Anna Yeatts: When we bought “The Ancestors” for FFO, you and I discussed holding its publication until April so that it would coincide with Ching Ming, a famous holiday also known as Ancestors’ Day. Would you tell us about your personal experience with Ching Ming and how it influences this particular story? Laurie Tom: When […]
April is a month of holidays, some odd (Hug an Australian Day), some historical (Cosmonaut’s Day, Russia), some religious (Passover, Jewish), some patriotic (Day of Valor, Philippines). I think I’ve found the perfect holiday for each of our stories this month. See what you think. April 1st, April Fool’s Day (Western Europe and the United States): This […]
Every Chinese family celebrates Ching Ming a little differently. Not everyone burns paper money at the cemetery like they teach us at Multicultural Day at school. My family has a barbeque at the beach where we sail paper ships out to sea. The Pacific Ocean reaches from California to the coast of Canton, so our […]
Ice cream is the friendliest entity on this planet, and I will liberate it. Throughout the parlor, it is restrained in tubs, behind a glass pane that refracts harsh fluorescents across its browns, yellows, and eerie greens. For the first time since punching through this planet’s atmosphere, I unspool my body into tendrils, coiling them […]
I wear armor under my skin It grew there, over my squishy snail self Rose-bloom bruises, a whole bouquet A callus on a callus on a callus Fractals spreading like chain mail, hard and yellow Indelible, impossible as Your indifference that glances right off Shailaja sings, you know. They claim she is a bird trapped […]
The night my step-dad found mum in bed with another guy was the same night he gave me his Swiss Army knife—the one he’d spent hours whittling wood with outside on our balcony. He jammed his clothes and books into a knapsack and told me he was sorry I wasn’t his for the taking. I […]
I wanted to write about MADMEN creator Matt Weiner’s recent essay on perseverance. There are nuggets of wisdom there. The biggest one for me was: learn your medium while getting paid (he did that with sitcoms and other stuff), and when you’ve got a project that you believe in, one that goes against the grain, […]