Jun 27, 2019
The Art of Letting Go, As an Artist and a Mother
Like a drawing is and is not mine once I’m finished with it, my son is not mine, not really, because he is himself.
Like a drawing is and is not mine once I’m finished with it, my son is not mine, not really, because he is himself.
A new period in my life started when Abu could no longer fast for Ramadan.
Well, what does it mean to be a boy or a girl? The answer so often is, simply: I don’t know. And I’m not sure that it actually matters, anyway.
As biracial people, my husband and I should know how to raise a mixed-race child. But I find myself wondering just how much I’ve figured out.
The secret of the beauty of our bodies is slowly starting to get out, becoming less and less niche each day. And I hope it moves faster.
After you have a preemie, but before you get to take your baby home, the world keeps going without you. It’s shocking, honestly, how much the world keeps going.
Rozha fled an abusive marriage, and survived the death of her son. Now she claims what is hers.
It felt as though I had been evicted from my own body, and it had been trashed in my absence. My resentment was as precise as any recipe.
I want to believe that I inherited too ways of feeling joy, ways of finding pleasure, ways of being with other queers in raucous and wild ways.
“I found myself dwelling on these parts of Korean culture as a way to reconnect with my identity and also the memory of my mom.”
Suddenly, miraculously, it was no longer dismay that I felt. It was freedom. It was Death doffing its blackness and revealing itself to me as life.
In the battered barbershop chair, Faris sits slightly camouflaged and crumpled, as though he is a mystery even to himself.
They say: I have to be honest, seeing that little girl and all that brown skin, for a second it was terrifying. Sometimes you forget people can look like that. No pink anywhere. Except her nails.
Being an “interesting” patient who also happened to be a trainee made me a morbid little celebrity.
I was leaving femininity behind, grateful to have an example like my grandpa to grow toward.
“How can we lessen everyone’s burden and give ourselves more time to work on what matters to us?”
The first generation of refugees have the power of selective memory. Children like me learned early to tiptoe around our families and their traumas.
It feels jarring to deal with “model minority” stereotypes in non-Asian American spaces while facing negative stereotypes within some Asian ones.
I felt a down spell in my persistent belief in possibility—a sense that something within me once felt unremitting, but had since been stretched to its limit.
Sometimes I thought of it as war reparations. On the outwardly civil but quietly vicious battlefield of my parents’ divorce, I had been the clear loser.
