Sep 30, 2020
What Is Left, What Is Held, What Is Grown As Roots
Always the most vulnerable will die. There will be others, too, but it begins there. And we see, in slow moving real time, whose life is valued, whose life is not.
Always the most vulnerable will die. There will be others, too, but it begins there. And we see, in slow moving real time, whose life is valued, whose life is not.
There have always been people suffering from anti-Blackness. And May Ayim highlights the continuity of the Black experience—not only her own, but those before her as well.
Once a mixed-race fishing community, the island is now empty, showing the gap between the state’s history and what it professes to be.
Whiteness cannot give us what we need, and this is not a disappointment. This is a testimony.
Maybe my dreams were trying to tell me something. Maybe I had what I liked to call, jokingly, “the ElGenaidi Gift.”
To this day, I can’t tell you the names of my extended family in Taiwan—but I can tell you their astrological signs.
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.
Around the time I was in seventh grade, I started performing makeshift eye surgery on my grandmother.
“Hoba! Hoba!” my daughter screeches, using the short word for ‘hobotnica’—octopus in Croatian. My friend says, “She’s Croatian alright.”
I wish I’d known Molly years ago. I wish I had known her when I was twelve years old, wondering who in my life would still love me if they knew my secret.
I’m longing for the day when folk like me and Trayvon and Korryn and Lennon and Aiyana and Botham don’t need to be lucky to stay alive.
As biracial people, my husband and I should know how to raise a mixed-race child. But I find myself wondering just how much I’ve figured out.
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.
To lose whiteness is to compress the white half, to describe it awkwardly, to never know how to address it.
If my grandfather could remain optimistic into his eighties, then how could I let myself become jaded in my twenties?
As a child of many cultures, I wasn’t sure I could lay claim to one. But I learned that identity can grow and stretch, widen and encompass more than a single country or language.
Our mothers wanted to protect us. So they hid us, beat us for having opinions, for being too inquisitive in a world that doesn’t permit girls to be curious about things.
We’d denounce the marches and torches and chants. When that moment passed, we’d continue to live with the ghosts of our country’s peculiar legacy.
Something unexpected cracks me open every year: Tonight, it was my daughter, recognizing the name I’d given her because I couldn’t give her the woman herself.
