Mothers have always held such symbolic weight in determining a person's worth. Your mother tongue, your motherland, your mother's values - these things can qualify or disqualify you from attaining myriad American dreams: love, fluency, citizenship, legitimacy, acceptance, success, freedom.
Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me - an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American - there were limits.
I like to keep a book underneath the pillow that I'm not sleeping on so I can reach over and grab it when I wake up. I don't always do that, but I like to. I try to make sure it's a book and not my laptop. I also try not to get too excited about who might've been trying to contact me while I was asleep.
My privileged upbringing and education and linguistic fluency gave me such proximity to whiteness that it stung all the more to still find myself outside of it. My mother, on the other hand, not only accepted that she would always be an outsider in this country but also believed it to be a finer fate and home than any other she could have had.
When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.
'Alphabet' by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen. It's a book-length abecedarian poem. It's an activist text but also a portal to wonder.
I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.
I'm surely not the only one to notice we employ metaphors to make sense of the news. I always like to take note of who hides their origins and who shows them off.
I'm drawn to the figure of the ungrateful subaltern as a trope in literature. In real life, it is often dangerous to demand more.
I wish I had acted better. I wish I had been the kind of sister who was patient enough to show my brother the proper spelling for 'Power Rangers.'
Does self-acceptance ultimately require another person, or is there a kind of love that does not dabble in the dream of a perfect twinship?
'Sour Heart' is a collection of seven linked short stories narrated by young Chinese-American girls living in New York City in the '90s. It's exceptionally hard to describe what I've written without sounding delusional or boring, so I'll just say they are stories about growing up and the pleasures and agonies of having a family, a body, and a home.
It's very Western to idealize a kind of love that does not come with any expectations, that still permits both the giver and recipient to be completely free.
One of the founding tenets of racism: a society that will never allow white people to think that because they are white, they won't succeed.
Chinese people of my parents' generation who lived through the Cultural Revolution knew so much of death at such a young age, and the psychic toll those experiences left was immense. I knew the stories of the Cultural Revolution before knowing what the Cultural Revolution was.
For a decade, Emma-Lee Moss has been steadily making weird, moody, melancholic music under the moniker 'Emmy the Great' that has been referred to as nue-folk, anti-folk, synthpop, and, most of all, literary.
Faced with ostracization at school and confinement at home, I turned to karaoke.
Early in my life, without any supporting evidence, I fretted over what I believed was my fate: accidentally becoming an international pop star. The pages of my diary were filled with hypothetical ethical dilemmas.
Whenever I passed by a Chinese restaurant in a car, I'd joke to my friends, 'Oh yeah, my uncle owns that place.'
In my mind, scatological writing is a core of the English canon.
