Passageway

Newtown Literary, Issue 9- Fall/Winter 2016 

You feel short of breath and wonder if this just takes practice. No one else around you looks like they are suffocating even though you start to pray for these crowds to move faster, and you never, or rarely, do you pray. Only in moments of extreme distress do you begin to ask for favors, to make promises you intend to keep in exchange for whatever miracle it was you were praying for. And each time you do this, always twice, once in English and once in Chinese, because you are still unsure which language is more effective, you secretly scold yourself for not praying more regularly. The sound of your voice will be muffled and drowned out by all the other troubled voices, all the other more regular voices. You close your eyes and imagine that instead of the hundreds of people surrounding you, you are somewhere else entirely, anywhere. But the shouts of a middle-aged woman disrupt your imagination. Tui tui tui, tui shenme? After her barks, the man stands eerily still and looks away silently, eliciting more yells from her. You continue inching forward every few minutes.

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In Less Than 365 Days

Brutal Nation, The Blueshift Journal Prizes for Writers of Color 2016

First Runner Up, Prose

“In Less Than 365 Days is a story about what Otherness means in America today. More specifically, the story examines race in relation to questions of immigration, assimilation, passing, and gentrification, and in doing so, the story gives us fresh insights into these important matters.”

— Jeffery Renard Allen, prose judge

Originally published in: 

The Seventh Wave, Issue 2: Labels

Then there is Sex Dirty Man.
Grandma hates cleaning his apartment the most.
Even though he lives alone, she finds colorful thin thin panties all over — stuffed in the sides of sofa cushions, hidden inside pillowcases, underneath rugs, and once, on top of the stove, inside a lidded pot. They come in bright colors like orange, yellow, and green, but also in deep shades of red, purple, and black. They are sometimes feathered, other times lacy. Grandma says they belong to different women because there is no way that one woman could possibly own so many thin thin panties. The apartment has a stench so foul she wears a face mask when she cleans Sex Dirty Man’s place. His fridge is almost always empty and takeout containers line the floor like ants marching to their fortress, except these ants never make it to the trash can where they belong.

Pill bottles, lipstick, a half-eaten turkey leg, used condoms — all things grandma once found in the bathtub.
You must never be with a man like Sex Dirty Man, she tells me.
He is a bad man, irresponsible and careless.

I wondered how she knew he was bad.

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Kiddie-Up Elmhurst!

Asian American Writers' Workshop, Open City, August 2013

When I was growing up, my dad’s pockets were often filled with quarters. His black slacks—standard issue at the restaurant where he worked—jangled cheerfully when he walked. The clinking coins were saved for two reasons—to feed the neighborhood parking meters and to pay for kiddie rides outside the supermarket where my family shopped on the weekends.

Each Sunday, our ritual was the same. My parents tag-teamed the shopping list: fish, meat, and vegetables. As they shopped, I waited for the moment when my dad would finish paying, reach into his pocket, and slip me two coins so that I could take a turn on the brightly colored mechanical horse outside the store.

Since moving back to my old neighborhood, I sometimes wonder about these rides, which still dot both my memory and the main strip along Broadway in Elmhurst, Queens. Even on weekends they don’t seem to get much use.

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