I was very fortunate to enjoy all three of my pregnancies. Growing children inside my body introduced me to the science and poetry of womanhood. I was fascinated by the physicality of the process: on the inside, the embryo having to claw to my uterine wall, the umbilical tether that
Correspondence with Mr. K has been taken back up again, like a forgotten piece of knitting one returns to. And each of our emails (I've succumbed) has felt like an offering, a writing prompt for the other person. In one of my updates to Mr. K, I shared
My favorite subject in school was always English, so unsurprisingly, my favorite teachers have been English teachers. In 10th grade, it was Mr. K. Mr. K wore denim shirts that were softened and distressed with age, baggy chinos, Birkenstocks, and delicate wire-framed reading glasses that he would peer over to
For my graduate thesis in creative writing, I intended to write a travelogue about my first trip - as someone who had grown up in Taiwan - to China. In 1999, my then boyfriend (now husband) and I traveled for 30 days by train, from Hong Kong to Beijing. The
I teach high school Creative Writing. The class is an elective - a voluntary English credit students take on top of their mandatory core English class, so most of my students are kids who love to write - kids who have always been passionate readers and who grew up filling
We always spend part of our Lunar New Year break staying at my parents' place, a 25-minute drive downtown from our house. Though they've remodeled the apartment two different times over the last forty years, it is the same place where I grew up. My husband and
This week, our son, W, competed in the last swim meet of his high school career. My husband grew up in San Diego and swimming in the ocean has always been an important part of his life - he surfed in high school, but less to ride the waves than
Generally, I practice two kinds of writing. The first is the writing I do each morning in my journal, just after I practice yoga and the rest of my family is still enjoying deep sleep. It's personal, intuitive, regular, and feels liminal, because it's so early
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Occasional essays on writing, motherhood, and the intersection between text and textile.