May 16, 2019
How Rachel Khong Built The Ruby, a Coworking Community for San Francisco Creatives
“How can we lessen everyone’s burden and give ourselves more time to work on what matters to us?”
“How can we lessen everyone’s burden and give ourselves more time to work on what matters to us?”
People will tell you the Marlins suck, that no one likes the Marlins. “Marlins fans?” they’ll joke, because everyone knows that Marlins fans don’t exist. Except they do, we do.
The first generation of refugees have the power of selective memory. Children like me learned early to tiptoe around our families and their traumas.
It feels jarring to deal with “model minority” stereotypes in non-Asian American spaces while facing negative stereotypes within some Asian ones.
I felt a down spell in my persistent belief in possibility—a sense that something within me once felt unremitting, but had since been stretched to its limit.
Sometimes I thought of it as war reparations. On the outwardly civil but quietly vicious battlefield of my parents’ divorce, I had been the clear loser.
“Leave it alone and it knows how to grow,” says Uncle Nimal. “If you care too much, it will die.”
He begged his mother to let him buy the guitar. When she refused, reminding him that it was half of the month’s rent, he wept.
I debated for a long time whether I would describe sex with Reese. I didn’t know if I could stand knowing that it might turn some readers on, that it could sustain their fantasies about underage girls. Some of you have come to this essay for the sex, whether you’d admit to it or not.
Whenever I got into an elevator with other people, I wondered if they could save me if I were dying in there. Like my mother or my father, I needed them—but they could let me down.
The slight din of the television on TVLand from her room made its way toward the kitchen where Curtis and I sat, trying to figure out how this was all going to go. How everything had changed.
Contrary to its reputation as an extreme sport, freediving has meditative aspects.
To lose whiteness is to compress the white half, to describe it awkwardly, to never know how to address it.
I lost my mother when I was young. So women like Michelle Kwan, Tara Lipinski, and Sasha Cohen taught me about femininity and fierceness.
Before I visited the Partition Museum, I had a sense that all the years of self-erasure could be undone if I just heard, watched, read enough. Now I’m beginning to rethink that strategy.
Dr. Couney settled in the United States in 1903, when he began exhibiting incubator babies on Coney Island every summer. “Infant Incubators With Living Babies,” the sign above the building read.
I know that their lips are touching, and that this is the first time it’s ever happened on a free-to-air telenovela.
If my grandfather could remain optimistic into his eighties, then how could I let myself become jaded in my twenties?
“I realized I had to change or I was going to lose you,” my mother told me. “So I did.”
