Apr 02, 2020
How the Literature of Empire Shaped My View of the Natural World
It took me years before I realized that I’d built my notions of beauty from the stories of a distant land.
It took me years before I realized that I’d built my notions of beauty from the stories of a distant land.
This period of social isolation is, I’ve told my child, an act of love for others. We are, whether we want to admit it or not, part of a herd.
Though tech assists so much of our daily communication, it’s not omniscient. Nor is it any kind of authority in our lives.
Together, the photograph and the needlework clearly told a story, one beyond any we knew.
You will remember, in fact, the first doctor who does ask, who says ‘is it okay if I put my hands here,’ gesturing, waiting for you to say ‘yes.’
I don’t think I cried over his death for a long time. I wondered if something was wrong with me. I hadn’t realized that we have to learn how to cry.
How sad that I couldn’t regard myself with more kindness before, but how necessary it felt now that I was in constant pain.
In the etiquette class, everything had a proper place and use—even me.
It was the first time I’d ever pointed at myself and claimed “boy,” even jokingly.
For Asians in the South and everywhere, there is still narrative scarcity.
How do you begin when your legacy is loss?
The racist assumption that women of color are hired as faculty because of our identities rather than our credentials can have a serious impact on our careers.
On other cooking shows, the cooks might make mistakes and laugh about them. Ina Garten has never made a mistake.
I do not have flesh; I only have ghosts. In this story, the dead are only what I say they are. Does this make them less real?
I added it to the list of things off-limits: questions about the past, the wars, why my grandparents had fled China for Taiwan. Why eventually they left that place too.
My relationship with my French teachers became more like the ones I had with my therapists: I desperately wanted them to like me.
From his youth until late in life he was able to “pass,” his heritage all but invisible until he mentioned his name.
I had a sense, unvoiced, that living well and loving steadfastly were one and the same. I translated that sense into certainty: Marriage would make me Good.
Just as Sendak inverts a stereotypical association of white with youthful ingenuousness, Max inverts the expectations of many a children’s morality tale, for he is allowed to be wild.
