For most of my life, I have carried my mother’s unhappiness, sloshing in an aged brown vat atop a rolled towel on my head, the way old ladies do in the countryside in Korea. It was always threatening to topple or overflow, contaminating me, no matter how carefully I maneuvered…

During the pandemic, people had to make decisions about who was worth risking spending time with. We rarely made the cut. — The day I realized we need to move out of our San Diego home, I ordered four new pieces of furniture. Not little decorative stools or night stands that you can stack on top of boxes, but four solid wood cabinets that would require two or three…

[Spoiler Alert] Years ago, one of my Korean-American friends told me how exasperated she was with Korean-American stories. “They’re so depressing. They’re always about loss. What are we supposed to do with all that sadness?” It’s almost as if writer/director Lee Issac Chung were eavesdropping on our conversation when he…

Jay Caspian Kang’s recent New York Times Magazine feature on Steven Yeun is not really a story about Steven Yeun. It is an exploration — through the medium of a famous body — of what it means to be an Asian-American in the United States. It is a slog through…

Let’s talk about one case of abduction. One morning in South Lake Tahoe in 1991, 11 year old Jaycee Dugard was abducted by Richard Garrido as she walked to her school bus stop. For 18 years, she was kept in Garrido’s backyard as a sex slave and forced to have…

In the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests, Asian-American writers and activists have flocked to urge fellow Asian-Americans to speak up in support of Black Lives Matter. Many argue that Tou Thao, an Asian-American officer who stood guard while Derek Chauvin suffocated and killed George Floyd, symbolizes Asian-Americans’ silence…