May 28, 2020
What Diane Nguyen Taught Me About Finding Healing Through Failure
When I moved to America, I thought I could fashion a new life out of the escape, but a BoJack Horseman character taught me to be patient with setbacks
When I moved to America, I thought I could fashion a new life out of the escape, but a BoJack Horseman character taught me to be patient with setbacks
I’m coming to terms with the fact that—whether it ends in an unfollow or in a blow-up bash in a house in Malibu—sometimes the kindest thing we can give one another is a goodbye.
I’ve found an unavoidable kinship with the Ducks. It could be, at least in my estimation, a quintessentially black American story.
We weren’t exactly rewriting our family traditions, but it felt good knowing that there was still a place for me in them.
In art, I was seeing the world. Yet, the entire time, I could not name a single Indian artist in my family’s homeland.
It both thrills me to watch myself as others might watch me in the world, and instills in me a deep loneliness—a grief that reminds me I am so helplessly stuck inside of myself.
As cliché as it’s become to say, I found myself needing this game in a way I could have never accounted for, even with all my years of fanboying.
I was a Black girl in the American suburbs, yet I believed The Beatles—and eventually, a dazzle of other white male musicians—were singing only for me. It wasn’t so.
My future was uncertain . . . A balloon dinosaur was tangible, even if it withered away in a week.
I pray my baby will love their body, or at least accept it, and carry it around the world, just as I have carried them too, with pride and joy.
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.
