Feb 10, 2020
My Body Is an Archive
I’ve published articles on examining the archive’s margins and gaps to recover women’s stories, but that won’t help me understand that girl who left her family when she could no longer live in shame.
I’ve published articles on examining the archive’s margins and gaps to recover women’s stories, but that won’t help me understand that girl who left her family when she could no longer live in shame.
"Juice" had the type of lyrics that forced me out of my solitude, whether I wanted to be out of it or not.
That first time I heard it, the music was so catchy and the words were so ridiculous that I threw my head back and laughed. I opened the curtains that had been closed for a month.
When I walk to the train, my shadow falls wider, and I like that I’m taking up more space.
“What do we want? Livable lives. Thriving communities. The right to our bodies and our desires. Love. Resilience. Possibility. Queer genius.”
To cope with pain, and prepare for parenthood, I had to learn how to breathe. To breathe, I needed more than air.
Morisot’s paintings of women up close lined the walls, a pastel perspective at vanity tables and in gardens. My breath rushed in: beautiful.
My mother described the Rembrandt paintings as her friends. I'd never heard anyone talk about art that way, instilling it with something like a personhood of its own.
I deliberately and obstinately use the word ‘limdi’ and not the term ‘curry leaf’ because the word ‘curry’ has always bothered me.
Eunjo Park, the executive chef at Momofuku’s Kawi, is cooking her way through it. Her food is a reminder that it’s okay not to be one-hundred percent anything.
Just as America’s horrors led Baldwin to flee decades before, I waded through my own fear as a gay, black man coming of age in an America burning once again.
For me, Khelobedu is a language, a culture, home. For most South Africans, it doesn’t exist.
When I first meet a client, I usually remove whatever wig I happen to be wearing, and the tension settles.
When palm trees swing in the soft breeze, I remind myself that my body is not an orchestra, and the trees are not dancing for me.
She is the page on which the story is written. Her body is a crime scene, and the victim of the crime, and the perpetrator of a crime, all at once.
A mastery of mushrooms and their uses could help me survive in a post-apocalyptic world—a world that didn’t feel all that far away.
How a small bakery in the Midwest gave me the Asian community I'd been searching for
Living with mental illness is a constant cycle of wellness and illness, and each recovery is impermanent.
I learned that kind of hard-won glamour; that we should have beauty, however much the world wants to keep it from us.
There’s a part of me that is overwhelmed by the possibilities, by the fact that I finally look the way I used to only imagine I might.
