Catapult: “Give Me Your Body”
“I’ve never wanted to tell this story because where I come from, we believe that to speak the name of a ghost is to invite it into your life, to allow it take up residence in your mind and the minds of all who hear it. And so for all these years I’ve kept it to myself, sharing it with no one, stumbling around it as you do a piece of furniture in the middle of a dark room.
The story begins when I was a child, and an illness tore through our village. One after the other the houses in our neighborhood went dark. First my mother was sick, and then my father, and I alone was healthy inside our house branded by the mark of the plague. It took everyone around us one by one. It took the neighbor girl next door, and her brother, and then it took her parents. It took the butcher and the seamstress and then it took their families. It took the rich and it took the poor, and finally it took even my mother and father. It took everyone but me and the shaman woman who lived beyond the outskirts of town, so that I—the only son of two only children—was left in the village, alone.” Read more here.
Granta: “Wudang Mountain”
“It is possible to long for a place you’ve never visited – to spend a lifetime nostalgic for a life you’ve never lived. I understand those people who go on Sound of Music tours in Salzburg, or learn to speak Klingon and go to Star Trek conventions all dressed up. I understand because this summer I went to Wudang Mountain in China to chase my own fantasy: I wanted to launch myself into the world of the kung fu stories my father told me while I was growing up – about martial arts heroes and fighting monks who could battle on water, jump from mountaintop to mountaintop, and balance on a single blade of grass without bending it. When I was a child, I’d try to run across our backyard as fast as the martial arts legends who were so quick they’d leave no footsteps in the falling snow.
My first glimpse of Wudangshan is from my seat, wedged against my suitcase, on a bus winding up a road through rain and fog. With its red-walled, green-roofed ancient temples, it looks like the landscape of my childhood dreams, and it is here I’ve enrolled in a kung fu school for a month with one of my friends. Wudangshan is a UNESCO Heritage site, famous for its kung fu history, inspiration for the Wu Tang Clan, and the setting of many martial arts movies. The teachers at our school are in their twenties, and have long, thick hair that they wear sometimes in ponytails, and sometimes on top of their heads in topknots. They smile and joke all day long, except when they teach or do kung fu, and then they move with a stillness that seems to come from somewhere so deep it may be the mountain itself. Their grace is like nothing I have ever seen before in my life.”Read more here.
The Rumpus: “Yellow Peril and the American Dream”
Last Christmas, my oldest friend, a girl I’ve known since we were ten years old, posted an image on her Facebook wall about how we should all buy American-made goods over the holiday season to help the economy we’re all so worried about. While I agreed with the sentiment, I was caught off guard by her comment underneath, “I reary rike this.” At the time, I hid the whole post from my feed and said nothing, but her comment triggered about five thousand angry alarms inside my brain. I am the child of Korean immigrants who spoke English with accents, and someone who grew up enduring taunts of “ching-chong” gibberish. I am an American who has been asked where I am “from” for as long as I can remember. My friend probably could not have imagined the sense of outrage she triggered, or how I would seethe at her comment in front of my computer screen. I’m certain she thought she was making fun of the Chinese—which in itself is problematic—without considering how she was parroting the ways we make fun of Asian Americans of all stripes, the ones who work and live in America, and speak with foreign accents. Read more here.
Granta: “Wish”
“The other day at dinner, you told this story about a student who fell in love with you. At the end of the semester he brought you a gift: a box you opened in private containing a ring you never wore, and afterwards you met him somewhere for coffee and told him, gently, that nothing was ever going to happen. When you told this story, I watched your face and was jealous of that boy. I knew you were kind to him, and sweet, and that for a moment, in exchange for his impossible little crush, he received the heady rush of your attention.
Another time at dinner, before you told that story, you mentioned that we always ended up sitting next to each other. I didn’t do it on purpose, but it always made me happy when somehow I found myself near you. I don’t know exactly what I wanted from you then, except that I wanted it badly. Still, I tried to avoid sitting next to you after that: I didn’t want you to grow bored. And then one morning as we walked to your studio, we slid in the snow, arm in arm, and you said you wished we were twelve years old and I wished it too. I wished I could give you my first kiss, which I gave to another boy with your name when I was almost twelve.” Read more here.
Redux, Originally published in The Journal: “Your Hand is My Hand”
“About a month ago I had a tumor excised from my left breast. The tumor was 3.3 cm in diameter, roughly the size of a ping pong ball, and was located under my left nipple. When it first appeared a year and a half ago, I told it, “You can stay so long as you respect the balance.” But in its last months it had spurned the balance and grown, rising to the surface so that it was visible: an alien marking out its territory. It started to develop what felt like appendages. It began to pull my nipple back into my breast, so that the skin around it puckered and collapsed.
I’d been told in the beginning by doctors that the tumor was not particularly worrisome. It appeared to be a fibroadenoma, a benign mass that often appears in women under thirty years old. When the tumor was discovered, measuring in at around 2 cm, I was told that surgery could end up doing more damage than leaving it—there would be damaged nerves, damaged milk ducts, scar tissue, and possibly a crater-like caving-in effect given the size and location. Surgery itself increased the risk of cancer later. I decided to leave it there, but remained always aware of it: sometimes it hurt, and sometimes it itched. Sometimes it shrank, but mostly it grew.” Read more here.