Jul 12, 2021
We Did Not Belong in Okinawa
Okinawa knew what to do with monsters.
Hospitality is supposed to be a Russian tradition, but finding food in stores is increasingly difficult. Any generosity is bound to erode from lack.
In Italy, I learned to stop searching for an authentic, fixed self, or an automatic kinship with the Chinese diasporic community—especially in a globalized world.
Can you still hear us? We’re drowning the state in our chirps tonight if you’d care to sing along.
Across the thousands of miles, and the hundreds of years of historical and cultural distance, Albertine and I had our hair in common.
We don’t need to accept potential as currently defined. We can change the questions we ask, the learning environments we create.
The spirit of manifest destiny has been rebranded into the travelogue.
They told me, “Gay people are all in WeHo. There are no gay people in Inglewood.” To be gay was not only to be Other, but to be white.
I drove past the third places that I’d grown up in and, through the eyes of an adult, saw a person shaped by spaces that are in-between.
Home staging is a privileged kind of precariousness.
I want to live in a world where I can be a physicist without also being asked to speak on or compensate for the persistent racism of institutions.
Out on the road and in the great outdoors my dad and I discovered we were more like each other than we believed.
It’s relieving when you find someone who feels the same way you do about Covid-19 risk and public safety. But what about those who disagree?
My German cockroach infestation, almost too good a pandemic allegory, forced me to confront the question of how much I could bear from New York City.
My heart is set on the Philly cheesesteak—the only one, I’m certain, to be found in India.
Sometimes, the word “belonging” feels more apt when snapped into two: be longing.
When your maternal grandmother dies from breast cancer, there’s this strange intersection between her health and your mother’s health and yours.
Dressing rooms were only special because of how we used them to quietly become human.
The problem, of course, is that the public toilet involves doing the private in public.
Every time I tell a customer that we’re not open for browsing, I know I am reminding them of how Covid-19 has disrupted our rhythms and routines, robbed us of numerous small pleasures.
