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If you were not big on Singapore before, you might have been crazy after watching Crazy Rich Asians.
The box office success is a two-hour tourism ad for Singapore, dazzling audiences with its delectable looking food and glorious sights.
Singapore also has a reputation as one of the world's safesty tourist destinations, but those who have grown up in the city also know of its dark side.
Poet Deborah Emmanuel does not look Singaporean, so from the outset
She spoke in Chinese, Malay and Indian cultures.
When she was just 19 she was feeling to jail. Police raided a wild nightclub party and Ms Emmanuel was made to do a urine drug test.
She spent six months in the Changi Women's Prison and six months in a halfway house.
"I feel a lot of strong things about incarceration and government control," she said.
"We grow up with this idea that you've been hammered, you can get your back.
"Everyone is a little bit bit – that 's the image Singapore wants to get across – and it works.
"There's super-low crime rates, it's supposed to be one of the safest places in the world. It's this idea if we do not have it.
Ms Emmanuel said she felt as if she was "brainwashed", that she was "black and white".
When she was released Ms Emmanuel turned to writing in an outlet chronicling her experience.
She still lives in Singapore, and has been a regular guest on TEDx panels, discussing cultural inheritance, classism and womanhood, and has performed both in music and festivals at festivals worldwide.
This weekend Ms Emmanuel will perform her new work Alien Flower In Fundamentalist Fields, dissecting cultural identity, and gender inequality, at Sydney's Story-Fest for the very first time.
"There's a line from one of my poems, Unidentified Object, about feeling alien even within your own natural space, which is a recurring experience for me, "she said.
"Most people do quite neatly in one of three groups in Singapore – Chinese, Malay and Indian.
A lot of people when they look at me, Singaporeans ask me where I'm not talking like it, I do not look like it.
"But I accept and embrace the 'otherness' because it allows me to embrace my identity."
This weekend Australia's largest performing writers' program, Story-Fest '18, brings together the world's best poetry slams, talks, and live literary mayhem at The Rocks and Sydney Opera House.
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