Dec 04, 2018
Confronting the Violence of Gentrification in Your Hometown
Moving home to Newark has been a surreal experience because I have had to mourn places that once were, but are no longer.
Moving home to Newark has been a surreal experience because I have had to mourn places that once were, but are no longer.
Ramen is comfort food, a thing to soak up your regrets and get you through a rough day. But my favorite way to enjoy it has courted great controversy among my friends and family.
The sixth sense, second sight, third eye. We are supposed to have both extra-accurate hearing and perfect pitch, more numerous and more acute taste buds, a finer touch, a bloodhound’s sense of smell.
I have such immense anxiety. It sweeps me up into its furious winds. And my kids are at the middle of the storm.
It can be easy to confuse real emotion with the shiny drama enfolding it. Sometimes grand gestures are signs of grand feeling—sometimes they’re not.
My family enjoyed “The Fifth Element” without seeing how queer it was. Did that mean they could not see how queer I was?
How do we pass the time while traveling from Point A to Point B? What stories do we tell one another, and how do those stories connect?
I used to imagine having a Korean mother, someone rich in stories and jokes about Korean food and culture. My Korean mom would, ideally, be Maangchi.
Animation can teach a kid a lot about themselves and the world around them. Disney movies taught me about my queer desires.
It is very rare, as a disabled person, that I have an intense sense of belonging, of being not just tolerated or included in a space, but actively owning it.
Every day, when my kids come home from school, the first thing I ask them—like most parents do—is about school. But unlike most parents, I do not expect my kids to say that school was fine.
Montrose was unofficially codified as the nexus of queer life in Houston. That’s the part we cared about. If you held a map to the wall, I could tell you how we came to be on those streets.
I felt that whipping out the white cane would irrevocably launch me into the kingdom of the blind, and, for many years, I did not want to go there.
The long and fluid history of fairy tales shows us that men who want to control, dehumanize, and violate women have always existed.
It’s easier to cut people out than to learn to differentiate between the chronically demanding and the occasionally needy. It’s war, we tell ourselves.
I have no desire to live forever. But what I would give to return to adolescence and do it over, even once! To kiss who I wanted to kiss, not settling for her brother.
In her illness, Korean food was all my Polish-American mom from Jersey wanted to eat. It was all that she could bear.
If citrine is supposed to bring you abundance, what might it bring if you didn’t need so much wealth in our capitalist hellscape?
There will be as many different iterations of this storm, and the ones to come, as there are Houstonians. And we have to hear them—they’re what will determine our map for the next one.
“Accommodations are things that we need, and deserve, in order to lead our lives. But they’re treated—we are treated—like we’re trying to pull one over on the rest of society.”
