Confessions of a Covert Stutterer
I’d become so successfully covert that the idea that I stuttered sounded more like an unfounded opinion than an incontestable truth.
I’d become so successfully covert that the idea that I stuttered sounded more like an unfounded opinion than an incontestable truth.
The film contains a pantheon of archetypes, all of them represented in these Indian Panjabi women.
I privately couldn’t get over the fact that she’d even felt comfortable speaking to me that way.
All I knew was that here was this woman who looked like the community I loved and interacted with.
Halmoni didn’t tell me she loved me. Her love could be seen in the work of her hands.
The play asked suddenly familiar questions: Why all this suffering? Is life really beautiful? How are we supposed to go on like this?
Some think good luck or bad luck is with us from birth—though our luck might change if a winged creature steals a strand of our hair.
Beds transmute into a form of policing while simultaneously being promoted as an alternative to policing.
I knew my body wasn’t ‘right’; it didn’t look like the bodies of the K-pop idols and Korean actresses I grew up admiring.
Months later, when people ask me to briefly describe my experiences in Berlin, I tell them I felt Jewish during the day and queer at night.
The authenticity of chop suey was always the authenticity of survival, of adaptation. And so, like generations of Chinese Americans, chop suey stayed.
After each meeting I felt lighter, looser, having spent two hours listening only to disfluent speech—to voices that sounded like mine.
In video games, dead parent storylines give a character depth. Their grief becomes a plot point, something to overcome.
If a pair, walking together, is forced to pass on opposite sides of some obstacle, they should say “bread and butter” or risk a permanent separation.
How do you navigate a healthcare system that wasn't designed for you?
When it’s bad enough, a tooth’s quest for touch is suicidal. Imagine asking your teeth to stay six feet apart.
I’m still drawn to stories about teenage girls’ lives, real or fantastical, and a part of it is trying to glimpse a world I never fully got to walk in.
A lot of my fears have been made real by the last year. And somehow, some way, I have returned to an insatiable appetite for things that scare me.
While I am shedding my femme clothes, I’m reminded of how my grandmother reclaimed her femininity, stolen from her by the Nazis, with a new dress.
Though the person in the skirt and I weren’t the same, when I saw them, I felt something I never had before at work: like I could be totally, completely myself.