In Chinese I Am Six Years Old
I know the sweet shape of sugar, tang, and the soft sweep of cat, mao. I know wo e le, I’m hungry; I know wo bu zhi dao, I don’t know. I know wo yao, I want; wei shen me, why; dui bu qi, I’m sorry. Last March, I learned the word ai zheng, cancer....
Night Owl
He switched the headlights off and urged her up, into the night air. “Go on. Stand up,” he said, pointing at the Toyota’s open moon roof. The car rolled slowly down a country road, somewhere deep in the valley of quakes. Soon enough she would be too old for this. “Really?” the little girl asked,...
Puddle Jumper (excerpt)
My family isn’t here to go to medical appointments with me or talk me through my symptoms or make strange jokes about body parts to ease the tension. They aren’t in another zip code or even across the globe. After every surgery in my adult life, there was no hastened, helpful, overprotective mom or tita...
Middle Child
I was meant to be the middle child. A boy came first, or so my mother believed. She met my father at the L.A. radio station where he wrote some jingles, and she typed the scripts. He was moonlighting from teaching. Trying new things. He rode a bicycle up the boardwalk in a dashing white...
What Happens When You Drown
A month after your suicide, when I’ve quit fearing a return to routine would mean I never loved you, I restart my daily swims at the university aquatic facility. The facility has two pools. Fitness, eleven-feet deep, where recent high school swim stars flash down cool-water lanes, chlorine-bleached hair tucked under bright swim caps. Leisure,...
Numismatic
I was a child once, and had no concern for cash but did, and still do, have a compulsion towards coins. The curve, the jangle, the shine. A coin is kind of magic, how any circle charms the human eye: halo, hollow, sun. We scraped circles on rocks before we could cobble together tools from...
Slapstick
I don’t remember every beating mom gave us. I just remember that we named them after All Star wrestling moves. She had an extensive repertoire of techniques. The Half Suplex. The Full Suplex. The Spine Buster. Also the body part specific moves: the Wrist Lock, Atomic Knee Drop, and Corner Butt Slam. Some included hardware,...
Electricity
After spending most of the day on a plane, too young to drink miniature bottles of liquor but too old not to resent it, crammed between my amma and a man in baggy churidar, there it was, not quite as I remembered but intimately familiar nonetheless: Mumbai airport. Redolent with humid, fan-beaten air; dark arms...
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