“I am paralyzed by the infinite degrees of freedom that you start out with, and so constraints can be freeing. To say, I can start here—I'm writing a story about time travel.”
Tag: Asian American
The Healing Power of Virtual Cuteness
Violence underlies the whimsical colonizing of an island in “Animal Crossing.” But perhaps it holds promise for political repair, too.
On Being Unmoored: Chang-rae Lee Charts Fiction with Anne Anlin Cheng
“If you’re going to write in a worthwhile way about something, you have to really understand why you care.”
Mae Ngai: “We’ve Always Had Activists in Our Communities”
“Americans—whether they believe they are not racist or whether they are stone-cold racists—still struggle to see the structures of racism.”
History Can Answer the Inexplicable: An Interview with Madeline Hsu
“The longer history of hostility toward foreigners remains latent. It has not gone away.”
The Asian American Novel in Our Time of Hate
What does it mean to write—and read—an American novel in the wake of anti-Asian racism and hate crimes, events connected to a history of Asian exclusion?
No Escape
What if comfort TV brought no comfort? Even the most innocuous shows can transform into horror, when the monster of racism bursts onto the scene.
Making Therapy Work for Asian Americans
How does one negotiate the truth within a network of Western racist stereotypes that pathologize the East, alongside equally Western ideas about “insanities”?
Make Allies, Break Empires
“Do you want to join the army, or do you want to go to jail?” This question—typically posed by a judge to a teenager charged with a petty crime—animated ...
Cute. Dangerous. Asian American. “Gremlins” @35
Gremlins—released 35 years ago this summer—is about a cute, furry ...
Virtual Roundtable on Fairness in College Admissions
The college admissions scandal exposed criminal and unethical actions that undermine the promise of the American university system. To get ...
The World of Asian American Studies
Last summer marked a watershed of sorts. Crazy Rich Asians became one of the most successful romantic comedies ever, grossing over $165 million in the US ...
Forms of Taboo, Forms of Love
Sonya Chung’s new novel, The Loved Ones, is in constant danger of being about just one thing, even though it’s richly and intelligently about how that one thing is ...
Teaching Kids to Resist
Do you know who Fred Korematsu is? He is not yet a household name like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr., despite the integral role he played in protesting the incarceration of Japanese Americans ...
“Master of None” and Everyone
Both for its first season and its new, more ingenious, more graceful second season, Master of None has become one of the most lauded shows in our era of ...