Essays

To the Joss Paper Boss
Off Assignment
The staff of my arts residency program had taken us on a gallery crawl one night, and we were walking back home when we stumbled upon your open storefront. White paper buildings with red-brick imitation roofs and miniature replicas of luxury cars and household appliances lined the walls. Our local host explained that you were a maker of pasted-paper sculpture and joss goods …

The Headlands of Yehliu
Zocalo Public Square
I was hiking the Port Orford Heads State Park on the coast of Southern Oregon this summer when I realized how closely the rock formations and coastline resemble the rugged geology of my parents’ native Taiwan. These similarities brought back memories of my trips to the country, and made me miss my friends and family overseas. By June, lacking enough shots for its 24 million citizens, the country, once seen as a COVID success story, was forced to institute lockdowns and close public spaces …

Helping Hands: The Power of Mutual Aid Extends Beyond Collective Crisis
Seattle Met
After my cervical biopsy, my doctor briefed me on my coming surgery and recovery. Holding my seven-year-old son would be too strenuous, as would standing for periods of time cooking. My husband grew anxious—he’d already taken over grocery shopping when anti-Asian violence began to dominate the news, and now he’d be meeting the needs of two people …

Where Beauty Lies
South Seattle Emerald
I thought the show should be called Hey, Good Looking, but the marketing team for the the Wing Luke Museum voted in favor of the more lyric Where Beauty Lies. I’d been hired to write the narrative panels and introductory text for an exhibition organized around decolonizing beauty …

Different Kinds of Harm: Why I’ll Think Twice Before Taking Another Self-Defense Class
South Seattle Emerald
The first thing that I signed up for after getting my second Moderna vaccine was a self-defense workshop for women held outdoors in a public park. While I’ve missed going to the gym and seeing friends play live music, my mind has been on the other ways in which life has changed during the pandemic. My nervous system has been on high alert since the Atlanta spa shootings in March …

An Author’s Journey: How To Raise A Feminist Son
Seattle’s Child

In her new book How To Raise A Feminist Son, Seattle University journalism professor and author Sonora Jha recalls sobbing at the ultrasound where she learned that her first-born child would be a son. Not with tears of joy, but fear. Overtaken by anxiety, Jha wondered if her son would grow up to be as brutal as the men in her family of origin. “What if he assaulted me?” she asked …

Embarkation: Reimagining a Taoist Ritual Ceremony
Genealogy
In the summer of 2019, my friend Tomo Nakayama invited me to create a commissioned work for a live performance showcase on the subject of fire at the Moore Theater in Seattle, Washington. Many contributors to the showcase interpreted the theme in the context of climate change and the fires burning across the Pacific Northwest and West Coast that year. I knew that I needed to ground my piece in a connection to the place where I live, but as a person of the Taiwanese diaspora, the home of my ancestors also lives within me. I decided to write a poem to perform that reimagined a fire ritual that I had witnessed in Taiwan. My inspiration was the coastal town of Donggang’s ritual boat burning, which is enacted as a way to transport grief to a far place—to unburden ourselves of it …

How Becoming a Mom Changed My Approach to Art
Seattle’s Child
When my son, Tomo, was born five years ago, I gave up thinking about making art for nearly a year. Days melded together and I lost sense of time. In those early days, I tracked the intervals between feedings, bowel movements and naps. At six months, I turned my attention to the markers of development, the emergence of teeth—watching for the proper time to introduce solid food. I tracked my son’s language development and traded in reading novels and poetry books for long dissertations on brain science and early childhood development …

Residential Dispatch
CityArts
At the end of June, my landlord was touching up a water stain on the living room ceiling of my Ballard apartment when he casually dropped a bomb: He’d be selling the apartment building where we’ve lived since 2012. He said that another apartment building of his in Northgate had sold to investors within days of placing it on the market …

I Owed My Parents Everything – But My Son Will Owe Me Nothing
YES! Magazine
I was never fully aware of my parents’ debt until having to apply for college financial aid. Poring over the universal financial aid application, I read my father a series of almost clinical questions about our family’s debt, income, and savings …

No Need for Words
Tricycle

Several weeks ago, in the middle of having his diaper changed, my son peered up at me and spoke his first two-syllable word: butter. My husband Kort still asleep in bed, I wondered whether the boy had uttered the brief sound or my imagination had merely conjured it. Standard early-morning mental fuzz could not account for this self-doubt; it sprang from a deep longing, ever since the day of my son’s birth, for him to speak in familiar language …

Trying Not To Itch
Tricycle

Three days into a weeklong Vipassana retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, just north of San Francisco, California, I notice myself itching, unbearably. I’m not the only person distracted by the desire to scratch. Someone else leaves a handwritten note on the staff bulletin board confessing discomfort. The senior teacher responds by devoting an entire dharma session to “the itch,” the gist of which amounts to the following: observe the body’s suffering and let it go. The aching knee, the tickle in the back of the throat—just sensory experiences. Name, but refrain from scratching at all costs …

Tablets
Poor Yorick

The wooden ancestor tablet presiding over my fourth uncle’s ancestral altar tells the complete history of my father’s family—a history that I didn’t discover until my mid-twenties …

When to Speak, When to Listen
ParentMap

My relationship with my Taiwanese immigrant mother, Noko, has always been mediated by my father. Separated by cultural and language differences, my dad kept us apart by making us depend upon him as our translator, cementing his importance in our lives by putting himself at the center. When my son, Tomo, was born last year, I asked Noko to stay with me to assist me in my transition to becoming a mom …

Water Returning to Water
ParentMap

Visiting my neighbor Kanjin’s home last March, I noticed a small figure installed on his altar, surrounded by colorful toys and candy. When I asked, he explained the sweets on his shrine were offerings to Jizo — Buddhist guardian of lost children. The conversation blossomed into a longer talk about mizuko kuyo, a ritual that he occasionally performs as the head priest of a Buddhist temple in Seattle. The “water baby” ceremony, which originated in Japan, is performed to support parents who have lost children to tragedy and miscarriage. It allows them the opportunity to give birth to, bond with, and lay the spirit of their unborn child to rest through an act of imagining. A single wave form returns to the ocean from whence it was born — water returning to water …

Eating Hot Pot With My Father
Medium

“I thought jie jie was a vegetarian,” I whisper to my father. My cousin insists on treating her parents, my father, and me to a Japanese hot pot dinner to celebrate our return to Nantou. She takes charge with the waitress, ordering platters of seafood, razor-thin cuts of lamb, sirloin, and pork. Earlier that day, much had been made of her vegetarian bargain with the Buddha …