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Coda: “Broken Words,” A Poem
Praise to the sweltering, yet comforting summers in Taipei, where the unrelenting humidity clings to my skin. Far into the night, my family and I walk through the brightly lit, crowded rows of the Night Market, bustling with the shouts of street vendors, fragrant with stinky tofu and Taiwanese sausages. The real city that never sleeps—you can get your hair done at midnight, grab food or drinks from a “seven[1],” watch movies in the theater until 3am, or sing at karaoke bars. My cousins send over a basket filled with lian wu[2] and bala.[3] Behind the doors of our family home silence prevails, where I stumble over my words in…
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Reflections
Over the past months, I’ve poured my time into crafting blog posts under the Autumn section where I combined the genres of book review writing, poetry, memoir, and theory. While working on my senior project, I witnessed the place of autobiographical work in my academic life and the symbiotic relationship between my personal life and literature. I have looked back to my love of the Young Adult Romance genre and read books written by Asian American authors, and I found familiarity in the experiences surrounding race and romance. I originally set out to explore questions of my Asian American identity and culture, silences in my childhood and current life, and…
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Six Stills, A Memoir
The following pages are excerpts of the first and fifth section from my memoir project for my Milton course. Using Milton’s writings as a guide, I analyze the “stills” of my relationship with my father, faith, and previous romantic relationships. I. “Muddy Pool” of the Past Stills I didn’t know how much I needed John Milton until now. My father has always been the patriarch looming over our family—commanding respect even though he never extended the same to his wife or children. He was a Buddhist but converted to Christianity when I was seven. His conversion transformed him, not in a positive light, but one that buries him in fear…
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These Violent Delights Book Review
“Astra inclinant,” he would whisper into the wind, so heartachingly sincere even when quoting in Latin, “sed non obligant. The stars incline us, they do not bind us” Chloe Gong’s debut Young Adult novel, These Violent Delights, was a glittering gem of a book. The book oscillates between the historical fiction, fantasy, and romance genres. My good friend and fellow senior English Major, Emma MacKinnon, recommended this book to me, and I loved it. Gong’s novel is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, with Juliette Cai, heir of the Scarlet Gang and Roma Montagov, heir of the White Flowers gang in Shanghai during the 1920s. They belong to rival…
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Language: Ableism in Words
Growing up in my Taiwanese American household, I never knew the official Mandarin word for disability. When my family members were upset or were referring to a disabled person, they would say Zhi zhang, 智障, meaning “retarded” or someone with a low intelligence quotient, and they would also use the word Wen-ti, 問題, meaning problem. During family conversations, I would hear others refer to a disabled person as the person with a Wen-ti. I’ve lost most of my Mandarin; I can still understand my parents when they speak it, but I am unable to speak it fluently. Mandarin and English are blended in my family: my mother speaks Mandarin; my…
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“Our Window,” A Love Poem
Sometimes, the air smells of you when I unlock our mahogany dust-coated chest Captured whiffs from the past that never seem to dissolve like the feeling of an intimate kiss on damp, bare skin. Once, I wipe the dust off, staining my hands with hints of dried tears and fallen petals of bleeding hearts the lock slips off, and I peer in the kaleidoscope of this still world, the fresh scent of pine trees will escape, but they remain trapped inside where the wind brushes and leaves and comes back. Locks of laughter emerge, hushed whispers under warm sheets in darkness, save for the glow of untouched, locked phone screens.…
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“Teeth,” A Narrative
The following memoir piece titled, “Teeth,” is an excerpt from my final project, Breaking the Silence Behind the Doors of my Family and Body: Wearing Words, for my Disability Narratives course. Teeth My heart thumps and pounds just like an intruder breaking down the door to steal the jewels inside, and my hands shake out of my control—it is like some stranger has detached my own hands and reattached unwanted hands onto my arms—almost a Frankenstein’s creature type of reattachment—and I cannot seem to string words together to speak coherent sentences because my mind is clouded with panic, and I have no control over my body. Panic rushes in…
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“Still” and “Close,” Gallery Series
I. Still We were strangers whispering under the silver moonlight of sacred stories seeping through every inch of our bodies. Deep into the night, we felt warmth from the stars above, not the cold drafts. It was new like a translucent shell of an unwritten book, eagerly waiting for the pencil to be held. ~ We were lovers curled up on a yellow picnic blanket under the warm sun, feeling the air thicken with honey. We created our own language, one that only we could understand. It sounded like the waves humming, and the rustling of the pages as the wind brushed by for a moment. ~ We were…
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Art of Handwriting
My relationship to handwriting has transformed and grown alongside me. One of my earliest memories of handwriting was when I was in first grade. My teacher asked everyone to hold the infamous Ticonderoga #2 pencil, and she walked around the room checking how we each held our pencil. For every student that was holding a pencil incorrectly, she gave them a pencil grip object. As she neared my desk, my heart was beating quickly in fear, and next thing I knew, she dropped a grip on my desk. My face burned red with shame. I also saw the look of embarrassment in the faces of others who were told that…
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To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before Book Review: Love Letters in the Teal Hatbox
“I like to save things. Not important things like whales or people or the environment. Silly things. Porcelain bells, the kind you get at souvenir shops. Cookie cutters you’ll never use, because who needs a cookie in the shape of a foot? Ribbons for my hair. Love letters. Of all the things I save, I guess you could say my love letters are my most prized possession. I keep my letters in a teal hatbox my mother bought me from a vintage store downtown” – Prologue to To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. The premise of YA romance novel To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before written by Jenny Han…
