2017: The Upside Down Year
It feels like there was a release halfway through 2017 that should have happened that did not.
All posts filed under: Essays & Poems
Lessons from the life and work of Iris Chang
Iris Chang’s life was many things to me. Even before I read her books, she was this wonderful figure among Asian-Americans. I remember seeing her face on the cover of Reader’s Digest in the Nineties and knowing and being proud of this rare instance of an Asian face being so prominent, and respected. I remember the excerpt of her book, “The Rape of Nanking,” in Newsweek and how much weight that carried. I also remember the feeling when news broke of her committing suicide in 2004, when she was just 36 years old: Horror. It felt like there was a dark void in what happened. What was it that drove her to suicide? That question has been probed many times in articles and books written by those close to her. This essay is not going to delve into that, but will be a reflection on the lessons that Chang’s life and work still carry for our time. Chang’s books and her experiences have been on my mind these past few years for many reasons. First, …
Impressions from Fall 2016
By Monica Chen It’s late fall now. The scent of Sweet Olive flowers is nearly gone. Flower blooms have mostly folded, and the golden light of the season is fading. Some falls are breathtakingly perfect. This fall, with its halting, bumpy rhythm, was not that. The leaves could not quite turn, their urge to change sputtered like a bad engine, clogged from too much rain at the wrong time, too much dreary cold, too much heat. It was 60 degrees followed by 80 degrees followed by who knows what. Like confused actors under an indecisive director, they stepped onto the stage, then stepped back, became annoyed and impatient, then stepped on again. Some of them walked off the production completely. Instead of leaves, the showy colors of this fall were filled by yellow asters. Bur Marigolds bloomed in new fields around my area, blankets and blankets of them wherever there was room. The pink flowers of Slenderleaf False Foxglove also appeared, though not as many as in years before. And there were also these humble, …
Winter to Spring
In the stillness of winter before the turning point comes you hope this would be the last time The last wrong, the last fight But the light darkens, then brightens again not waiting for you And you reach for it because you want to grow too Maybe this is how flowers live a tree, a grass Leave the safety and warmth of the soil reach toward the sky See this luminous world for the first time the freshness and sweetness of air the softness of rain Understand with shock the fear of thunder, hail, frost the hot days that never end Oh, just sigh like the moon, the stars like the neverending cascade of beauty that is day and night The whole of the world can be felt from the root of a single flower The turning point comes winding you around as easy as sliding around a corner as hard as growing a new skin I remember the stillness of winter the electric blue of the soil Then movement comes, and its radiance gives …
American Dream
The conventional wisdom used to be that there was a “First World” and a “Third World,” a “New World” and an “Old World.” Your home culture was also supposed to be thought of as what you leave behind. Perhaps decadent, perhaps repressive, but always undesirable in some way and that was supposed to be the emphasis. It was what you needed to grow away from. Your home culture was considered to be in the past. Certain countries, certain places also were considered to be backward, to lag behind. But in recent years, this attitude changed. People have begun to realize that we have been in the same time all along, and there was no “First World” or “Third World.” This is true when you think about. While the more modern, technologically advanced countries provided better infrastructure, the “Third World” and the “Old World” countries still had those ancient things, old ways, that provided the balance to sterility, over-emphasis on progress, over-reliance on technology. For me, personally, the American Dream is no longer the aspirational, prosperity-based …
Generations
In the winter of 2011, a time that felt like the first breath of spring, when people were beginning to say and do exactly what they wanted to do all along, I remember going to the grocery store at night and seeing a young black man helping a middle-aged white woman load groceries into her car in the parking lot. It was a moment that imprinted on my mind both because of how much it reminded me of all the simple, spontaneously kind gestures that I have seen of my generation – in real life, online, here, around the world – as well as everything that happened in the past few years. The years of 2013-2016 have been such a horrifyingly cruel, dark time. It has been so much more violent than what I ever expected and what I remember from my childhood in the ‘80s and ‘90s. For me, nothing prepared me for this. Not stories, not history, not anything. It was the randomness of it, and how irrational and unprecedented it was, the …
The Spring Magazine 