Introspection
To Make a Dumpling
It’s the summer before my freshman year of college, and my mom is trying to teach me as many recipes as she can before I leave for school. One day, she approaches me — she wants me to make dumplings from scratch, all on my own. While I’m usually enthusiastic about cooking together, that day I balk.
Searching for Heart Mountain
That sequence — train station, cars, my grandmother and her knitting needles — always felt so vivid, so real.
That I Can Tell You in One Word
The play is exactly what its pitch promises. Fiddler Afn Dakh. The Fiddler you know, but — to most who are not obscure intellectuals or devout Orthodox Jews — less intelligible. So why is everyone so obsessed with it?
Money Close-Up
Relationships facilitated by Seeking Arrangement have an explicit financial agreement built into them, in which an older person pays a younger person to go on dates and sometimes to have sex.
Alien Column image
"One minute, you’re looking into this light, and the next you’re waking up, hours later."
Enrolling in Sugar Baby University
The landing page of the Sugar Baby University website greets me with a “student debt clock,” a live update of the combined total that American students owe.
Further Realms: Are We Alone?
Alien encounters are usually written off as far-fetched and unproven. Maybe they are. But I think it’s myopic to call them impossible.
Do You Know What You're Getting Yourself Into?
But spending the money is worth it, because a successful Visitas is imperative for NAHC. We’re a small group, and if we don’t convince enough prefrosh to join as freshmen, our numbers will dwindle. We feel like we have to convince Native prefrosh to commit to Harvard — and once that happens, we have to convince them that we are a community worth investing time in.
A Cultural Masquerade
In the 21st century, maybe it’s increasingly impossible for anyone to have a straightforward explanation for where they come from. We toggle between identities, pulling from a jumble of birthplaces and nationalities. When I pretended to be my American roommate Hannah, maybe it wasn’t a lie, so much as one facet of who I am.
Breaking and Entering
The ladder was decades old and rusted over. It clung to the side of the building; I had nowhere to fall except the neighbor’s backyard, five stories below.
Porn Endpaper Illustration
"It is not the first time I am feeling this way — air light on my shoulders, warmth radiating off the bodies of friends, and a gut sense that my presence, or my humanity, is being realized."
Walking Graphic
"Though some of my classmates had lived in America for years, all traces of their American accents were gone. Mine didn’t go away."
Abandoned House
"In Virginia, my dad found a faulty lock on the door of a run-down, whitewashed church — an easy entrance."
Visitas Graphic
"We don’t spend a lot of money all at once during the rest of the year, so that’s probably why the bank deactivated our card on the Sunday afternoon of Visitas."
If All Space Were Safe Space
I have encountered this feeling in somewhat unconventional spaces: directing a porn film in an artist loft in Oakland, Calif., cheering from the audience as a woman reclaimed her sexuality in orgasm on a New York City stage, and participating in a “sex magic ritual” in a kinky mansion in the heart of New Orleans.
No More Sixteen Candles
These comedians and I are having a conversation, and we don’t need a big wooden table in a Harvard seminar to talk about diaspora, our parents, and Asianness in America. We don’t have to explain unbelonging to each other.
Taking Off Your Shirt Means Something
With each question, the hookup gains stakes, a momentum of affirmation.
Whose Body Part Is It Anyway?
Over winter break, I watched the first season of “Botched” in three days.
Further Realms: 'Nipsey Hussle, Can You Hear Me?'
Perhaps this kind of conscious, selfless reflection brings us closer to the kind of existence that happens once our time on this plane is up.
Talking Out Loud When My Roommate's Gone
When I first started watching Korean dramas, I was too young to be cynical.
Looking Through Myself
When I was three my father came home from work one day with an enormous canvas, twice as big as me, featuring the photo. This canvas hung in our living room on a wall facing the front door, so any visitors to our home would be unexpectedly greeted by our smiles.