Fate and Desire in Asian America
The satisfaction people take in free will comes not from their ability to choose, but from their ability to feel like they’ve chosen.
how strange it is that we are talking about a character’s agency
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
thankfulness
Tiger Writing
want
sheherself
before
feel
feeling
Mostly what people want from free will is control.
5.
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
What Happened to Her? And the Strawberry Fieldsmother’s
Matthew Salesses is the author of The Sense of Wonder, national bestseller Craft in the Real World, the 2021 finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, and two other novels. Adopted from Korea, he has written about adoption, race, and Asian American masculinity in The Best American Essays 2020, NPR’s Code Switch, the New York Times blog Motherlode, and The Guardian, among other media outlets. BuzzFeed has named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. He lives in New York City, where he is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.
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This is the deal I’d make with God: my devotion in exchange for acceptance of the past, peace with the present, and assurances about the future.