This essay and its translation are part of Transpacific Literary Project’s monthly column, with art by Mit Jai Inn. العربية English ..read more

Every Lunar New Year, Manhattan’s Chinatown overflows with crowds of locals and tourists alike. They marvel at dancing lions eating cabbage and tossing oranges, the firecrackers popping in the night and leaving their acrid smell in the day, and the clouds of confetti glittering in the sunshine. But in February 2024, buildings and cars were also coated in the dust of demolition. The joyous sounds of drums celebrating the year of the dragon came just days after the neighborhood was filled with the bangs of demolition at 125 White Street. Since 2022, New York City has been tearing down the Manha ..read more

all my life, my grandmother has talked  about the scent of the oranges in Jaffa. you know you’re in Jaffa  when you can smell them,  she tells me. not like the ones here.  they smell otherworldly, like perfume, almost.  she tells me. //she has to tell me these things because there are no more orange groves in Jaffa. because there is no more Jaffa.// all my life, i did not know: my grandfather had owned most, of the orange groves  in Jaffa.  //you see, he didn’t talk about Palestine. i don’t know where he was born, i don’t know how his parents met. i don’t kn ..read more

When you pick up one of Julie Otsuka’s novels for the first time, you will be surprised. That is my promise to you.  The Buddha in the Attic (2011) was the first novel of hers that I read, back when I was in college. It follows the lives of Japanese picture brides—women who came to America, having been promised as wives to Japanese men already living abroad; their marriages were arranged by a matchmaker, who sent photographs between the potential pair. The novel starts with their trip to America and unfurls into their unpredictable paths as World War II looms. I won’t give away the endin ..read more

Rouen Cathedral, suburban facade (noon). Woken at midday with my mouth dry like cheap champagne, the kind sipped from large glasses with silicone bendy straws, flutes unavailable for lack of class. Heady, pulsating summer offers no reprieve: sticking my face in the refrigerator for a cool wind, my hand shoved deep in the can—a tunnel to China, to territories where mental health patients risk surveillance, and hard to get to by tunnel these days,—to recover one leftover lychee from last night’s mimosaing, mimosaed decadence; nude fruiting bodies peeled and soaked in syrup, wide mouths still ..read more

This essay and its translation are part of Transpacific Literary Project’s monthly column, with art by Mit Jai Inn. Translator’s Note “Once Upon a Time” is a love story written in the form of a fairy tale. While translating this essay, I was struck by how the narrator maintains a consistent distance between her and the story, and how the tale is told like a movie—there are a lot of movements that involve language, travels, reimagination of emotional pain tied to well-known literary works, and the act of remembering. A love for translation is pervasive in the piece. How do stories from differ ..read more

English Korean 色 나는 과도한 색깔에 시달린다. 내가 나빴다. 좋아하는 것들이 많아져서 색깔을 훔치곤 했다. 천연의 것들. 인공의 것들. 미안. 너의 그림자도 건드렸다. 심지어는 물에게까지 그랬다. 색깔들이 불규칙하게 차올라서 나는 쉽게 무릎이 꺾인다. 나는 눈동자가 커다랗고 내가 너무 무거운 것이다. 그렇지만 좋은 것들은 정말 많고 네가 있고 나는 녹이 슬고 나는 호흡 곤란. 오래오래 그럴 것이다. Color I suffer from excessive colors. I’ve been bad, there were so many I liked I kept stealing them: natural, artificial. Sorry. I even messed with your shadow, and worse, stole from the water. The colors fill me oddly, so my knees bend too easily; my eyeballs are enormous, and I am far too heavy. But still, there’s many an upside, and you are here, and I am ..read more

That week, the final week that Zhuli drove to see her mother every day, just after she was released from the hospital, following another surge of the virus, leading hospitals to restrict patients to one visitor per day, despite the fact that the eighty-six-year-old patient in question had three children, one of whom had booked a flight from Taiwan just two days before takeoff in order to be there, because it was her mother’s third major hospital stay in the last year, and how many of those can one be expected to survive? and after days of disheartening prognoses and falling spirits—literally ..read more

It rarely matters who tells it. Combed from the fur of browning fronds, I braid a prayer for you. Here. Hold its bones like grenade pins. This November: a sharper whistle than the last. I stand waist-deep in earth’s womb with a flashlight, ask, Is anybody home? You must have stepped out. I need you to know the supercut of us had me crying in the club. They burned you into my name, but there were days and nights and dawns where I chose the soft beating of you in my throat, a compass of sorts. You lived in this body and ripped the wallpaper out. How do I mourn you while remodeling. Even scars b ..read more

When my father first threw open the doors to his small store on Catherine Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown in 1971, he thought the business might last a few years, if that. The store was as much a political experiment as it was a retail venture. Unlike neighboring Chinese shops, which typically marketed curios for tourists or food and sundries for working-class migrant residents, my father’s inventory appealed to a different vision of an incipient postwar diaspora. People’s Liberation Army regalia and socialist-realist propaganda posters celebrating peasant revolution hung on the walls alongsi ..read more