Perspectives

Though I spent a lot of time under her care, my Pau Pau and I didn’t speak much. Our exchanges were generally limited to one-way admonitions in her native Toisanese. Hehk fahn was her most common invitation — “It’s time to eat.”

Grandma was my primary guardian growing up. And like many of our guardians in Chinese immigrant families, Grandma was a mystery, a fish out of water. It may be because of how she mystified me that I never had the ears to hear her stories before she passed away.

The sound of sharp boar’s teeth hammered onto my flesh was surprisingly therapeutic. I felt a wonderful calmness while my husband and a fellow Filipinx American hand stretched my skin and my mambabatok left these permanent soot marks symbolizing powerful ancestral messages.

One stormy afternoon, Auntie sat with me at our kitchen table. I was in third grade and wildly enthusiastic about everything origami, eager to show off my crane-folding skills. Relieved at a low-key activity to partake in, my bookish Auntie started to fold a paper boat for my cranes to ride in.

These past few years leading up to and under the Trump administration have been a tumultuous journey, which has left me feeling unmoored from my foundations and shaken to the very core of my identities and beliefs.

Recreating memory is often seen as a liberating phenomenon. Whether it’s expressed through songs, journal testimonies, or stories passed down across generations, memories can be powerful tools for families and close communities. But I am skeptical about its resonance for creating multicultural and caste-transcending communities in the Indian context.

A 10-year-old girl looks out to a bare and large soccer field of her elementary school. Standing on the elevated platform, she can see all around her meaningful landmarks from her first decade of memories in Ilsan, Korea, all she’s ever known.

Every summer until I was 8 years old, I visited my grandparents at my mother’s hometown in Seoul, Corea. The most enduring memories of these visits are the quotidian moments of my grandmother and me squatting in the street corner near her yeontan (briquette)-heated house, surrounded by a group of her friends and local neighbors.

Even though I never learned how to speak any Filipinx languages, the names of everyday dishes like pancit and kaldareta roll off my tongue with relative ease. Some of my strongest memories are of me waiting for my mother in our car after she had spotted a malunggay tree in a neighbor’s yard.

Asian Americans have been brought to the forefront of the news because of Harvard’s Affirmative Action case and the Asian American community has been divided about how to approach the issue. Some groups argue that Asian Americans have been systematically discriminated against because of racial quotas.

It was the first week of Christmas break in 2010. I was halfway through my final year of college and had picked up extra shifts at my part-time job at Panda Express. Walking across campus, exhausted from work and carrying my groceries, I ran into my friend Taka, an international student.

I believe in ghosts. As a young boy, I visited my father’s village of Ofu, Manu’a in American Samoa, which is known throughout the Samoan islands for its ‘aitu (spirits). One day, after an eventful afternoon of shooting pigeons (faga-lupe) with my cousins, we lost track of time and began our walk — more like a hike — back home later than expected.

As far as I know, the miniature house-shrine still perches on the corner of the wet market. I’d been in Malaysia for 14 years, and up until last year, I’d never looked inside. Next to the food truck that sells roast pork and the other one that sells water spinach bunched in rubber bands, the gilded three-walled shrine squats on its haunches over the street

Asian American churches seem to love the Book of Esther. How many Asian Christian women are named after this Old Testament heroine? I know too many Asian Esthers to count. Queen Esther represents beauty, obedience, and bravery.

There’s an African proverb that states, “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

A long time ago, the first chancellor of post-war Germany, Konrad Adenauer, joined a TV interview where a journalist asked him the following question: “You were often called ‘The Great Simplifier of Politics’.

I left my Korean church eight years ago. It was my third departure in 11 years, but this was different. This time, I didn’t walk through a revolving door into another Korean church. I walked away from church altogether.