Jan 15, 2020
Living in Paris, I’m Just Another American—and the French Don’t Seem to Mind
My life as an American in Paris is a far cry from what the glamorous direct-to-DVD movies make it out to be. Still, that’s the story I tell.
My life as an American in Paris is a far cry from what the glamorous direct-to-DVD movies make it out to be. Still, that’s the story I tell.
Succubus, siren, gold-digger, temptress: There are so many words for a woman with money in her hands.
There is a comfort in believing that all our ancestors’ understandings of time and space, however met with destruction, live on.
Every day, as news reports about climate change become more threatening, I grow more nostalgic for the places and objects of my childhood that feel increasingly imperiled.
In Darjeeling, the landscape and my familyscape seemed to be living, breathing beings, the paths like veins and the stories like the flow of blood.
The only means for talking about our mixed heritage was the ‘adorable’ contrast between ‘the girls,’ as we were called: one light, one dark; same parents, different skin.
We’re told the Wicked Witch wants the ruby slippers because they have magic powers—but so does any material object once possessed and cherished by a deceased loved one.
Myths were—are—created to explain the unknown, like natural disasters, like death, like the unknowable bodies of water.
This smell of Notre Dame burning was the smell of books older than all our lives—on fire.
I’m not looking for a cure—not for my kids, and not for me. Any treatment we choose is merely a tool to help us enjoy our lives.
When you don’t have sky-high expectations for Paris to begin with, the disillusionment you find in the City of Light is much more nuanced.
There, as I walk in a sea of Vietnamese people, I know I stand out.
Linguistic diversity is under threat around the world. Each challenge to a patriarchal binary system marks a step away from extinction of this richness.
Being good at working hard felt like a tired routine. Being polite was starting to grate.
Abuse and harassment within the restaurant industry is very much intertwined with other forms of racial and economic oppression and violence.
When my grandmother died, lamas stayed for five days next to her body, guiding her through bardo by reading from The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Being left behind is not a disadvantage. It is an opportunity to grow and an opportunity to live life on my own terms.
Experiencing a severe reaction to medication taught me many interesting things about the limits of my own body, but also the limits of the world around me.
Do we hold the specialness of each meal at the core of our travel? Or is a meal that happens during a vacation a shadow of the memories it serves to create?
Embracing the stigma and using it as a weapon feels punk.
