My mother called me today. She called me to say, “I am so proud of you. I hope you are safe.”The invocation of safety was thrown in as a filler for protection which she could no longer provide. She is now 2,000 miles away. The mention of pride still flushes my face and creates a…
Category: Personal Essays
Nostalgia, or Homecoming Pains
For so many Americans, India still evokes an Orientalist tableau–kings and queens dressed in luxurious swaths of cloth, riding on elephants to the Taj Mahal. That vision is fictive, in part because India formed a democracy after a devastating revolutionary war, and in part because the Taj Mahal has only ever been a tomb. A…
Don’t Worry Just About Yourself
by Tran Dang “You have to worry about yourself first. Don’t worry about anything else,” my mother told me over the phone one evening last November, in response to my attempt to explain the protests that defined the campus. Although my Vietnamese often splinters under the weight of topics with substantial social commentary, my mother…
Reflections on Angel Island
by Gregory Ng I love Asian America. It is where I learned that I could belong in America after coming from Singapore. It is where I learned about the resilience of immigrants and the children of immigrants, making their way in a country that did not want them. It is where I can look at…
Reclaiming Our Space
by Joyce Guo I’ll be honest–I wasn’t panicked when I saw the results of the election. I was shocked, confused, but perhaps because of denial or because of my own privilege I naively felt fine. The powers of the president are limited, I reminded myself. Congress is not going to approve a wall, Trump probably…