Genre: Essays

1.

In telling the story of where I went wrong, my mom drew two lines to mark the turning points that led me down a singular, inevitable path toward a male babysitter who drew no lines at all. 

One “if …

In rural Laos, a village had relocated only meters away from its original site after a recent dam construction submerged it. The historical village lay under an artificial lake, where tree branches poked from underwater. In the afternoon, our modest …

You know, I think these days we would call it a mild stroke . . . yes, I think your dad had a mild stroke. 

Could that happen from drinking?

Well, I don’t know, but he was very drunk. …

1.

Every morning of my childhood, my mother emerged from the bathroom after a shower perfumed by a heady mix of talcum powder and baby oil. Dressed in a blouse and petticoat, the softness of her belly just spilled over …

What does it mean to be southern? What does it mean to feel and think deeply through multiple geographies of the South? What is invoked by the “southern” of “Southern Post-Colonial,” and what new spatial and political possibilities are rendered …

At the age of fourteen, during my last year in junior high school in Gardena, I began to realize that if I were ever to get a date I ’d have to revolutionize my musical point of reference. The faux …

What kind of a machine is found by smell, in the dark? What kind of a machine turns blood into food? What kind of a machine works better unwashed? What kind of a machine gets darker when ready? What kind …

I abandoned my homeland in 2000, when I was twelve years old. Home was a small village located in the northernmost part of Korea. A decade earlier, the Arduous March had started, and though the famine was formally over, for …

For fewer but more perfect blooms,
experts say to prune the buds.

—Sara Wainscott, Insecurity Systems

The ideas in this essay have not led me to quit or walk away from any role or job I currently hold. But …