I was born as an ode to this country—skin and sinew spun from the American Dream, from my mother’s stretch marks and growing pains. She chose my name because it means “blossom” in her language—because she wanted me to grow and climb and soak in the sun of opportunity, to bask in the privilege she […]
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There are mangoes now. There always have been, of course—just because something stops tasting good doesn’t mean it stops growing—but there are mangoes again. There are mangoes, and there is the cerulean sky, and there is sweet, sticky amber coating my palms and racing toward my elbows. In the winter, they grow Crayola yellow and […]
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In my memories of the baseball diamond behind my elementary school, it never rains. I’m sure it did—this was deep within California’s drought years, but there must have been muddy infields and cancelled practices. What I remember, though, is all sun and dry dugout dirt floating up to irritate our eyes and grazed elbows. We […]
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I learned my grandfather died in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, somewhere between Los Angeles and Tokyo. A text arrived in the plane’s whirring, slipping past all the miles of metal and clouds to glow quietly on my screen. I was sipping green tea that tasted like warm hay. The flight attendant paused, scanning […]
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A mosaic of vibrant magnets covered my family’s off-white refrigerator. My eyes traced the mural from the I ❤ NYC sticker in the top-right corner of the door, down to the Honolulu postcard, and past the handle to family photos in Beijing, evoking memories that felt like fairy tales. As a kid, I believed our […]
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Dear Father, Why did you keep taking me to your childhood home? Now that you’re dying, no one else wants to go there with me. My mother drives through in a rush, too spooked to stop more than a moment. Decrepit but still standing, then vacant, covered in weedy trees and vine, now cleared again, […]
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lies its twisted self around the circumference of my brain. My age: eleven. The age I wished to be when he tumbled from earth to heaven: ten. Or twenty. Or thirty. Or any number beginning or ending with the number zero, because to the ancient Greeks “zero” is a non-number.“Nothing.” μηδέν. The number one (I […]
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I embrace my child with tears streaming down my face, attempting and failing to muffle the hitching sound of my sobbing. “Are you sad?” she questions guilelessly, squirming out of my grasp to gaze up at my face. She is not yet five, and without enough lived experience to have witnessed me in the depths […]
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Overture in Ow Major If my pain had a sound, it would be the pulsing hum of an MRI machine. I went into one when I was ten, maybe eleven. I’d been in and out of Children’s Hospital appointments for nearly a year, diagnosed with minor scoliosis for two, and stuck with doctors scratching their […]
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We don’t talk about it. We take long walks in lake effect snow. I push my gloves into my coat pocket. Small penance for big slights. Your face is for the sun. You inhale the crisp air. You stop to watch a great heron skip across a mildly frozen lake. Across the lake somebody is […]
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“She dresses up like that to go out for noodles?” —an off-screen character in In the Mood for Love As we passed all of the extravagant wallpaper designs, including an art deco print of cheetahs, a not so subtle homage to the dim sum lounge’s name, the host grandly gestured to the booth and chair-table […]
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(content warning: mental illness, suicide, body horror) The first track of Isaac Hayes’s Hot Buttered Soul plays in the background. “Walk on By” is a cover song; subsequently it has been sampled repeatedly: Damn they trynna stick me for my paper. I can’t go to sleep. I can’t shut my eyes. But my technique is […]
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Thanksgiving is not the place to get naked and unashamed. That was Eden, and we are several miles away. Thanksgiving is the place to deliver chrysanthemums coaxed into the shape of poultry. As you hand your aunt the flower turkey, distance crimps carefully. It is as guarded and dry as her smile in its separate […]
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I think I am drinking spit. I can feel it on my tongue, just that bit thicker than water, sliding down my throat like egg white. Gabrielle is banging her palm on the sticky table, repeating the start of a drinking chant we all know, in a tone that is slightly too aggressive for 7am. […]
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Lately I have stopped being able to recognize my face as a sum of its parts. When I stand in front of the mirror, pinching soft skin between accusatory fingers, the face that looks back is unrecognizable, each feature isolated like pieces of a disjointed puzzle. My reflection smiles at me and parts her lips, […]
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Nearly halfway to 14 and I’ve slept with more men than my parents Pat and Steve would ever care to count. I know them by their names in my head, where the safety I can sometimes make happen looks like a sort of glow: outside, they have to be the Mom and Dad who get […]
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Content warning: Mentions of sexual harassment and rape. No one warned me about boys. In Grade 6, I was ill-prepared when a group of them took my backpack and tossed it in the boy’s bathroom. My textbooks and notebooks were wet from whatever was leaking under the urinals. They locked me in as soon as […]
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I’ve been estranged from my parents for five years, and this is not the first time I have been estranged from them. In movies it is often a single event, a concrete conflict, addiction, or an unfortunate event that leads to estrangement. In my case, and I suspect in many cases, the problem is not […]
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Chicken Hekka is a dish originating from the plantation era. It is a Hawaiian version of Japanese sukiyaki and is still popular today. Cook time: 5 generations and approximately 45 minutes Ingredients: 1. Boneless chicken breast 2. Dried Shiitake mushrooms 3. White planter elite to oust Queen Lili’uokalani 4. Canned straw mushroom 5. Long rice […]
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beloved(s)! plz clink ur glasses w/ me! today is my 25th birthday. today is always my last birthday. today is X-mas. today is Yom Kippur. today is Columbus Day. today is a day of celebration. how else to consider life w/o joy? no. ur probs right: the big dipper is scoopin all the stars 2nite […]
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In the city that birthed rebellion in the decade before my mother birthed me, I have built a home out of ruins. This city that burned itself and then rose from its own ashes has been my guide, showing me the way through the flame ignited by my own personal book of matches. This city, […]
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Little Sister The scene is Dad on a staircase. Yellow air. Sticky-sick sounds formulating. “He’s like an angel.” There was a banal frame, Macy’s-like, with husband, mother, daughter, son-brother. “It’s the white shirt.” There are screams. There is a mother clasping head between arms between legs and cracked-door. Legs and arms and matted hair. There […]
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My mother broke herself into so many pieces that when she glued herself back together there were some shards she would never find. One day, she decided to stop trying to fix herself and focus her attention on shaping someone else. So she adopted a baby from China. She would mold this child into a […]
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The first of these is the NAIL FILE, the very one Grandmother Virginia took across the ocean with her from Puerto Rico to New York, to her aunt in the candy shop with striped windows. Virginia wouldn’t finish high school until she was in her fifties, but she knew how to raise the file two […]
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SET THE STAGE: the Drowning Children + me in a habitat of natural childhood: THE J PAUL GETTY MUSEUM, where models stand pinned in glitzy dead butterflies, wings spread, a graveyard of history. We are young, and the net age between us and the statues could cradle our grandparents in its palms. We are young, […]
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The pink floor lamp was flickering behind my ear, the dirt was making terrains for summer ants on the plastic strips that we got from Ikea to cover the life-size window behind your couch, also from Ikea. There were stains of old, dried acrylics visible on various parts of your beat up couch from the […]
Read more(I sit on the edge of a bench facing an overgrown field that has been infiltrated by daylilies. Orange heads bobbing above tall weeds and lush grass. Cleverly disguised snipers waiting in trenches. They call them the Ditch Lilly. An old man sits on the bench next to me. Nods his head. Crosses his legs. […]
Read moreYou knew it would be someone, it always is. Before you try and count the times the Ohio River has seeped into your neighbors houses. Before you hear the push brooms hit pavement with a resounding crack. You, standing inside your dry house, just out of floods reach, staring at origami swans hanging in the […]
Read moreEvery day the world chooses a darker turn, a crueler path. Apathy seems the best course against this indecipherable savagery, this unspeakable calamity. Like a turtle, I want to crawl within my shell and disappear. So I take myself to the mountains in springtime where its verdurous raiments can soothe my rattled nerves. Here the […]
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I wasn’t even part of this — but it’s spread into everything like motor oil — stays around — I wonder what decides critical — sticky and forcefully there — I wonder who decides who gets a house — I want to know how much money they lost — to lose even more — what […]
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Sometimes I swear there’s a rock in my stomach. It shakes a little when I lie on my back at night, staring up at the starburst-textured cement ceiling of my bedroom. The rock is always there, but there’s something about the time I take to fall asleep that makes it want to be known, like […]
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Alcoholic Anonymous’ Thirteen-Step Guide on How Your Addiction Destroyed Her Life: {for best results, follow the curve of the theory. trace it to the bottom of its backbone so you can find how best to hollow out her spine.} i. get a young woman. be her father. tell her she’s your sun. your stars. tell […]
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It was a knowing. A Gnostic phenomenon. I had seen the place before, a place that stood quietly at the edges of a town. It was the type of place one intended to visit, but intentions are not actualities. There were around it wheat fields to one side, and large quiet looms on the other. […]
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VAGABOND CITY 