Mar 31, 2020
“What Are You?”: On Mixed-Race Identity and ‘The Buddhist Bug’
Yet, my same racial mutability also poses a threat: “How can you identify a ‘them’ if it can pass for an ‘us’?”
Yet, my same racial mutability also poses a threat: “How can you identify a ‘them’ if it can pass for an ‘us’?”
I recall a 2016 headline that warned, ‘Orangutans face complete extinction within ten years.’ Nash will be thirteen in 2026.
In the water, what you are called can change. And words, like water, will dissolve.
“The food scene in the Bay Area is dying because everything is so expensive; rent is expensive.”
A daughter who is jia 嫁 is out of the house is gone forever, water poured out of a bucket, never whole, never yours again.
I remember the day Mom said “stage IV metastatic,” so now I need a show with forty seasons.
In Taipei, my disengagement with the silk scrolls wasn’t random. It was learned.
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.
