Sep 08, 2021
Traveling With My Parents Taught Me “Growing Up” Is Not “Growing Old”
My parents were old. It was time to take seriously the last years we had left. That is not, of course, how they saw things.
My parents were old. It was time to take seriously the last years we had left. That is not, of course, how they saw things.
On the plane, I felt the tension of visiting so many unspoken truths.
After a year of virtual classrooms, what have we learned?
Bogotá has the largest network of cycling infrastructure in Latin America. It is a city that begs to be biked.
I love our Little Odessa because it is the closest approximation to a home I will never really know.
When my dad was incarcerated, I began noticing specific tropes that reinforce a cultural narrative about prison all around me.
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.
