On 14 March, Jeremy Tiang tweeted, ‘My play has been postponed indefinitely and I made a pink cake’, with pictures of a pinkish Swiss roll he had just baked while self-isolating in his apartment in Flushing. ‘Looking forward to baking my troubles away,’ the Singaporean writer and translator quipped in the same thread.

Two weeks earlier, we had arranged to meet at Kinokuniya’s Cafe Zaiya in Bryant Park to discuss his play with the prolix title Salesman 之死: The (Almost!) True Story of the 1983 Production of Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre Directed By Mr Arthur Miller Himself from a Script Translated By Mr Ying Ruocheng Who Also Played Willy Loman. It was set to premiere at the end of March at Target Margin Theater in Sunset Park, an ethnically diverse neighbourhood in Brooklyn.

• Tags: Issue 19, Jeremy Tiang, Peter Yeoh