Category: Essays, The Hyphenated Life
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Whose Tongues Come First
A ParentSquare notification arrives in Tamil and the dropdown to switch is buried four screens down. An essay on mother tongue, colonial inheritance, and the joy of learning Korean in my fifties.
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On Sōseki, K-Dramas, and Twenty-Five Years
After dinner I walk to the window and look up. Tsuki ga kirei desu ne: the moon is beautiful, isn’t it. Sōseki’s translation of I love you, the K-drama that revived it, and twenty-five years of pointing at the moon.
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The Dropdown
The intake form asks me to select “Asian.” Tamil is a language, not a continent. A coastline. The smell of filter kaapi at five in the morning. None of that fits in a dropdown.
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Half of Us
The survey landed in February. One thousand Indian Americans, asked to describe their lives in this country. The Carnegie Endowment published the numbers, and I read them the way I read most things about us: looking for the part they got wrong, and the part they got right. One in two reported experiencing discrimination in…