My face is the filter through which people see me. It can’t be helped. When people look at me, they see an Asian girl. To some, it’s the face of familiarity, but to most it’s the face of a foreigner. It creates distance, division, and tension. It brings up questions of heritage and place and […]
I wrote this poem for Kate Motaung’s book release, A Place to Land. Kate’s journey to find home was a story I could relate to as a mujer navigating my own sense of home and place. I was overjoyed with she asked me to write a poem to read at the Festival of Faith and Writing, […]
They say it is winter now but this doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever known of winter. While others tug their scarves tightly around them the sweat still pools where my purse hits my shoulder. Maybe I’ll get accustomed to the tropical air before the real heat comes early next year. Getting used to the […]
I knew now… why I could feel homesick at home. — G.K. Chesterton O Come O Come Emmanuel And ransom captive Israel That mourns in lonely exile here Until the Son of God appear Coffee cups I don’t remember much of the particulars of that conversation. I remember fumbling around for words as my […]
We are here and you’d like to forget it, have us more hidden then our black faces and tired, old eyes. Isn’t it enough to leave my own country as a teenager? Isn’t it enough to run on bare feet from my home that is at war with itself? Isn’t it enough to be homeless […]
It was in a portable classroom building, a sort of mobile home, where I first learned words and names for the power of story. While my junior high classmates sighed when asked to diagram a sentence for its grammatical parts, I flew to the board to help (Yes, I was that student). I read Tom […]
At night these mostly bare walls with fresh paint echo more than they used to, bouncing each memory of the past six years back through my unquiet mind. The crickets and tree frogs sing a melody that is as commonplace to me here as the call to prayer and honking cars was when we lived […]
In October of this year, our family will celebrate the fact that this home is the place where we have lived the longest together. The bar is low: our record is only four years and ten months in one location. My husband and I started our life together in a tiny basement apartment near […]
This year has been cruel y’all–like the stinging hits of freezing rain or cutting winds of a blizzard storm-harsher climates have shifted our atmosphere. The down pour of political and civil unrest has left our country drenched in hate, apathy and fear. Racial divides, Trump’s win, continuous murders of Black Lives, Standing Rock, the threat […]
We cannot have reconciliation without first having truth. I. I climb back into my minivan, fumbling with my keys. My face is blazing, my breath coming in short bursts, fevered and sour on my tongue and in that moment I don’t know whether I want to explode in a stream of expletives or lay my […]
My face is the filter through which people see me. It can’t be helped. When people look at me, they see an Asian girl. To some, it’s the face of familiarity, but to most it’s the face of a foreigner. It creates distance, division, and tension. It brings up questions of heritage and place and […]
I look at this new-to-me kitchen window, the one overlooking the quiet, manicured space that I now call home. With wide white cupboards and the sheen of granite tiles, I curl into its comfort. There are drawers for everything, there’s a proper pantry, everything fits! Looking out the window, my eyes are quick to wander […]
I spent the first eighteen months looking for signposts that life sprouts here in our new state. After a historically snowy winter last year in Michigan, I stalked trees for buds. I gently nudged snow from the neighbor’s crocuses with the toe of my boot, my soul hungry for a flowering something, anything that signified […]