I went to graduate school in New York City a year after college for a Masters in Fine Arts (MFA) in creative writing. The best thing about being one of the younger students in the program was befriending writers who were a little older and much wiser than I. In
The night before our eldest son’s graduation from high school, the five of us go out to a quiet family dinner. The weekend calendar is already booked solid with events gathering different circles of family and friends; knowing how big celebratory moments can splinter your energy and attention, it
Our daughter is in the 7th grade and this is her second year participating in the Middle School musical. She is a part of the ensemble cast, which means she does not have any speaking lines, but sings and dances in all the group numbers. It is a role she
My mother is a serious person. She doesn’t read, she studies. The first time I was taught to annotate in literature class, I recognized it immediately as the way my mother combs through texts. She underlines and makes marginal notes for everything – even recipes, instruction manuals, museum pamphlets, and
In the late 1980s, my family got our first 8-track karaoke machine. It was huge and extremely heavy and we kept it stationed by the piano. We weren't the type of family to host karaoke parties at home, I think my parents wanted it to practice so that
When I was little, my parents would often take us to Beitou, up in the mountains just north of Taipei, where there were several hot spring hotels that made good use of the natural underground sulfur. When we drove up the mountains, the eggy smell permeated our car, and the
I fell into translation the same way I fell in love with my husband – without expecting to and wholeheartedly. Both experiences were so embodied, I appropriately (or ironically?) did not have the words to translate what was happening. When I met my husband, I was 20 years old, too busy
Six months ago, I started tracking my menstrual cycle with my dear friend, S. We are both 48, on the cusp/midst of perimenopause and fascinated by the tidal rhythms of our changing bodies as we enter this new phase of womanhood. S has always had a regular, almost textbook
Sci-fi has never been my genre - especially if it involves space and time travel (or worse, aliens dripping with goo). I like both my feet firmly planted on the ground. If you ask me what my favorite age is, my answer will always be: right now. When I was
When I was nine, I felt frustrated by the adults around me, who seemed to have forgotten that they had once been children, too. They functioned in an air space that floated many heads above mine and when they occasionally turned their attention down towards me, it was in a
I like to do something with my hands when I'm talking on the phone or when I'm in the midst of a long, face-to-face conversation. In high school, I would doodle on the backs of envelopes and worksheets while I chatted for hours with my girlfriends.
The poet, Safia Elhillo, wrote a craft essay on Catapult Magazine (back when it was still a magazine) about turning poems into prompts. I read it during a time when my writing was at a lull - the reason why I was combing the internet for writing ideas in the
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.