Jun 14, 2022
Why I’m Still Dreaming of a Brown Percy Jackson
BIPOC kids can be the heroes, the fighters who push back against impossible odds. We, too, should be the stuff of legends and prophecies.
BIPOC kids can be the heroes, the fighters who push back against impossible odds. We, too, should be the stuff of legends and prophecies.
While kids my age were falling in love with the fantastical, I did not. I wanted to read about rich white girls behaving badly.
On the back of that wind, my brain rose and skipped and tumbled far beyond the boundaries of any quarantine.
These stories had deep histories, centered Black women, and belonged to us. We only had to be brave enough to claim them.
When my father died in 2012, I inherited his well-read copy of Montaigne’s ‘Essais.’
Where I lived and grew up, the novella was never endangered.
“I needed preparation, not protection. I needed to see myself as a part of history.”
If we had left Venezuela, it had to be because life in America was going to be better, but the BSC world didn’t seem inherently better—just different.
For generations, Indians had to learn a poem about a flower most would rarely see.
The cruel logic of cancer therapy is that what kills the malignant could also kill the benign.
There is an equivalence between fanfiction writers and readers: we’re in this together, united by our mutual passion for media.
“What do we want? Livable lives. Thriving communities. The right to our bodies and our desires. Love. Resilience. Possibility. Queer genius.”
I go to Japan, pulled like a magnet, to see what is mine, undiscovered or forgotten; to see what will never be mine; and to find some way to reconcile the two.
Tango is not a thing that can be done halfway. Neither, I learned, is memoir. You’re either all in, or you’re dishonest.
When Etty wrote to herself, I heard her speaking to me, and I took her words to heart.
“I think of McCarthy and ‘The Group,’ giving me language to understand myself before I even knew that’s what I needed.”
“There is a saying in book collecting: You only regret the books you don’t buy.”
Fitzgerald was ground down, I imagine, consumed by how to take care of her family. This didn’t make her any less the thinker, writer, reader, that she was.
I told Kingston how much her book meant to me as a half-Chinese woman, as a writer. It showed me my own life was worthy of examination, even exaltation.
“The best books show us who we were when we first read them, who we are now, and who we may yet become.”
