They deny the true nature of their history and try to censor ours in the name of equality.

you yourself love to pretend you remember your own birthplace

I always knew my mother was a writer.

She hails it as her best skill.

My mom slaps down some more dough in front of me. To eat, you must create.

Dust swirls into the air. The crowd gathers nearby—safely out of the way of stamping hooves . . .

Anything is un-trans-lateable

if you are a bad enough trans-lator

Herring fish gather in the shallow stream behind the lake and through the trees.

From the 200 billion trillion stars in the galaxy, 

my father gripped one

Propped up on my elbows, on the stiff gym floor. 

Planks: a climax in the battle to stay healthy.

From the sky I saw endless gray rivers,

older than the cliché of arteries

My mother fries chicken for dinner

says she hasn’t seen real chicken in America

I have a goal in life—to build the Black community here in America.

There is nothing profound about any of this. There is everything beautiful about all of this.

The Zhou famiy typically ate dinner at a rectangular table for four.

Once under the light of dawn

there sat a singing lark.

Quiet settles like a thousand years of grief, and

it spills over in the wake of a firework's shout

As we approach the river, the sight between its two bridges is my worst nightmare.

"Bye," she says. "Love you!" 

I freeze, almost tripping down the steps. 

Ingrain yourself in a wild honey: flail a standing ovation with petaled hands

moonlight kisses the clouds. It rings, the moonlight, like church bells striking.

"What's with the buckets?" you ask. "They're carrying something important." 

You listen for pleasure to some songs, for pain to others, Robin had said. Which was this? 

It was the boys' table at lunch. They were all in my grade, some of them my friends. 

I wasn't alive in '93, when cryptosporidium poured

through the water like liquid lava

Rice piled on my plate like a cold white ant bed. Mom adjusted her glasses again. 

You have never known those shores or those 

people or those words that sound like a memory

Shirk your sense of responsibility. 

Leave your guilt at the door of progress. 

Gen Z is not afraid of speaking out against policies; we are starving for justice. 

Lisa hasn't changed at all from the way I remembered her from the local library. 

The story my grandfather told continues to shape me today. 

Dr. André studies the intersection of identity, race, identity—and opera. 

It is our job to be allies and fight alongside Black Americans for equality. 

Hope means understanding that, while there will be obstacles, we can still make change.

Racial disparities in the American healthcare system absolutely exist. 

The scariest aspect of the Bay Area's disparity is just how little acknowledgement it receives. 

We often forget how Black communities and Asian communities have stood up for each other. 

I long for the day when lockdown ends and I can safely visit Evie again. 

I knew Chinatown best on Saturdays, 

the November kind

for two cents, the man 

answering will reach into the ocean

They tell us to put our hands up. Then, they ask us why we moved. Sister, that is why they shoot. Because we move.

I am coming of age in a world that doesn't make sense to me. I will turn eighteen quietly, without a party, without my extended family. 

In the jungles of Aklan stands a statue of a man I've never met.

Stands a monument to a face I've never seen.

Change is unexpected. 

Like the day I was told we were moving to America. 

Don't you swat at a fly. 

Don't you mindlessly shoot that harmless creature to the ground.

Sometimes I like to collapse infinity

into a single point in time I label "now."

My mom got me a goldfish. I didn't even want it. She told me it'd teach me diligence. 

And the sea has many teeth, far more than I. But if we are one 

then I have all the same teeth as the sea, then it has the same teeth as I. 

The night comes with a special kind of softness,

where the music swells. 

I am an American boy

with a Mexican twin. 

There was a girl in class that Rose really wanted to play with, but she didn't know what to say. 

Air sticks to my skin, 

like honey. mosquitos circle my ankles and wrists

The spoon looked down at the washcloth. "If you would be so kind, we are on our honeymoon."

The Red Dragon Café was the talk of New Orient City.

When Uchechi’s voice crackles with laughter and her almond brown eyes crease . . .

There's a sort of spell that falls over the dinner table as we wait for the athan to sound.

She spoke with her hands, weaving stories out of air and breathing life into them . . .

I grew up eating an excessive amount of eggs. Actually, that’s a little misleading.

In November 2018, the horrific picture of a migrant mother and her daughters fleeing . . .

Guitar, I'm sorry. You deserve so much more. Your cracked case, covered in a few . . .

“Black people don’t eat sushi.” He said it while I was in the middle of filling a bowl with grits . .

Suburban living is a great, untested experiment. While this style of living . . .

I believe in

People Places,

A Place for every Person to

There is a certain inscrutability in the mercurial ebb and flow of life in the woods, an unassuming cadence that settles just beyond my naive circumspection. The dry sweep of the wind’s touch is fond and insidious in turns . . .

On a frosty October morning, I walk to a field

And lie flat on my back in the dewy grass.

You always liked to watch the trains as they passed by, one after another, right on schedule. You liked the whooshing sound of the breaks as the train slowed into the station, and the whirring of the engine as it started up again.