There were many traditions that followed my birth, all aimed at pleasing various gods. We lived in faith and fear, moving from one ritual to another in the hope that our lives would be made better, our future brighter, and our marriage fruitful.

Just before my third birthday, my parents, grandparents, and one-year-old brother travelled to Varanasi for another necessary ceremony. We were to get our baby hair shaved off by a priest. The hair from the womb was considered inauspicious and full of negative energies and influences from our past lives. In shaving our hair, we were cleansed and purified—free from the baggage we may otherwise carry.

While my brother was relatively calm, snuggled up on my mother’s lap, I burst into tears the minute the sharp blade touched my hair. I saw the locks fall all around me—a waterfall of jet- black curls. My father patted me gently in an effort to soothe his terrified child. My mother had vanished.

I went to school wearing a hat, ashamed and embarrassed at my bald head. No one told me that my sins had been washed and I was now a pure, innocent being ready to begin a new life.

Between the ages of five and eleven, I was invited to my neighbour’s house once a year to be worshipped. On the eighth day of Navratri—a nine-day festival celebrated in honor of the goddess Durga for killing a demon—it is said that the goddess enters the body of young girls who have not begun their menstruation. I was worshipped as an embodiment of this goddess without the privileges that she would have enjoyed. I had no say in the matter.

Families ruled by men used the gods as a powerful tool to control dissent and discontentment. My family was one such, amongst many, in Calcutta. While men worshipped goddesses in temples and bowed to them in reverence during festivals, the women in their households enjoyed neither adulation nor respect.

The women fought their battles within the confines of their homes. They did not succumb to rage, running into the fields with their swords held high. Their victories were slow and hard- earned, cultivated carefully over the years. They played the long game, giving up their youth, hoping that the small wins would add up to victories for their children.

My mother was one of the many women in our household, a warrior of unimaginable strength and resilience. Her story began when she met my father, as did her decade-long battle with the gods she revered and the men who stood in her way.

This is her story and, in some parts, mine as well.

My parents met in 1978. While floods ravaged West Bengal, Calcutta hosted the National Football Championship. An Indian Airlines flight was hijacked, Indira Gandhi was yet to win her second national election, the Left Front government had just come to power, marking a new era in Bengali politics, and the Calcutta Stock Exchange was established. India’s first test-tube baby, Durga, was born. The first satellite, Aryabhata, was launched, and the first nuclear explosion was tested at Pokhran, Rajasthan.

As India advanced in politics and technological milestones, my parents dated secretly. The world was opening up, and our country was modernizing. But the families of Calcutta refused to change. We remained stuck with outdated values and dysfunctional systems. Dating was strictly prohibited and limited to meeting a man your parents chose, whom you would eventually marry.

Things may have gone differently if not for the accident that changed their life. It was a turn taken too quickly amidst a heavy downpour. We don’t know whether the lorry stopped without warning or if my father did not see it in time. My mother was rushed to the hospital, cut and bleeding all over her face. My father was unharmed.

“Who will marry her now?” my grandfather asked my father when he saw the three-inch cut along his daughter’s face, from cheek to chin. “I will,” my father answered.

The conversation should have led to wedding preparations. Instead, my paternal grandfather refused the match. My mother was not from the same caste or social standing. The marriage could not happen.

My mother refused plastic surgery to remove the scar from her face. She wanted a reminder of the consequences of lying to her parents.

They had almost given up hope when, in 1979, my father’s grandfather asked to meet my mother on his deathbed. His wish could not be denied. As my mother gingerly approached him, he smiled at her and blessed her, placing his hand gently on her head. The match was approved, and as the family patriarch, his word could neither be challenged nor refuted.

The accident set the tone for my mother’s place in a family that was complex, complicated and hierarchical. According to my grandfather, she had jumped the line and made her way in, against his wishes. Her situation as a new daughter-in-law was not favorable. My parents married out of love, hoping that, with time, my grandfather would forgive them. He almost did.

My mother was a dutiful daughter-in-law. She adjusted to the new family dynamics without question. In her opinion, she had wronged them and would have to work hard to be treated as a family member. She brought her love for continental cuisine into a household that had only seen and eaten staple Indian food. She made the first lasagna, pizza, pasta, and baked dishes. The children loved her and flocked to the kitchen often. My grandfather appreciated her effort and bought her a small oven, thus indulging her for the first time.

However, a daughter-in-law’s duties are not confined to household chores. She is also meant to have children to strengthen the bloodline.

Three years after their marriage, the family began questioning my mother’s fertility. Why had she not had a child yet? While children were being conceived simultaneously so that there were always two of the same age in the house, my mother paid no heed to family planning. Eventually, the pressure hit a high note; she removed her Copper-T, and I was born in 1983.

My birth changed everything.

Our family was large. My father had three brothers and two sisters. The sisters were married. The rest of us lived together in a house that could spare only one room for each family of four. We shared the drawing room with a single TV and one landline phone. We ate our meals together, and the women cooked in one kitchen. A separate prayer room was dedicated to the gods and managed and run by the women.

Two years after my birth, my mother produced a bonny baby boy. We were both fair and chubby children in a house of brown-skinned kids. My mother was educated, liberal, and free- thinking. Her ideas were considered radical, and her parenting was often questioned. But she did not budge. When it came to her children, no indulgence was too much, education was paramount, and the arts were necessary for creativity and growth.

My mother loved my father and, by extension, his family. She wanted to be liked and accepted. But when it came to her children, everything else paled in comparison. Her instincts to protect us overrode her logical brain.

We were her greatest source of courage and the reason for eventually being cut off from the family.

My grandfather was a patriarch who ruled his kingdom with an iron fist. We were in the business of making Indian sweets. Our confectioneries were many and well-known. No wedding or event in Calcutta was complete without our delicacies gracing the buffet table or being gifted in neatly wrapped boxes. My grandfather had five outlets. Each son managed an outlet and was paid a monthly salary. All outlets were owned by him, and the final decisions in business were his.

The women were not allowed to work or join the family business and were relegated to daily duties of cooking, cleaning, praying, and managing their children. They were expected to wear only sarees, leaving little to no choice for self-expression or creativity.

My mother quickly realized that her husband’s salary could not support her vision for her children. She needed to earn money on the side. A good lawyer can work around any contract and find loopholes that would benefit the case. Since my grandfather would not allow the women to work, she opened a small business in the garage, hired a tailor, and began taking orders for children’s clothing. No one could find a logical argument to object.

As she grew financially independent, the household grew restless. Cracks began to appear in the near-perfect façade of our family. Eventually, my grandfather closed her small business, citing her unavailability for household duties as an excuse. But my mother did not give up. She started another small business from her parent’s house, leaving after we were asleep at night. The family snitch found out. My mother was caught and the aftermath was not pleasant. She was not allowed to leave the house after dark. My grandmother said the children could not be left alone at night.

My father, encouraged by my mother’s courage, asked for ownership of the outlet he was managing. My grandfather refused. “If you want to run the business yourself, buy the shop from me and leave the house. As long as you are under my roof, my rules apply.” His fists tightened, and he found many ways to punish my parents for their impudence.

The cracks deepened, fissures spreading across the wall like rivulets.

My parents would have borne the brunt of my grandfather’s wrath if he had left my brother and me out of the fight. But patriarchs do not like being questioned or challenged. It began slowly and from within the house.

We were first cut off from the kitchen and asked to cook our own food. My father arranged a makeshift kitchen right outside our room, under the staircase. Next, my mother was banned from entering the prayer room. It was best if the women did not support her.

Phone calls were refused, and messages from friends were blocked. The night curfew continued. My parents could not make a single decision without my grandfather’s permission. Our outings were reduced, and we could no longer call our friends over. They tolerated it, hoping that the storm would eventually subside. I could blame myself for what happened next, but that would make my grandfather not guilty—and that would be far from the truth.

We were practicing for a school play in the afternoon. There were peals of laughter and raucous romping. This was the time my grandfather returned home for his afternoon nap. When he woke up, he lined up my friends and reprimanded us for being unruly and disrespectful. He held my arm in a firm grip and whacked me. “As young girls, you should be seen and not heard.” I was eleven years old.

I remember being angry and ashamed. My cheeks burned with embarrassment and my hands clammed up. My body rebelled, turning rigid, refusing to bend or apologize. I had done nothing wrong. I walked out with my head held high, hugged my friends who were leaving, and then headed to my room to tell my parents.

With a sickening sound, the façade cracked and the wall collapsed.

Two days later, we packed our bags, our entire lives fitting into six large boxes and four suitcases, and left the only home I had known. We were not allowed to take anything else.

The eviction took eleven long years. My grandfather had played a long game too, but his was dirty and filled with jealousy and hatred—a battle of wits, backstabbing, politics, power play, and money. My mother fought hard—for her right to belong, for her right to work, for her right to be accepted and loved. She fought for her children. She fought for all the women in our house who could not raise their voices in protest. She fought for the women in her community and country, a warrior’s cry against systematic injustices that they faced on a daily basis. She fought with the hope that one small win would encourage others to join and support her. She fought so that I would not have to.

Her fights were not bloody or cruel. She did not go into battle with her sword raised high above her head. She did not succumb to rage. Her victories were slow and hard-earned. She gave up her youth, hoping her children would have a better future.

In the end, she lost not because she was not strong enough. She lost because she refused to give up her sense of self, her identity, and her dignity. She refused to change her ways, to fit into a mould agreed upon by the gods and men.

As the gods watched, my mother’s life was scrutinized, analyzed, evaluated, and considered inconsequential. She was discarded, like a rabid dog foaming at the mouth. She was no longer of use to the family—an infection that was best cut at the source, lest it spread amongst the women of the household. If there was one thing my grandfather feared more than the gods, it was radical thought and free speech.

I grew up in a house where your identity, destiny and future are decided by the Gods. You are the gender you were born with, and you carry the burden of its expectations throughout your life. Your birth chart dictates who you marry and when you marry. Sometimes girls are born with inauspicious futures which may kill the first husband they marry. To nullify this, they are married to a tree first.

I am not free from the history that precedes my mother, grandmothers or the women who came before them. The burden is passed to the child in her womb—quelling any rebellion at the formative stages of growth. Our body learns the history of our ancestors, setting the foundation for what we must value and what we must discard.

Today, we call it trans-generational trauma. It takes many years to realize that we are bound to the trauma of our ancestors and many more years to break that cycle, if at all. For those who don’t have the means to work through their own histories, the trauma passes to their children.

I grew up in a world where we worship powerful goddesses and yet prevent menstruating women from entering temples. We hold the womb as sacred, yet find the baby hair that grows in it impure. We worship little girls and yet do not let them decide their future. We keep our doors open for gods to enter silently at night and determine our fate.

My identity as a woman is deeply connected to the shared experiences of the women in my household. They were not weak women. It takes a certain kind of strength to bow to a patriarch and yet hold your head high in the face of injustice, to not break or back down.

I am my mother’s daughter. I have learned to love fiercely and live independently. I have learned to question authority and rigid social structures. I have fought for her and beside her.

We may not always see eye to eye. Where she sees the power of faith, I see worship used as a tool—to frighten or gain power. Where she sees value in old traditions and customs, I see a family that caged a free spirit. What she considers as a compromise, I see as arm-twisting. We are from different worlds, living in parallel lines. We will never find a meeting point, both of us caught in our own cycles.

The difference in our thinking became even more stark when my daughter was born. Here was a chance to break the cycle of trauma. To give my child a life that was her own, free from the fate of gods and the will of men.

On the night we returned from the hospital, my mother insisted that we leave the door open for Brahma to bless and decide her future. I protested. As an atheist, I was determined not to let the shadow of God touch my child.

“This is my only wish. Please let me have this,” my mother pleaded.

“She is not your child!” I screamed in anger.

“She is my granddaughter. The door will be left open.”

I could have fought harder. I could have said no. We could have argued well into the night. But I let it go. I am not sure why. The following day, the empty piece of paper was given to a priest at a temple. I told myself that rituals only hold power if you believe in them. I would protect my child from the whim and fancy of gods, shield her from dated notions of good and bad, teach her to fight and stand up for herself. I would lose a few battles if I could win the big ones.

My daughter is eight years old today - a free spirit who questions openly and rejects without fear. She is not sure if she believes in God. I have left that decision and journey of discovery to her. What she does know is that I will respect her opinion, fight her when I need to, and give her the space and freedom she needs to grow into a beautiful woman. We may not agree on everything, but that is okay.

I sometimes wonder, if my mother had the life and freedom I have now, would she have lived differently? Would she question the faith and customs that she holds so dear? Would she realize the many cages she had built around herself? Perhaps someday, I will ask her.

The identity of women in India is irrevocably connected to their families and guided by caste, class, social standing, power and influence. Your future is decided based on these parameters. And fear is the weapon used by men to ensure that these structures hold strong—a golden empire with gilded cages.

I know that I have many such cages, one locked inside the other. I am aware of my years of conditioning and knee-jerk responses from generations of subservience. And yet, I fight—not for myself but for my child—in the hope that one day, I will break the cycle and free her from my family’s history. My daughter’s future will not be dictated by my past. The men will not tell her how to talk, walk, dress, or behave. The gods will not decide her future. To move forward, we must break the link to our past. To find the key that will open our cage, we must first find our voice. To command respect, we must find ways to love ourselves. Because when we do, the empires built by the men and gods will crumble overnight.

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Samira is an Indian woman who works and lives in New Delhi. While she runs a communication design studio professionally, writing has her heart.

She writes to understand her history, culture and customs. She write to witness her lived experiences and make sense of her world. She writes because sometimes words are stronger and wiser than conversations. She also writes to open up space for those who have lived similar experiences—perhaps in search for others like her. Samira believes we are not alone in our struggles, our battles and our victories.

Her writing aims to navigate the complex society she grew up in and questions the myriad customs and rituals that surround us as we grow older.

You can also find her on Instagram.

In-between Lines

An exploration of stories that lie in the spaces between light and shadow.

By Samira

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Do you have news you’d like included in next month’s issue? Email me at tiffany (at) peripherylit (dot) org by April 20, 2025.

Welcome back to another issue of From the Margins, where we share stories, articles, and poems from our very own Periphery members.

AN APPLICATION FORM / BURNING HAIBUN FOR REINCARNATION

— writes of is & was

As someone with a complicated relationship with my own mother, this poem was both painful and cathartic to read. E.R. brings to light the intergenerational wounds that can pass on from mother to child. Sometimes it is an attempt at protection; sometimes it is a dagger.

In “An Application Form / Burning Haibun for Reincarnation,” she writes:

The slippery [moon / god] emerged out of [her stomach / the waves]
and she vowed to repay [eye / scar] for [eye / scar] and [tooth / blood] for [tooth / blood].
With her heavy breathing and screaming, she demagnetized the [ocean / room], and I left her womb to cleave to her wound.

There is acknowledgement of former generations’ pain, but not dismissal. I found this achingly beautiful.

of is & was

Weekly poems, essays, & short stories.

By E R Skulmoski

Surging Spring Qi: Ride the Wave

— writes Earthbody

Spring is upon us, and Jiling leads us in her newsletter by helping us attune to our bodies and the earth, and engage all our senses. I find this increasingly important for myself during a time of turmoil, and I was grateful for come across Jiling’s spring edition. It’s so uplifting and encouraging. She gives small and practical ways to take in the season, drawing from elements and seasonal nodes.

Spring has a ripping-apart sensation. Buds tear off their winter coats to explode neon-green leaves, bulbs press through cold dirt to send brave flowers skyward, and the whole world pushes and pulses, lifting leaves and flowers, baby hummingbirds and bunnies to the sun, “Look! Here I am! I am alive.”

Read more

EarthBody

Monthly Letters: Five Elements Lifestyle Medicine for Seasonal Living

By Jiling Lin, LAc

Reading Su Shi: An Ant Clinging to A Small Plant Floating on Water

— writes Request of Literary Exile

I admittedly have limited knowledge of classic Chinese literature, despite my heritage. As such, this article by Hyun Woo about poet and essayist, Su Shi, was a delight to read. Exiled literary geniuses intrigue me (see: my fascination with Victor Hugo), so when I read this about Su Shi, I was captivated.

Truly, we all reside on an island of one’s own. All we can see is a large sea, the end of which cannot be grasped. We feel lost, and it seems life is not going anywhere. On a different scale, however, the water is nothing but a tiny puddle, formed by the water from a basin. Why not just laugh about it, then? Look up, look down, and it will have dried in no time.

For those of us who call ourselves artists, we sometimes (often) struggle with wondering what the point of our work is. Hyun Woo writes about his own journey in this essay as well. There was a lot I found relatable, and reminds me how closely entwined we still are, even with people of the distant past.

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Requests of Literary Exile

Literature as an act of exile

By Hyun Woo Kim

Teaching from Rest

— writes Fireflies in a Jar

I really appreciated this reflection on homeschooling by Zahra. As a homeschooling mom myself, I’m often frazzled and stressed by questions of whether or not my child is keeping up with his peers, whether he’s getting enough socialisation.. etc. There came a moment a few months ago when my husband and I considered whether this was truly the right choice for our family. We decided it was, after all. Zahra wrote about many of the reasons we talked about in her post. It’s beautiful to read about her letting go of societal expectations and choosing to rest.

For anyone who has children, I highly recommend reading Zahra’s post.

And the most important lesson that reiterates throughout this beautiful book is that “we are meant to recognize every facet of our day as coming from the hand of God”.

What that essentially translates into is trusting Allah swt and his decree. My kid might not feel like touching a book today, me nagging him, hovering over him all the time will not change his feelings toward learning today. But being patient, accepting and accommodating of his need to lay back may result in him grabbing a book first thing the next morning or maybe not for another few days. What is key to teaching from rest is our faith in Allah’s divine wisdom and that we remember to rely on him completely. All of the above lessons apply to parents and care givers who choose the traditional education route as well, because a child’s true education begins at home.

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Fireflies in a Jar

A peek into the writings and loves of an immigrant, homeschooling mom.

By Zahra. G

When was the last time you looked up?

— writes becoming | more myself

It’s always a good time to remind yourself to slow down and take in your surroundings more. In this essay, Cissy writes beautifully of a poignant moment between herself and a heron during a time of transition. It can be all too easy to focus on the troubles of today—look down, as Cissy puts it—rather than keeping a broader perspective in mind. The problems can then loom bigger and overwhelm us.

Cissy’s reminder to take a step back and reconnect with your larger purpose is a timely one. I hope you will enjoy reading it, too.

Reorienting toward the horizon is a daily practice. Setting intentions while remaining open to how the path unfolds before us, trusting that the next right step will reveal itself.

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becoming | more myself

meditations on ambition, selfhood, and our inner world

By Cissy Hu

Where do we go from here?

— writes nōto

I appreciate Erika’s stark honesty here, and her refusal to conclude with a pat resolution to suffering—because real life often doesn’t offer tidy solutions. And yet, she gives the reader something else: gentle reminders that while evil seems overwhelming, to look for the good. Which is a deeper reminder that there still is good in the world. Or, as Mr. Rogers would say, “Look for the helpers.”

In dark times, I’m more grateful than ever for messages like Erika’s, which are not simple. She doesn’t dismiss the bad. She instead challenges us to look for something higher. And, of course, I can never resist a good Lord of the Rings quote, even if it’s not from the book. Thank you, Erika.

If goodness means something—anything at all—to us, then we must refuse to let go of it. Naming what’s good out there can be a whale-sized effort. It can seem like everything is doomed, and that’s that. But examples such as the Minneapolis neighbors providing for and protecting each other prove that goodness persists in the world. We might just be everyday people, but we get to choose if (and hopefully how) we overcome evil and power and corruption.

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Nōto by Erika Tovi

Eclectic, ever-evolving notes on life, creativity, and children’s literature. 📒

How I found my way to my faith as a ‘bad’ Muslim woman

— writes Sanobar’s Newsletter

Sanobar’s essay resonated with me on many levels, especially as I’m working through my own faith reconstruction journey. While we don’t share the same faith, I believe everyone has a faith, and at one (or some) point(s), we must question why we continued to adhere to it.

I’ve also been the rebellious girl who drove her parents mad by questioning why we had to do certain things, pushing back against traditions that no longer made sense, and congregations that made little to no space for those who don’t perfectly fit the limited mold created for them.

My writing offered me clarity in confronting my conditioning, providing me space to rage against patriarchy. It attracted compassionate engagement from people of diverse backgrounds, most surprisingly by my Muslim female friends, many of them hijabis. Suddenly, we were on the same side – tolerant of our nuanced personal experiences – resisting, questioning and reclaiming faith in our own ways!

It’s so refreshing to read about others who find freedom within a faith they once found restricting.

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This issue of Periphery features was curated by of The Untangling. If you enjoyed these picks, be sure to subscribe to her publication.

Want to write for us?

1. Featured writer — Submissions are open on a rolling basis with no theme. Even if you’ve submitted previously, I encourage you to do so again, because I’m now opening it to writing pieces that have been previously published on personal blogs or Substacks. Full guidelines can be found on this page. Payment: $10 upon publication.

2. Curator — no limit: Sign up to curate one of the monthly round-ups (like the one you just read!). There are different ways to do this. You can either look through the Periphery directory and read posts you want to highlight, or highlight posts by Asian authors you already subscribe to. This page has our past editions if you need a reference. Sign up for an upcoming month here. Open to Periphery members.

3. Decolonise Your Bookshelf series — no limit: If you love books and also love recommending them to others, sign up to write one of these posts. This is one of my favourite things to do and would love to hear about more books by Asian authors from y’all. Check out this page for past issues. Open to paid subscribers.

To keep this work sustainable, please upgrade your subscription or give a one-time donation. This is incredibly important so that I’m able continue this work. Financial support directly impacts how much time I’m able to devote to this publication. Thank you!

Thank you, Young Woong Yi, Andrea Louie, Bill Bishop, Demian Yumei, TheUltraContemplative, sunshine moonlight, Lael Johnson, Sanobar Sabah, for your generous support.

Periphery is a publication dedicated to fostering greater understanding and appreciation of Asian cultures and experiences among a global readership. Subscribe to decolonize your reading and discover unique writing.

Welcome or welcome back to Periphery. A special welcome to who writes Self Portrait, and , who writes Acts of Service. Please take a moment to check out their work and welcome them to our community! If you’d like to be added to the directory, please fill out this form.

Today, I’m sharing some books I read in recent years that I hope will pique your interest.

Nonfiction

Here After (Amy Lin, 2024). This was not an easy read. I didn't expect it to be. Amy's memoir of her first year after her husband's sudden and unexpected death at only 32 years old is heartbreaking and raw. Her language is sparse yet striking; the chapters are very short, yet impactful. Still, it's not a book meant to be read quickly. Amy's description of grief and the lies we've been told about it, her attempts to convince her family and friends she's okay, were all too familiar to me. A necessary book for everyone, because grief will visit us all someday.

Reena: A Father's Story (Manjit Virk, 2011). If you're familiar with Reena Virk's story, you'll know this will be a difficult read. Reena Virk was 14 years old when she was murdered in 1997 by a group of her peers she'd been bullied by. All she wanted was to have friends, to belong. Her father, Manjit, wrote this book as a way to cope with his grief--a motivation I relate to--and shares their family's story. He writes of Reena's struggles to fit in as part of a minority group in Canada, the poor choices she made as a result of her desperation that harmed herself and her family. Manjit and his wife, Suman, faced racism from Canada's Ministry of Children and Families as they fought to protect their child. This book is a sobering look at how the system failed a family, leading to the senseless murder of a 14-year-old girl. Amidst these horrifying events, Manjit and Suman's strength and faith, refusal to stay silent about the injustices their family suffered, are truly admirable.

We Have Always Been Here (Samra Habib, 2019). I came across this book by complete accident, and I’m so grateful I did. Samra’s story of growing up in Pakistan, immigrating to Canada, and discovering their identity as queer, is an essential read for everyone. Theirs is an incredible journey of repression to freedom, of finding one’s voice in a world that says they shouldn’t exist. I recommend this to anyone who has felt like they don’t belong, and needs some hope (aka everyone).

Fiction

An Imagined Life (Rohan Srinivasan, 2024). A stunning debut about a young boy whose world gets turned inside out after a family tragedy. Akash has always lived in a close-knit community, but when circumstances force him and his mother to move across the country, he finds himself drifting in an unfamiliar world. He finds solace in a mysterious ability to transport himself back into past memories. It's a multi-layered deep dive into what grief is like for a child still growing up and learning about the world, what it's like to be an outsider, and what it means to have deep roots untouched by frost. This is a story that will stay with you and move you, long after you read the last word. Read my interview with Rohan here.

Taiwan Travelogue (Yang Shuang-Zi, 2020). The most compelling aspect of this novel is that it's presented as a rediscovered translated nonfiction travel memoir by a young Japanese writer who traveled to colonised Taiwan in 1938. This is one of those slow, subtle books that you have to take time getting to know. It covers multiple layers of colonialism, identity, history, and friendship. Once you sit with it, though, it's well worth it. I wrote a full review here.

A River from the Sky (Ai Jiang, 2026). As usual, Ai Jiang delivers a beautifully written book with multiple layers that I want to read over and over. Although this is a short novella, there is so much going on. I really enjoyed diving into Lufeng's sister's POV more in this book. I found her really interesting, especially as she wrestled with how to save her people and home without losing herself and becoming like those she's fighting. These are questions we must ask ourselves all the time when we engage in social justice. Ultimately, I always wish I could spend more time in Ai's worlds. She has such a rich imagination and describes them with such lyrical beauty. A bittersweet conclusion to the Natural Engines duology. Read my interview with Ai here.

Have you read any of these or do you intend to? What did you think?

Thank you, , , , , , , , , for your generous support.

Subscribe now

Want to write for us?

1. Featured writer — Submissions are open on a rolling basis with no theme. Even if you’ve submitted previously, I encourage you to do so again, because I’m now opening it to writing pieces that have been previously published on personal blogs or Substacks. Full guidelines can be found on this page. Payment: $10 upon publication.

2. Curator — no limit: Sign up to curate one of the monthly round-ups. There are different ways to do this. You can either look through the Periphery directory and read posts you want to highlight, or highlight posts by Asian authors you already subscribe to. This page has our past editions if you need a reference. Sign up for an upcoming month here. Open to Periphery members.

3. Decolonise Your Bookshelf series — no limit: If you love books and also love recommending them to others, sign up to write one of these posts. This is one of my favourite things to do and would love to hear about more books by Asian authors from y’all. Check out this page for past issues. Open to everyone.

To keep this work sustainable, please upgrade your subscription or give a one-time donation. This is incredibly important so I’m able continue this work. Financial support directly impacts how much time I’m able to devote to this publication. Thank you!

One and a half years ago, I set out to create a space to unite Asian writers and showcase our work. We’re now over a thousand strong, which is no small feat for someone as introverted as I am.

The turmoil in the world and hatred toward marginalised people makes me want to hide away. A hateful comment1 on a Note celebrating one of Periphery’s milestones is still seared into my brain. “Stop speaking out,” it said. When I asked why, the person responded, “We (Whites) have had enough. We don’t need your kind of voices.”

For a while, waves and upheavals, both personal and political, have left me breathless and unable to put out a word.

But someone reminded me recently why I continue to write and publish.

And then, I remembered why I made this space in the first place.2

Periphery family and allies, you don’t need me to tell you that our voices are needed more urgently than ever. And here is one place we won’t be silent.

With that, there will be some minor changes to the submission process.

New Submission Guidelines

First of all, thank you to our paid subscribers, , , , , , , , , , and Tony W. Because of you, I’m super happy to announce that I’m now able to offer a $20 payment to writers who contribute to our monthly guest column3. I hope that this amount will increase with your generosity! Thank you so much for your support.

Subscribe now

Instead of a quarterly themed submission period, submissions will be open on a rolling basis with no theme. Even if you’ve submitted previously, I encourage you to do so again, because I’m now opening it to writing pieces that have been previously published on personal blogs or Substacks.

Guidelines can be found on this page.

Directory

If you have not been added to the Periphery directory, you may do so by filling out the Google form here.

The directory will now be regularly updated. To provide the most beneficial resource to our community, users who haven’t updated their Substacks for a year or longer will be removed.4

Scheduling

Count on me to overextend myself by trying to run two newsletters, launch a book, and homeschool while managing mental and chronic illness at the same time. So, what I’ve come to realise is that weekly publication is not possible.

However, the beating heart of Periphery is all of you, your voices.

That said, this is what you can expect:

• The featured essay or story each month (depending on number of submissions received).

• We will continue doing a monthly round-up of posts from members in the Periphery directory.

• Decolonising Your Bookshelf: A list of book recommendations every other month (or every month, depending on number of contributors)

We’re all in this together

Can you tell I’ve been binging on musicals? Anything to distract me from reminders of the Wuthering Heights movie. 🤮

As you may know, Periphery relies on the awesomeness of volunteers and generosity of sponsors to keep running. If you so feel inclined, I would love to have you on the team in one of these volunteer roles.

1. Community monitor — 2 needed, alternating weeks: You will initiate weekly discussions in the chat to foster community, moderate comments, and help keep the flow of conversation going when needed. Email me if you’re interested in this position. Open to Periphery members.

2. Curator — no limit: Sign up to curate one of the monthly round-ups. There are different ways to do this. You can either look through the Periphery directory and read posts you want to highlight, or highlight posts by Asian authors you already subscribe to. This page has our past editions if you need a reference. Sign up for an upcoming month here. Open to Periphery members.

3. Decolonise Your Bookshelf series — no limit: If you love books and also love recommending them to others, sign up to write one of these posts. This is one of my favourite things to do and would love to hear about more books by Asian authors from y’all. Check out this page for past issues. Open to everyone.

And, of course, one of the best ways to support is to spread the word by telling your friends about us!

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The other way is to ensure I can continue paying writers by taking out a paid subscription or making a one-time donation.

As always, thank you for being here. Your support in every way has helped expanded this publication beyond what I imagined:

• Surpassed 1000 subscribers

• Have enough patrons to pay contributing writers

• Published 10 written works of literary calibre

• Submitted our first Pushcart nominee (congratulations to !)

• Interviewed 7 authors

• Recommended 40 books by Asian authors

• Featured too many of your writing pieces to count!

I’m excited to see where we go next.

Oh, the answer to the opening question is, of course, fuck no. Periphery is back, and louder than before.

No submission fee. Open to Periphery subscribers.

Creative Nonfiction, including, but not limited to:

• Personal essays

• Memoirs

• Some forms of experimental writing

Fiction

• Short stories

• Flash fiction

• Novel excerpts

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Not following all guidelines will result in automatic disqualification.

All submissions by a writer of Asian descent will be considered for publication. Priority consideration is given to those who are part of the PERIPHERY directory.

Submissions must be complete, in English, and under 3000 words to be considered. No pitches, please!

• Only 1 submission per submission period permitted. Also note that if you were accepted for a previous submission period, please wait 12 months before submitting again.

• Submissions should be your original work and previously unpublished. This does not include your Substack or personal blog.

• Attach your document in the following file forms: .doc, .docx, or pdf.

• All manuscripts should be in 12-point type, with at least one-inch margins, and sequentially numbered pages, double-spaced.

• In the email subject line, put in all caps: “[CATEGORY] SUBMISSION.” For example, “CREATIVE NONFICTION SUBMISSION”

• Include a brief bio (about 100 words) in the body of your email, and include your connection to Asia. Note any links to your website or social media if desired.

• Indicate the following in your email:

  • Title of the work

  • Word count

  • Subgenre (e.g., short story, flash fiction, personal essay, memoir, etc.)

  • Brief synopsis (1-2 sentences)

Simultaneous Submissions: We accept simultaneous submissions. Please contact us as soon as possible if your piece is accepted elsewhere.

Compensation: $10 through Paypal, Venmo, or Zelle, paid upon publication

Exclusivity: We request exclusive first publication rights for accepted pieces for a period of one month. After this period, all rights revert back to the author, to reuse and republish as you wish.

Response Time: We aim to respond to all submissions within 4-8 weeks.

Send your submissions or questions to tiffany (at) peripherylit (dot) org.

By — Understanding Korea, One Story at a Time

There are deserts you can see—seas of sand stretching to the horizon under a merciless sun. And then there are the deserts you carry inside you: a landscape of fear you enter the moment you cross a line on a map and your very existence becomes a crime. For years, I lived in such a desert. It was a wasteland made of held breath, of words swallowed like stones—a place of blinding sun with no shadows to hide in, where you must learn to become a shadow yourself.

An Oasis of Our Own Making

I was born in Aoji, North Korea. To most South Koreans, the name means one thing: punishment—a place where people are sent to disappear into the oblivion of a coal mine. But for me, it was simply home. It was the scent of burning coal mixed with kimchi, the warmth of neighbors who shared what they had whenever there was a need, and the sight of my father’s hands. This community was the water in our small world, a shared well of humanity that kept the larger desert at bay.

He worked at the Sunbong Coal Mine. Each evening, he would return from the tunnels, his face tired, but his eyes always held a quiet kindness. His hands were a map of his love, the lines etched permanently with black coal dust that no amount of soap could ever wash away. He was a cog in the wheel of a relentless state industry, but to me, he was a gentle giant.

He was also a farmer born of necessity. Around our home were unused, barren patches of mountain land. He would not let our lives become a barren land. Single-handedly, my father cleared that earth, turning it into a field where he first planted corn, potatoes, and soybeans—and later, even rice. It became a family affair. All four of us siblings worked alongside him, planting seeds, pulling weeds, and gathering the harvest.

To farm, you must first plow the land, which was not a simple task. Oxen were managed by the state and unavailable to individuals. So, my father built his own solution. When I was about six years old, he spent several evenings after work hammering and carving. One day, he announced, “Children, let’s go plow.”

“Plow?” I asked. “How are we going to plow?”

“Look there,” he said, pointing to his creation. It was a makeshift, man-powered plow—a gadeagi, as he called it. It looked like a smaller version of a real plow but with three long ropes attached.

“Father, how in the world are we supposed to pull that?” I protested. My sister added, “It’s shameful! Are we cows?”

My father looked at us for a long moment. “Then who will plow the fields?” he asked, his voice patient but firm. “We need to cultivate the land to plant the crops so that you children don’t go hungry. Plowing by hand is much harder, so I made this. No more backtalk—just follow me.”

He slung the makeshift plow over his shoulder and led the way. My two older sisters and I took the ropes. My father steered the blade deep into the earth and shouted a command as if to an ox: “Giddy-up!”

At his command, I lurched forward. We moved in unison, panting like animals. A hot shame washed over me. I was mortified, desperate to hide. What if someone sees us? I thought, my face burning. What if my friends see? They’ll call me a cow at school. I suddenly felt a wave of empathy for the cows. How could they do this work without protest?

Just then, I heard the distant sound of a train. The tracks ran alongside our field. It was an unwelcome sight. On instinct, I dropped my rope and waved at the passing train, pretending to be a carefree child just playing in the fields—a girl who had never been harnessed to a plow. After the train disappeared, I picked up my rope and we began again. Thanks to my father’s ingenuity, this became our yearly spring ritual: we became the oxen that tilled our fields.

In the autumn, our rooms would overflow with the corn we had grown, and the yard would be filled with bundles of soybeans. Every night, we had a quota of corn kernels to shell. At first, it was a game, but soon our hands would ache and our skin would peel from the repetitive labor. Summers were for a different kind of harvest. We would go out with baskets and knives to forage in the mountains and fields for wild greens and roots—water dropwort, fernbrake, and deodeok, a fragrant mountain root. On the way home from school, I’d pick the tips of mugwort growing by the road, stuffing them into my pockets. My mother would dry them and later use them to make rice cakes.

The Arduous March - The Desert of Hunger

Then came the famine.

The oasis of our community began to dry up as hunger sharpened the edges of our humanity. The official rations had long since stopped. We were surviving on what little we could grow, but a rumor spread that the Party was going to confiscate all privately cultivated land. Afraid of having our precious rice taken away, we faced an impossible choice. We were just ten days away from a proper harvest, the grains almost perfectly ripe. But we couldn’t risk waiting. We harvested the rice while it was still green and unripe. In those hungry, desperate times, I remember that green rice tasting unbelievably delicious.

Soon, even that was gone. The pots were empty. The gnawing hunger in our bellies became a constant, dizzying ache. It was no longer just a metaphorical desert—it was physical. Our stomachs felt like cracked earth. Our voices turned brittle, our bodies dried out from within. I remember my mother disappearing for a day. She said nothing—just wrapped her thin coat tightly around herself and walked out the door, heading toward the nearest major town, miles away. She was gone for the entire day. When she finally returned in the evening, she was a ghost. Her face was ashen, and she leaned against the doorframe to keep from collapsing, her breath coming in shallow gasps. In her hands, she clutched a small sack—just two kilograms of corn. It was a treasure.

I soon learned the price of that treasure. She had walked all those miles to the clinic to sell 400 grams of her own blood. This was not a one-time sacrifice. She did it again and again, more times than I could count, exchanging a piece of herself for a pouch of grain that would barely keep her family of six alive for a few more days. When she saw our heartbroken faces, she would try to comfort us with a devastating kind of optimism. “Isn’t it a relief that I have type O blood?” she would say with a faint smile. “It’s the type that’s needed the most.”

She had turned her own body into currency, her blood into food. It was the most brutal— and the most sacred—transaction I have ever known.

When even my mother’s blood was not enough, we started to eat things that were not food. I remember a rice cake my mother made from animal feed traded from China—a gritty mix of dust, pebbles, and husks. “Mom,” I whispered, “this tastes like dirt.” She looked at me, a painful smile on her lips. “Then we eat dirt today,” she said. This was the first taste of the desert, the feeling that the earth itself had turned against us, offering grit instead of grain.

A Handful of Soil - Crossing Into the Desert

We decided to leave, not in pursuit of freedom—I didn’t know I wasn’t free—but to escape starvation. As my father prepared to cross the Tumen River, the border that separates North Korea from China, my mind, still a tapestry woven with state propaganda, recoiled. “Father,” I cried out, “how can we leave the General behind?” My older sister was even more resolute. “Father, let’s protect socialism, even if we starve to death.”

My father looked at us, his face a mask of frustration and love. “It’s no use, no matter what I say to you here,” he said. “Then I will show you. I’m going first, so follow me.” Before his words had fully settled, he stepped onto the vast, frozen river—a white desert that promised a new world on the other side—and walked into the darkness until he disappeared from sight.

My mother led us down to the river’s edge. “Let’s bow to our homeland one last time before we go,” she whispered. I followed her, bowing deeply to the frozen earth. As I rose, I secretly grabbed a handful of soil—its cold grit a final, desperate anchor to the only world I had ever known. I will come back, I promised myself. I will definitely come back.

We finally stepped onto the ice and started our journey. We were about halfway across when we saw a figure walking toward us. It was my father, coming back. He must have grown worried when he couldn’t see us. There, in the middle of the frozen Tumen River, our family of six was reunited. That was the moment we stepped into the desert.

A Ghost in a Borrowed Room - The Desert of Illegality

China was not the oasis I had imagined. It was there I learned a new name for myself: illegal migrant. The word itself felt like a brand, searing away my identity as a daughter, a sister, a girl from Aoji, and leaving only a classification of wrongness. We were people without rights, without protection, without a voice. We had no papers to prove we existed, no country that would claim us, no place we could truly call home. We had crossed a river of ice only to find ourselves in a desert of scorching fear.

If caught, we would be repatriated to a fate of imprisonment, torture, or public execution. That fear became the air we breathed. We hid—behind drawn curtains, in borrowed apartments, our lives a series of whispers and furtive movements. We couldn’t trust anyone—not the neighbors, not the police, sometimes not even other North Koreans who might trade our location for their own safety. We had to live in a state of constant, quiet vigilance. In the desert, every moving shadow could be a predator; here, every stranger, every uniform, held the same threat.

I could not go to school. Instead, I worked. I found jobs in restaurants and, for a time, as live-in help at the home of a South Korean pastor. I was only a teenager, and I didn’t have the practiced efficiency of an experienced housekeeper, and I was often scolded. I remember one Christmas in that house. The pastor, his family, and their church members had gathered to exchange presents, but as I watched, I realized there wasn’t one for me. In that moment, I felt that even on Christmas, I was just the housemaid—someone excluded from the joy of celebrating Jesus’s birthday. Looking back, I understand that a gift exchange is reciprocal, and I had nothing to offer. But as a young girl, all I felt was a profound sorrow—the sorrow of being a tool and not a person, a pair of hands and not a heart worthy of a small, wrapped gift.

Those days were filled with moments like that—a deep sense of being out of place. I felt myself shrinking, trying to take up less space, to become so small I would finally be invisible. In the crushing silence of these days, a strange and painful nostalgia began to grow. I found myself missing North Korea. Not the propaganda or the hunger, but the solidness of my own life there. I even missed the shame of being harnessed to my father’s makeshift plow. I remembered the feel of the rope on my shoulders, the sight of the train passing by, my desperate wave to a world that could not see my humiliation. At the time, I had felt like an animal, mortified. But in China, I realized that even as an ox, I had belonged to someone. I belonged to my family, to that patch of earth my father had claimed. We were suffering together, under our own sky. In this Chinese desert, I was suffering alone—a ghost with no name, belonging to no one and nowhere. The desert, I was learning, was not just an absence of food or water, but an absence of belonging. The shame of being a beast of burden felt more real, more human, than the emptiness of being invisible.

That is the nature of this desert. There are no maps. There are no signposts. There is only the horizon of today, and the constant, burning fear of what lies behind you and what might lie ahead. You exist in a state of permanent transit, a ghost haunting the edges of other people’s lives. You forget what it feels like to stand on solid ground, to speak your own name without flinching. You learn to live with the taste of sand in your mouth, and you pray—not for an oasis, but just for the strength to take one more step.

About Jiwon

Dr. Jiwon Yoon is a Korean American writer, educator, and researcher who has spent over two decades working with North Korean defectors in both academic and creative settings. She is currently collaborating with Kumhee, whom she met in 2002 as a volunteer English tutor in South Korea, to co-develop a memoir chronicling Kumhee’s journey through North Korea, China, South Korea, and now Australia. This essay is part of that larger project and reflects Jiwon’s commitment to bringing Kumhee’s voice to a wider audience through literary nonfiction.

Jiwon also publishes a weekly Substack newsletter, Growing Up in Korea (yoonjiwon.substack.com), where she explores Korean childhood, education, and civic life. She is currently running a special series on Korea’s democratic spirit—not just documenting protest or impeachment, but tracing how such collective action became possible in the first place. Her goal is to offer hope, insight, and even a kind of civic blueprint to readers in countries where democracy is struggling to function.

You can find more of her work and connect across platforms at jiwon-yoon.com/links.

By

My mother’s most precious possession was a loquat tree yielding bundles of yolk-colored fruit. Several items had vied for that top spot, such as the heirloom rosary she kept on her nightstand for her daily prayers, her engagement ring featuring a Philippine pearl that my late father sourced himself by diving in the south seas surrounding the island home they left, and even her fake designer handbag that appeared authentic. Of course, there was also her green card and subsequent certificate of naturalization. There was even her only child’s framed diploma with the Latin honor magna cum laude (that she said should’ve been summa cum laude). Yet despite other strong contenders, the tree sprouting forth from the fertile soil of our southern California backyard had rooted itself into the depths of her heart, leaving room for little else.

“Nanay, why can’t we just get you a house plant?” I asked. In one day, we would cede the keys to the home my parents had planted themselves in upon their immigration to America. While we spent the past few days boxing up 26 years’ worth of stuff, Nanay had summoned me to pack up one last thing with her: the tree. It loomed above us with its lowest branch dipping down just enough to pat the top of my head, like the condescending touch of one who believes they are superior to you.

“Anak!” she said, thrusting a shovel into my hands. Her wrinkled fingers with chipped crimson nail polish grazed my own hands, rough and dry from constant hand washing at the hospital where I’d just started working as a labor and delivery nurse. “We move out from house; we take tree with us.”

I turned the shovel over in my hands, avoiding the many splinters sticking out of it. “I’m not sure this tree will fit in our new backyard or if we can even get it there ourselves...”

She gave me a look and I shut my mouth. The first light of day had barely begun to roll over a horizon that hid behind the graffitied billboards and old wooden power lines surrounding this suburban neighborhood. A lingering morning fog blurred this image, giving it a watercolor effect as sharp boundaries obscured. The cloud-dotted indigo sky faded into dawn’s golden sunbursts, which then bled into the muted greenery of the lush, uninhabited land in the distance. The sky and land folded together, melding into one.

Even the chirps of birds overhead harmonized with the lull of traffic in the distance and the vague mumblings of characters in a Spanish children’s cartoon floating out from the next-door neighbors’ TV. I’d seen the kids, both too young to be in school, kicking a ball around in their backyard earlier. Upon seeing my mother who had once scolded them for kicking their ball into our yard, where it struck the tree and caused some loquats to fall prematurely, they fled back inside their house in tandem—even their little strides syncing up. They shut the screen door so fast it bounced back a bit, leaving Nanay and I alone.

We stood on opposite sides of the tree. A decent pile of dirt formed behind Nanay as she hurled mounds of earth over her shoulder with an impressive speed for her age. Then again, she had cared for this tree ever since moving into this house.

It was only when Tatay was diagnosed with advanced-stage lung cancer that Nanay shifted her focus onto him. Upon his death, I suggested she and I move into a smaller house closer to my work. I’d assumed she’d grown apart from the tree enough to leave it behind.

At my father’s viewing, however, she floated through the wooden church pews explaining her master plan of how I was going to help her excavate the tree and relocate it. Our friends and family humored her by listening in as she recounted her wish of digging the tree out of the ground and strapping it onto the top of my old station wagon. She told them we’d drive away from the only neighborhood we’d ever known in America, past all the neighbors who spoke broken English, rusty and dented cars parked on the cracked street, and yards with overgrown weeds. We’d drive away from it all, planting the loquat tree in the miniscule backyard of the tiny townhome—complete with access to a community recreation center and a strict HOA—that I could barely afford.

I knew it would be near impossible to fulfill that dream, but in the presence of God, my dead father, and our extended family who’d flown in from the Philippines, I wasn’t going to turn her down.

“Anak! Don’t just stand around. Start digging. We finish by sundown!”

I finally pushed my shovel into the grass. As I did, a gust of wind blew through the tree, causing the branches to sway and the leaves to shiver. If I hadn’t felt the wind myself, I almost would have believed the tree was moving on its own and shaking with laughter, clearly entertained by my dilemma.

It was borderline unsettling that Nanay put as much effort into raising the tree as she had with me. She set the tree up for success by giving it the best fertilizer on the market just as she sent me to highly regarded tutors and ushered me into prestigious internships. She monitored how well the tree performed by tracking the number of perfect loquats it produced just as she checked all my report cards for straight A’s. She molded the tree into exactly what she wanted it to be by trimming any unruly and discolored leaves and discarding scarred and imperfect fruit just as she pulled me out of my fun art clubs and away from friends she didn’t approve of.

Despite our shared experiences, I found myself at odds with the tree. I deemed the slim branches bony and unattractive, always wondering how they could even support the weight of all that fruit, which in itself was almost too sweet and too addictive. Once, I bit into a loquat and was propelled into a frenzy, gnawing at its flesh until nothing was left but the pit and juices streaming down my chin. I loathed the way I craved it in the off-season and felt idiotic when it was the first thing to come to mind when my stomach growled during long shifts at the hospital. It annoyed me how easily the tree flourished under my mother’s care. Each year, the crop was more bountiful than the last, while I barely made it through school without losing my mind and struggled to keep up with work. And more than anything, I hated how day by day my mother seemed to prefer the tree over me.

This was evident in the ways I always found her with the tree, even when she wasn’t actively tending to it. In the mornings she’d bring a mug of steaming green tea out back and walk circles around the tree to exercise. During the day, instead of sitting inside with the air conditioning, she’d lean against its trunk or sit at its base and hum songs to herself in Tagalog. Sometimes I’d come home from study groups late at night to find her eating a meal beside the tree and she’d wave me away when I’d beckon her to come in lest the mosquitos get her. It appeared like she was permanently attached to the tree, always hovering about it and keeping it in sight the way a mother would a young child.

My suspicions of her favor for the tree were officially confirmed after a New Year’s Eve incident a decade ago. My parents threw a party at our house, with the bulk of the guests being Tatay’s co-workers. While Nanay and the wives of these co-workers congregated around the TV in the living room to watch the live New Year’s Eve broadcast, the men sat outside in plastic chairs positioned in a ring around the loquat tree. They downed beer, smoked, and prattled on to each other while gawking at the string of lights Nanay had hung around the tree’s branches for decoration. The lights glistened off the slew of empty bottles scattered at their feet.

While Nanay was busy hosting, I kept an eye on the men all night, drifting from the living room to the kitchen under the guise of getting more food so I could peek out the glass door. They were loud and obnoxious, like the college-aged frat boys renting out the house across the street. As the night wore on and the amount of empty beer bottles on the ground multiplied, the men became more animated. They kicked their chairs, gyrated suggestively, and shoved one another.

When one of the men smashed a beer bottle against the tree, eliciting an eruption of laughter from the others who then joined in on smashing their bottles against it, I beckoned Nanay to see what was happening. Despite not really caring for the tree, this behavior unsettled me. When she opened the door and cool night air polluted with the aroma of smoky beer ushered in, I studied her plain expression.

Before I could ask why she didn’t seem to care that they were abusing her precious tree, she grabbed my arm, yanking me away from the open door. It was too late. I had already glimpsed one of the men with his pants and underwear pushed down to his knees, urinating on the base of the tree while the others howled and cheered him on.

Eyes wide, I snapped my head back to Nanay, whose own face remained still.

“It’s almost midnight!” a woman yelled from the other room, causing the men to stumble inside and gather with the others in the living room.

“Nanay, aren’t you going to do anything?” I asked as we stepped outside.

“No anak,” she said, bending down to pick up glass shards. She ran her hands through the grass, searching for cigarette butts.

“But-but, it’s not right,” I said, eyeing the wet spot on the tree. When I stepped closer to inspect the trunk, I found tiny burnt dots.

Nanay stood and placed one hand on the tree, the other on my shoulder. “The tree is fine. You and I are fine. Let’s not say anything to Tatay, okay?” My eyebrows scrunched together. “But why can’t we? Why did—”

“Do not question him,” she said, her eyes wide and unblinking.

Beneath the moonlight and lit-up tree, Nanay and I missed the countdown to the new year as we finished cleaning up in silence. I wanted to obey her—something about the pleading look in her eyes told me to—but an uneasy bubbling persisted in my stomach. And when no amount of pain relievers eased the sensation by the time the guests left, I took it as a sign to confront Tatay.

I found him in the kitchen. He’d forgone a plate, instead picking up a fistful of fried rice and shoving it into his mouth despite dropping most of the rice grains. When I approached him, he’d moved on to the lumpia.

“Tatay, what your friends did to the tree was wrong. You shouldn’t have let them do those things to Nanay’s—”

Tatay held a hand up, causing the words spilling out of me to stop. His hand hovered in the air for several seconds. I focused on the gleam of lumpia grease on his palm and fingertips. Then, so slow as if suspended in a vat of the syrupy sweet and sour sauce we used for dipping, it came down and slapped me across the face. I froze. My head remained tilted downwards just as his hand willed. Strands of hair fell forward, veiling my reddening face as tears blurred my vision. He walked away without saying a word.

When I finally willed my legs to unstick themselves from the ground and passed by my mother, holding my throbbing cheek in my hand, she had a knowing look on her face. I didn’t blame her for continuing to help the tree and not coming to my aid. Unlike me, it hadn’t disobeyed her.

After that ordeal, I aspired to be more like the tree: quiet, content, and never out of line. I found myself spending time with the tree just as Nanay did, hoping its qualities and appeal to my mother would rub off on me. At first I’d just lean up against it, bark rough against my back, and scroll on my phone for a few minutes. Then, I started bringing books and snacks out to enjoy under the tree for hours. That led to me staying beneath it long enough to fall asleep, my eyes fluttering shut as the tree’s shade blanketed me and whispers of leaves in the wind swirled into a lullaby.

Still, I couldn’t shake my hatred of the tree for being what I couldn’t be—if only because it was what my mother wanted me to be. I often daydreamed about its downfall, thinking about poisoning it or chopping it down myself. If poisoned, it would deteriorate slowly. The leaves would wilt and turn yellow. The fruit would cease to grow. But if I took an ax to the trunk, then I’d get that satisfaction of seeing it tumble before me. Its fall would shake the earth and send dirt flying everywhere as the tree succumbed to its fate.

By midday, Nanay and I stood waist-deep in the trench we’d dug around the tree. The sun, now unaccompanied by clouds or fog, relinquished its hot rays to us. Sweat dribbled down my neck, sticking my hair and shirt to my body as I sweltered in that makeshift underground oven. Dirt adhered to everything: a layer of it coated my clothes and exposed skin, it was caked underneath my nails, and it had somehow made its way inside my bra.

I pushed my shovel to the side, taking a break from digging to rub my throbbing forearms and pick at the blisters on my palms. I thought that by now, Nanay would have voluntarily given up. Of course, I’d planned to make a show of helping. I’d come out here before daybreak and fling some dirt around, but hoped that Nanay would catch on to the fact that the two of us couldn’t de-root this massive tree by ourselves. Despite the minimal progress we’d made, she didn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.

“Nanay, enough of this,” I said, attempting to clean my hands by wiping them on my dirty pants. “Let’s just leave the tree here.”

She raised her shovel, forcing it back into the ground at once. Her whole body shook from all the effort.

“Nanay? Are you listening to me? Stop digging.”

Heaps of dirt just narrowly missed my face as Nanay slung a shovelful over the edge.

“Give it up!” I yelled, moving to grab her shovel.

She tore it out of my reach and held it close to her chest, which rose up and down quickly with her breaths. “Not done yet,” she said.

“Look at yourself, Nanay. You really want to do this all for a tree?” In response, she pushed her shovel back into the ground. “Okay, fine. Let’s finish what we started then.”

If she wasn’t going to budge, then I at least wanted to see the tree topple down. Then I’d leave her there to deal with it, her darling tree. I snatched my shovel and the two of us resumed our excavation. I drove my shovel into the ground as hard as I could, picking up way more than it could manage. Dirt slipped off the shovel’s sides and I catapulted whatever remained over the pit’s edge. For a moment, the chaos of shoveling took me back to when I was younger, helping my mother kill any surrounding weeds by making sure the roots were carefully removed. We’d make a game out of it—who could extract the most weeds? She’d always let me win.

“Why do you even love this tree that much?” I asked after a while, swiping at my eyes with grubby fingers.

Nanay refused to answer.

“Why?”

Dirt flew around us as we slung it out, no longer aware of where it landed since we’d long forgone trying to aim. Our skin shone with sweat, allowing dirt to cling to us even more than before. My eyes stung and started to water. My mouth was dry from dehydration. My body ached from overexertion. I knew Nanay felt it too, for she grunted in pain with every shovelful. Soon one of us might throw in the towel—not by choice, but by passing out.

Clank! I’d assumed our shovels collided, rusted metal blades kissing one another in the flurry of dirt slinging, but we struck something in the ground. Nanay fell to her knees and crouched over, tossing handfuls of dirt to the side. In this state, with her body balled up and made small, shoulders hunched, sun highlighting strands of grayed hair hiding amongst the box-dyed brown, I remembered just how old she was. The hands that used to pick me up and hold me above her head so I could reach fruit on the tallest branch, now trembled as she unearthed a metal tin from moist soil and tangled roots.

“Nay, what is it?” I asked, as she wiped the tin’s cover to reveal images of Danish butter cookies. I recognized this kind of tin, often used for miscellaneous storage rather than preserving treats. “Don’t tell me there’s mending supplies in there?”

Her chapped lips turned up into a smile as she popped the lid off. Inside were several yellowed photographs with tattered edges, dust specks, and creases from where the photos had once been folded up. In one, Nanay wore her school uniform and stood next to her own mother, a woman she’d left in the Philippines long ago. In that photo I couldn’t tell where my mom ended and her mom began—they were that close to each other. In another, Nanay’s gummy smile with missing teeth was on full display alongside a group of girls her age. Then there was one of her and Tatay at the airport, before they embarked on their journey to America and learned of all the hardships that came with immigration. Tatay’s features were softer then—his face plump and without the deep frown lines and rough patches of skin that would form later.

The photo that caught my eye amongst the many in this time capsule, however, featured Nanay leaning against a lofty tree, her arms crossed. I’d always known my mother and I looked alike, but when I first glimpsed the image, I thought it was a picture of me. Same dark hair, familiar brown eyes, similar constellation of beauty marks across our cheek.

Before Nanay became Nanay, she was once just a young girl. Only she grew up in a small province in the Philippines where she spent her days basking beneath the sunshine and looking out into the vast sea wondering, perhaps, what else was out there for her. Maybe she daydreamed of moving elsewhere and raising kids whom she could protect and raise to stand a chance in this world. Maybe her mother was just as hard on her, fearing what might come of her in a world so unkind to girls.

“I loved and cared for this tree because it reminds me of one from the Philippines,” Nanay said, recalling days past of her own mother caring for various fruit trees planted in the family farm. How she learned to distinguish when the mangoes and pomelos and jackfruit were ripe before she was even old enough to start school. How she could never forget the stench of fruit marinating its sweetness in the humidity or the way her mom pinched her playfully when they ate lunch beneath the canopy of rustling branches and leaves, the harvest between them. “The way it bears fruit may be different,” she continued to me while looking up at the budding loquats, “but they’re still similar at the core.”

Nanay put the photographs back into the tin, tucking in her memories. “And I raised it the way I did because that’s all I knew. It’s what I saw from my own mother. I thought it was what’s best. Maybe I’m not always right.”

“Maybe I’m not, either.”

“Maybe you are, sometimes,” she added with a chuckle.

A loquat’s stem snapped above us and the fruit dropped into our trench, rolling not too far from the tree. We both bent down to pick it up, our fingers brushing against one another as we stood. At that moment, I imagined the roots at our feet coming up from the ground and twisting around us, tying us together. I could almost feel the slimy roots slithering up my body, pulling my mother’s chest to mine as they tightened around us.

“Sabay nating itanim ito,” she said, holding the loquat up to the sun’s light as if, through its golden exterior, she was trying to see through to the pit.

I nodded. Together, let’s plant this.

About Trin

Trin Encarnacion is the Filipina American daughter of immigrants who moved to the United States from the Philippines in the 70s. She grew up in San Diego, CA unsatisfied with the lack of Asian characters in the books at her school library. She now resides in Bellingham, WA where she pursues an MFA in creative writing at WWU, teaches writing composition, and writes stories about the Gen Z Filipina American coming of age.

By — My Dead Flowers

Anita sat at the table in the corner, the very same table as the last time when she had come with Mark. That was six months ago. It was their fifth anniversary, and they had dipped into their savings and gone all out. They had even splurged on a babysitter.

It was light outside, the evening brightened by the white of snow. A car rolled by, a sign of life, that drew attention to the emptiness of the streets. Behind her, she heard the clatter of plates and cutlery, the low rumble of conversation. It seemed to her that the entire neighbourhood must be here, gathered in merriment, warming themselves with wine and stew.

A waiter came up to ask her again if she wanted anything else, another glass of wine perhaps, and she said no, she was fine, her friend would arrive any moment. In between, she worried she might not recognize Anjali; so much had happened since they’d last met.

Finally, she saw the shadow behind the door—the exterior door, constructed to proof against the winter. She knew just from the size and shape and movement of the shadow exactly who it was.

“Hi darling,” Anjali said. “I’m sorry I’m late.” Her nose was red. So were her cheeks. On her head, she wore a fluffy hat. A hat made of soft, white fur that fell over her eyebrows and doubled the width of her face.

“Hi,” Anita said. She attempted to get up but sat back down. She watched, instead, as Anjali took off her coat and hung it on the peg, where it draped the wall like a tailored curtain.

Anjali shook snow off the hat and came to the table. She leaned to one side to give Anita a kiss but was crushed in a tight embrace.

“It was the damned train. It took so long. It was stuck for fifteen minutes somewhere. I don’t even know where. Jay something or the other.”

“Jay Street-Metrotech.”

“Yeah, whatever. Then I had to get out and luckily I saw a cab. I didn’t think you got cabs here.”

“It’s still the city.”

“I know. I just had no clue yellow cabs came here. That, too, on a night like this.”

“We’re only half-hour away from Manhattan.”

“It took me forty-five minutes to get here. Maybe a bit more.”

“Well it doesn’t. It takes thirty. It’s still the city. We’re still very much in the city and it doesn’t take that much time to get here at all.”

Anjali said nothing. She looked out of the window. The street glowed orange under the lamps, as though the evening sun had cast its amber rays on white sand. A man and his dog wandered down the centre of the road.

“We love it here,” Anita went on. “The people are so much nicer. There’s a true sense of community. You don’t find that in Manhattan.”

“Yes, well, it is rather…serene…”

“We like that. We wanted that. It’s nice to raise a family here.”

Anjali reached for the menu. “Is that the wine list? Let me have a look at it.” She flipped through the front section and turned it over. Then turned it back again when she realized there was nothing on the reverse side. “That’s it?”

“That’s all they have. It’s not a fancy wine bar in Manhattan.”

“You don’t have to be a fancy wine bar to have decent wine.”

“There is decent wine.”

Anjali studied the menu closely. She wondered if the Malbec would be too heavy and tannic, as some of the cheaper ones got.

“Thanks for coming ahead and getting the table, by the way.”

“That’s okay. I told you it wouldn’t take long to get a table—forty-five minutes. It’s always like that here. They always say an hour, but it’s never an hour. It’s never over forty-five minutes.”

“I still don’t understand why they don’t take reservations.”

“It’s just the way they do it here.”

“I know, but I’m just saying…it’s quite inconsiderate, expecting people to wait like this.”

“Then you should have gone somewhere else.”

“Where else could we have gone?”

“You didn’t have to come all the way here.”

“But I wanted to come here.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“But I wanted to. I wanted to see you.”

“Since when?”

“I came, didn’t I?”

“Well, this is how things are out here. It’s different from Manhattan.”

“I’m not complaining. I just don’t understand why they can’t take reservations. Who has time on a Tuesday night to wait an hour for a table in the middle of Dyker Heights?”

“Ditmas Park.”

“Whatever.”

“We’re farther north. We’re closer to the city. There’s a lot more going on out here. There’s some really nice places if you go a few blocks over.”

“I bet they’re all cash-only and none take reservations.”

“Well we don’t mind. You put your name down and go for a drink around the corner. They call you on your phone when your table is ready. It’s a tradition. People enjoy it. Things are very laid-back here. It’s not like in Manhattan. The owners used to personally wait at the tables, but not anymore. Now the woman is too old and can’t get around. Her daughter takes care of things.”

“I just think it’s stupid.”

“It’s not. They’re really nice people.”

“Really nice people who are stupid.”

“Okay this is silly. Why are we arguing?”

“We’re not arguing. I was just stating a fact. That everyone here is nice and stupid.”

A waiter came and stood at their table. He took out a notepad and cleared his throat.

Anita had to scoot a little to the left so he wouldn’t bump into her shoulder. “Are you getting a drink?” she asked.

“Yes,” Anjali said. “I must have something to drink. God, I need it. It’s been one long day. I had to go to a really dull birthday party for a coworker before coming here. There was no alcohol. Can you believe it?”

“I meet friends without drinking.”

“Well it was quite unbearable. But she’s a very dear friend of mine and I couldn’t say no. I had to go.”

“So you do go out socially.”

“Not all the time. Sometimes. Only when it’s absolutely necessary. She’d have been very upset if I didn’t go.”

Anita folded the corner of the menu into a small triangle. “I guess we’re just too far out now.”

“It’s not that.”

“We were hoping you’d come for the baby’s rice-ceremony.”

“I really wanted to, but I was traveling.”

“You’re always traveling.”

“I’m here now.”

“But you still haven’t seen the baby.”

“I’ll see the baby.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“This weekend? What are you doing this weekend?”

“I can’t this weekend.”

“Traveling again?”

“I…yes.”

The waiter, who was still standing there, tapped his pen against the notepad.

“Ladies…?” he said.

“Oh. Yes. Wine. I really need wine. Are you having another glass also?” Anjali asked.

“What?”

“Wine.”

“Oh. No. I’ve still got half a glass here.”

“Hmm. Hang on, let me see what you have by the glass.”

“Where do you go?” Anita asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Where do you go when you travel?”

“All over.”

“Anywhere interesting?”

“Well, two months ago, I was in Paris on a conference.”

“That’s nice.”

“Well I hate going to Paris in the winter. The best time to go is in the spring.”

“Do you go there often?”

“At least once a year.”

“You must know a lot of people there.”

“A few.”

“That’s nice,” Anita said. “I’ve met some new people since we moved here too. They all have little babies, so we go to the park together and sit for each other sometimes. We’re lucky to have that because babysitters are so expensive, you know.”

“So,” Anjali asked, “How’s it feel like to be a mom?”

“It’s amazing…I can’t put it into words…”

“That’s wonderful.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re happy?”

“I’m very happy.”

“You look it.”

“Yes. It’s hard, but it’s so satisfying.”

“And what are you doing these days?”

“I just started a new job at the Department of Health.”

“Oh. That’s great news.”

“It’s not quite what I want to do but it’s good for now. It has flexible hours and good benefits. Mark quit his job so he can focus on his writing full-time. We need the benefits. What with the baby.”

Outside, the sound of a store-shutter rattled loudly against the soundless night; the traffic light continued to blink its lonely warning.

“Should we get a bottle?” Anjali asked. “What is it you’re drinking? God! I’d get a headache if I drank that all night. Have something better. You must have something better. Should we get a bottle of the Rioja? Doesn’t seem to be much else to choose from.”

“There’s plenty to choose from.”

“It all looks a bit…”

“A bit what?”

“I’ve just never had any of these before.”

“They’re good wines. This is a good place. It may not be a trendy Soho restaurant, but it’s very good. Few people know of it. But it’s better this way. We don’t want half the city to land up here. There are lots of places like this around. You just have to know them. They don’t advertise.”

“The hidden jewels...”

“Yes. It’s the best around here.”

“Well,” Anjali said, looking at the menu, “I guess I’ll just go for a glass for now. A glass of that,” she pointed at the menu and looked up. “God. Now where did that waiter go?” Hello? Excuse me, over here!”

“Sorry, what were you saying earlier?" Anjali asked.

“What was I saying?”

“That Mark quit his job?”

“Oh yes. Mark quit his job and we moved to the studio because we needed to cut down on our expenses. We decided we could do that now, while the baby was still young. We need to do what’s important for our future.”

“Yes.”

“And this is so important to him.” Anita looked down at the menu. She knew it by heart. She knew that she wanted the cod, which is what she had when she was last there with Mark. But today she just couldn’t justify the thirty-dollar price tag.

“Well that’s what makes a good marriage—when one makes sacrifices for each other,” Anjali said.

“They’re not sacrifices. Really. They’re things I truly want to do—for him. For us. It’s a choice we’ve made.”

“And you’re happy. That’s what’s important.”

“Yes, I’m happy.” She bent the corner of the menu back and forth until a crease had formed along its edge. “Yes. I’m really happy. I don’t mind this, I know it’s just another year. He’d do the same for me.”

“You have a good man in him.”

“Yes. He is. And I’m so thankful that he’s in my life and so happy we’ve made this move. This is the right thing. I feel it.”

“Now where did that waiter go? How long must I wait for just a glass of wine? Hello? Hi, excuse me…”

“Just wait. He’ll come.” Anita played with the menu until the edge tore off and she was left with a little piece in her hand. She folded the little paper in half, then another half again. “I’d like to go to Paris sometime too,” she said.

“What?”

“A holiday. I really need one.”

“You’ll love it.”

“May be I’ll go next winter, when the baby is a bit older. May be Mark will take care of her for a week and I can go on my own.”

“You should.”

“You think so? You think I should go?”

“Why not?”

“How much do you think a ticket will cost?”

“I can’t really say. The company pays for me.”

“You think I can get a cheap ticket? You think it’s safe for me to go stay at a youth hostel by myself?”

“I’m sure you’ll be totally fine. Paris is a very safe place.”

Anita’s face lit up. “I want to buy a pair of shoes when I’m there.”

“You get amazing shoes in Paris.”

“I can’t shop a whole lot but may be one thing. I can treat myself to one good thing.”

“You should.”

“You think so? You think it’s okay that I splurge a little on myself?”

“You should spoil yourself a bit. You deserve it.”

“Sometimes I miss things.”

“Oh look, there’s a waiter. Now if only he’d look this way.”

“Mark thinks I’m too materialistic.”

“It’s not being materialistic to treat yourself every now and then.”

“You think so? Even though it comes out of our savings?”

“Absolutely.”

“Mark wants to go camping and hiking in Colorado. But I’d rather go to Paris.”

“It’s a different kind of fun.”

“I want to go alone.”

“Traveling alone is nice.”

“Yes. I want to go on my own.”

“You should.”

“But I don’t know if we can afford it. It’s not so easy right now, with Mark not working.”

“But this is just for now.”

“Yes. It’s just for now.”

“Things will change.”

“Yes, things will change.”

The room was dark. A single votive flickered on the white linen. The cutlery and plates shone in its reflection. Hot air wafted through from the kitchen.

“This is a charming little place, actually. I’m glad you brought me all the way here.”

“Yes, it’s our favourite.”

“Such a pity about their reservation policy because I would have come back otherwise. If I were ever around here, that is. Oh look—a waiter. Hey, excuse me! Hi, over here. ”

“Don’t shout. He’ll come. Relax.”

“They sure know how to keep someone waiting out here. For a table, for wine. How long does it take for the main course? An hour also?”

“You just have to build the wait time into your evening’s plans.”

“But an hour?”

“Forty-five minutes. It’s never more.”

“But why can’t they take reservations? I still don’t understand.”

“These are just neighbourhood folks that want to have a decent meal now and then. They don’t mind not having reservations. They don’t make plans weeks ahead.”

“What’s wrong with reservations? The rest of the world takes reservations. People are simply too busy to wait around an hour for a meal in Dyker Heights.”

“Ditmas Park.”

“Whatever.”

“Dyker Heights is much farther down. That’s too far. We would never move that far.”

“That is the problem with these restaurants here. They think they can do whatever they like. No reservations. No credit cards. And the worst part is that they can get away with it because the people here have no other choices.”

“Dyker Heights is dull and depressing and far from everything. But it’s not like that here. There are a lot of interesting things happening. We love it here. We go to a place on Cortelyou where there’s live music on Saturday nights.”

“I suppose it’s a different kind of life out here. I suppose once you move here, you don’t really care about things like good food and a proper wine-list. You can show up in your track-pants like that man over there and it’s okay.”

“If they took reservations, it would be booked for a whole week in advance.”

“What’s wrong with that? At least then I’d know when I was going to eat.”

“People can’t plan their lives so far ahead. Things happen. You can’t always make plans. You have to be patient and learn to make adjustments in life.”

“Well, this is why no one else will really bother coming here. This place will always remain what it is—just a half-decent neighbourhood restaurant. Nice enough I suppose, but never amazing. Although, why should I care, it’s really their loss. It’s their problem.”

“It’s your problem.”

“Why are you getting so upset? All I said was that I think this is a great restaurant but their reservation policy is completely stupid. Come on. What restaurant in Manhattan would do this? I can think of only a few and they have very good reason to.”

“What good reason?”

“They’re good.”

“This place is good.”

“Oh come on. This is just a more grown up version of Café Mimi—you remember? That little place on Sixth Avenue we used to go to when you came down for spring breaks? We’d get their cappuccino special, which came with two biscotti, because that’s all we could afford, and sit in the smoking section? You have to admit, this place is like any old joint in Manhattan.”

“Why don’t you just go back to your Manhattan.”

“You’re crying. Why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying.”

“Yes you are. You’re crying.”

“I love this place.”

“It’s a fine place.”

“It’s our favourite.”

“Just with a stupid reservation policy.”

“We’re fine with it. We don’t mind not having the best. We don’t want a front-page review or annoying people from Manhattan making a line out front.”

“But a whole hour.”

“Forty-five minutes.”

“I suppose it’s a small sacrifice to make, in the grander scheme of things. Although it’s not something I have the luxury to do.”

From the corner of her eye, Anjali saw the waiter, cleaning one of the tables. She raised her hand, and this time he saw her. He continued to wipe down the table, picked up the empty glasses and the dirty napkins, deposited them in the kitchen and then made his way to their table all the way at the far left corner. She asked for a glass of the Chianti. He was just about to turn away, but she called him back and said they were ready to order. She got the cod while Anita—the mussels.

Outside, the snow fell harder and covered everything, gathering like rolling sand dunes. Anjali worried about how she would get home. No taxi would take her in this weather. The trains too might have temporarily stopped running.

Inside, Anita felt it was summer. Thoughts festered in her like germs in hot, dank air.

“It’s not a sacrifice, really,” she said again. Then she scooped out a mussel from its shell and put it in her mouth. It wasn’t as good as usual, but perhaps, she thought, they were just too busy in the kitchen today.

Afterwards, Anjali picked up the tab, and they hugged each other goodbye. She watched as the white-capped taxi disappeared into the snowy breath of nightfall.

It was quiet outside. The calm—excruciating.

Mark was babysitting tonight while she was out. He’d said he needed to get back before ten to finish something he was working on. It wasn’t that far to Park Slope, where he was staying at his mother’s. He’d said it was easier this way. But Anita had a strong feeling in her gut that he’d return before Spring.

She had already forgotten her name—Anna, yes, that was it.

About Buku

Buku Sarkar is a Paris based writer/photographer originally from Calcutta and New York. Her collection of stories, Not Quite a Disaster After All, will be available in the US (Flowersong Press) Fall '25. Her first collection of poetry, My Dead Flowers, is forthcoming Dec '25 (Harper Collins India). She co-wrote the screenplay for The Shameless and her first monograph was Photowali Didi (Fallline Press).

My Dead Flowers

Writer /photographer in Paris Books: Not Quite A Disaster, Poetry (Fall '25) |Monograph: Photowali Didi | Screenplay: The Shameless | Works in/at NYRB, n+1, ZYZZYVA, 3penny, Art Basel Miami | P/t Faculty ICP

By Buku Sarkar

Periphery is a publication dedicated to fostering greater understanding and appreciation of Asian cultures and experiences among a global readership. Subscribe to decolonize your reading and discover unique writing you won’t find anywhere else.

Rohan Srinivasan, an emerging voice in contemporary fiction, represents a new generation of writers who seamlessly blend cultural authenticity with universal storytelling. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Rohan has remained rooted in the region that shaped his creative sensibilities, finding inspiration in the diverse communities and landscapes that define Northern California’s cultural tapestry.

At twenty-four, Rohan brings both youthful perspective and artistic maturity to his craft. His academic foundation in film and television production from the University of Southern California has provided him with a unique understanding of narrative structure and visual storytelling, skills that translate powerfully into his prose. This cinematic sensibility, combined with his natural ear for dialogue and character development, distinguishes his writing from his contemporaries.

Rohan’s journey into professional writing began through his participation in the San Francisco Writers Workshop in 2019, where he first shared his short stories with a receptive audience. This pivotal experience provided the catalyst for his most ambitious project: his debut novel An Imagined Life, which he began crafting in early 2020. The novel has commanded his creative attention for the past five years, representing a sustained artistic commitment that speaks to both his dedication and the work’s complexity. During this period, he has maintained his connection to visual storytelling through short screenplays, several of which he has adapted into films.

Drawing from a rich literary palette that includes Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and works by R.K. Narayan, Rohinton Mistry, and Vikram Seth, Rohan gravitates toward narratives that prioritize emotional depth and character complexity. His recent literary influences—including Peter Hedges, John Boyne, Fonda Lee, and Haruki Murakami—suggest an evolving artistic vision that may well inform his future projects.

Beyond his literary pursuits, Rohan finds creative fuel in his eclectic musical tastes, which span from Indian classical music to indie rock. His love for expansive walks and thoughtful conversations reflects a contemplative nature that undoubtedly enriches his writing. Perhaps most telling of his creative process is his absolute requirement for music during writing sessions—a ritual that speaks to his understanding of how different art forms can inspire and enhance one another.

While Rohan is known among his peers for his broad musical knowledge and passion for storytelling, those who know him might be surprised to discover that he cannot begin any writing session without his carefully curated soundtrack playing in the background. This intersection of auditory and literary arts continues to influence his distinctive voice as he prepares to share his debut novel with the world.

You take on some heavy and complex topics in your novel, “An Imagined Life.” Can you discuss what inspired you to explore these themes?

I wish I could say that the range of topics explored in my novel was planned out from the start. But this humongous, complex story came from a place of letting go and allowing my mind to tell me what emotions and ideas I needed to explore. I had ambition for the story’s scope when I began writing, but I never could have predicted that the book would become what it has. I say this especially in regard to the connection built between the two speculative aspects of the novel—the Imagined and the Town. Nostalgia—and the reinterpretation and romanticization of childhood memories—has caused me great comfort and distress, depending on the time of my life I was at. Additionally, the South Asian immigrant community I grew up in has provided me with a solid foundation of values but has also caused me significant confusion as to what the boundaries of culture are. I used to believe that these two volatile pieces of my life always functioned independently of each other before embarking on this novel. By freeing my mind during the writing process, I’ve come to discover how the two work in tandem: the way individual memory reshapes as we get older parallels how collective cultural ideas reform within each successive generation of immigrant communities. It’s wonderful what you can learn about the world and yourself once you summon the courage to leap into the unknown.

How do you balance your artistic integrity with the expectations of the market and the publishing industry?

I have always prioritized artistic integrity above everything else. A huge reason why I decided to self-publish my book was because I knew I needed to take creative control of my story: I could not alter my work to what the industry wanted. My goal in life has always been to be a great artist, and I define that as someone who uses their work to interpret themselves and the world in a way that hasn’t been done before. Focusing on market trends will never let me achieve this. It will never let me fully use my work to tap deeper into my mind and emotions. It might be possible to some degree, but listening to the imaginary opinions of an audience that you have no relationship with will never let you completely sink into your work and use it to better yourself.

Marketing the novel has only further confirmed this belief. I had a vision for who I believed my book would speak to: South Asians between the ages of 18 and 35. Never did I expect that my book would appeal to people of all races and ages, from all over the country. You can never predict who your story will resonate with. You will drive yourself mad if you try to. Your instincts and intuition are the only things that you can always be certain of and are what should ultimately guide your work.

While this is your debut novel, it seems you've always had a taste for stories and storytelling. What drove you to write a novel in particular, and will you be exploring other mediums later?

The novel came as a surprise to me too. Though I used to be a voracious reader, I studied film in college and believed that I would be writing screenplays. However, when I began thinking of the characters and world within An Imagined Life, I knew that the vision I had for this story was too large, too untamed, to be contained within a screenplay. Even if I somehow managed to fit it into a feature-length script, the budget to achieve what I wanted would be astronomical. I needed to tell Akash’s tale immediately—I couldn’t wait for years and years until I could maybe scrounge up enough money. I began this book prioritizing the needs of the story, not aspiring for a career in fiction. I am a storyteller first and will always be open to the medium that best supports what I need to say to the world.

Being an author is a difficult career choice, especially for underrepresented writers. What challenges have you faced, and how did you overcome them? How do you think your unique perspective contributes to the broader literary landscape?

I could write another book—probably of equal length or more—detailing the struggles along this journey. “Difficult” doesn’t quite capture the emotional toll this process has taken on me—personally and professionally.

The hardest challenge has been (and still is) believing in myself, day in and day out. I am lucky to be surrounded by supportive family and friends, but the work of completing the book was incredibly lonely. Coming from a community where barely any pursue an artistic field (and even fewer take the chance on their own art), I struggle to find my way without a mentor who can guide me. I believe that this is a battle all artists have to face at some point in their career. Fighting for one’s lane—taking a bold chance on oneself—is the only way us artists will be able to create projects that are wholeheartedly our own. It is what distinguishes us and our work.

However, self-criticism and humility are equally important traits artists must have in order to improve their work. Finding a balance between self-belief and self-criticism is something I grappled with constantly while writing the novel. Without any previous publications that could prove to me that I would find the end of the road, I truly didn’t know whether I would be able to make it or not. The book is complete, but the mental battle is still ongoing with marketing. Hopefully, I will be able to offer better advice one day on how to overcome this.

Nevertheless, I can confidently say that if I didn’t take the risks that I had, I wouldn’t have produced the version of my book that is now published. This novel comes from years and years of searching within myself—digging into my heart and understanding what matters to me, what confuses me, what motivates me to live. My book is a portal to my innermost thoughts, fears, and flaws. Whether this perspective adds to the literary landscape or not is up to the readers. But I have done my job, and I have done it with as much individuality as possible.

What do you hope your book will leave your readers with when they read it?

After publishing the book and receiving feedback from readers, I’ve realized that everyone relates to something different within the story. Some love a specific section or scene, some resonate with the larger cultural understandings at play, and some are simply touched by a character arc. The book weaves together a complex tapestry of themes, symbols, and plots, so I’m not surprised that I’ve had such varied responses. I can’t predict what readers will connect with, but I hope some aspect of the story reaches their heart. I hope it makes them view life a little differently, helps them empathize with someone they didn’t think they could feel for, or even provides them an emotional release they didn’t know they needed. I hope the story saves them even a fraction of how it has saved me.

I wonder if you could share about your experience of traveling around to promote your book? The highs/lows, takeaways, what you would do differently, and if you have any advice for new authors who might be considering selling their books in person.

I am now over halfway done with my tour, and I’ve had the great privilege of visiting many cities—Austin, Seattle, Chicago, and Boston, to name a few. I don’t take this experience for granted and consider myself lucky to have met such a diverse range of readers. Though there are of course moments of loneliness that come with traveling, the tour has been a much needed break from the solitude of writing. I definitely feel rejuvenated to get back to my desk once my travels wrap up.

A lot of event prep comes from experience. I try to refine my setup, pitch, and presentation before each stop based on how the previous engagements were. One recommendation I would give to other authors: Make sure your pitch is bulletproof. Each sentence needs to engage, be easy to follow, and keep high stakes/tension. Confidence goes a long way when selling—readers will only take a chance on your work when they see you’re selling a story you believe in.

Can you tell us about your future projects?

One of the most exciting parts of finishing my novel was freeing up my brain to allow for new characters, worlds, and story ideas. Every day, thoughts about my next project bounce around my head. I have the beginning ideas for my sophomore novel—the same amount that I had before I began An Imagined Life—but I also know that I have to be realistic with my career. Having gone through this five-year process, I am very familiar with the effort and sacrifice needed to see a book through. I hope to continue creating for the public (I will always write for myself), but it depends on how this novel does. If the world decides it wants more of my writing, I promise that I will do everything in my power to push myself with my work. I will dedicate myself to my future projects—dreaming bigger than I already have and not stopping until I’ve reached my full potential as an artist. Life is limitless, and I hope to discover as much about it as I possibly can through my work. So, readers, all I can say for now is let’s see where this journey takes me! I am just as curious as you may be.

To stay up to date with all Rohan is doing, follow him on his website or Instagram.

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Joanne Yi, a thoughtful and introspective voice in contemporary literature, brings a unique perspective shaped by her multicultural upbringing and diverse experiences. Born and raised in the sun-drenched landscapes of Southern California, Joanne’s journey has taken her throughout the serene neighborhoods of Orange County, with a few years spent in San Diego during her university studies. Having returned to her birthplace of Los Angeles, she has settled into the city’s creative rhythm, embracing it as her home.

Joanne’s path to professional writing reflects her multifaceted interests and intellectual curiosity. With an academic foundation in human development and psychology, she briefly ventured into culinary arts before discovering her true calling as a writer. This winding journey culminated in her pursuit of an MFA in creative writing, where she completed her first novel and honed her editorial skills as a fiction editor for her program’s literary magazine. Her experiences as a judge for writing competitions, an editor for literary magazines, and stints in journalism have provided valuable stepping stones toward her ultimate goal of becoming a full-time fiction writer.

Drawing inspiration from authors who fearlessly explore the depths of human emotion, including Joan Didion, Pik-Shuen Fung, Ocean Vuong, and Kathleen Glasgow, Joanne strives to create narratives that are raw, vulnerable, and honest in their examination of grief, pain, and the complexities of human existence.

Beyond her literary pursuits, Joanne finds solace in baking, an activity that, much like reading and writing, offers her a personal escape from the demands of everyday life. She shares her home with her husband—whom she met after resigning herself to a life of solitude—and their beloved Supermutt, Lumo, who keeps her company during writing sessions. Together, the couple indulges their shared passion for horror films, always searching for their next favorite.

While those who know Joanne recognize her as a quintessential introvert, few might realize that English was not her first language—she spoke only Korean at home until second grade. This linguistic journey, along with her profound appreciation for emotional Korean dramas, continues to influence her distinctive literary voice as she carves her place in the world of contemporary fiction.

You take on some heavy topics in your novel. Can you discuss what inspired you to write about these themes?

Soon after I graduated from college, my father was diagnosed with ALS. Over seven years, he lost the function of his limbs, the ability to speak and eat, and the strength to breathe independently. Following a spate of emergencies, he was admitted to a care facility, where he passed away suddenly and alone. Anticipatory grief did not prepare me in the least. I simultaneously knew and rejected the facts of his prognosis for a long time.

I’ve spent most of my adulthood trying to find the right words. What I’ve learned is that there are none, really, to articulate a loved one’s slow and inevitable deterioration. My forthcoming novel, All the Tomorrows After, is shaped by our journey, which began in the absence of hope and continues in the absence of a farewell. It is inspired by my father, his battle to maintain his identity, and our family’s experiences as caregivers. It is a reflection of myself as a young adult navigating grief, guilt, and isolation.

How do you balance your artistic integrity with the expectations of the market and publishing industry?

I am still trying to figure out this balance as a debut author. I can’t deny that building a career as an author involves the ability to sell books. As with most things, the industry cycles through trends with popular genres, themes, and tropes. This brings on a level of pressure, and the question of whether I am writing the “right” kind of book at the “right” time.

While I don’t have the answers yet, I do try to stay true to the why of each project. Why am I writing this story? What is my mission? I also prescribe to the common practice of writing what I want to read. The novels I love and return to over time tend to be written with authenticity, while still employing strong characters and engaging plots. These are elements I aspire to in my own work.

Can you share more about what drives you as an artist?

The authors that leave a lasting impact on me are those who explore universal truths through their unique lenses. Stories on the human condition, loss, healing, mental health, intergenerational trauma, and so much more. Stories that touch, educate, and prompt reflection through their transparency.

In a similar sense, one of my goals is to put my voice to paper, in the hopes that it will reach and move its audience in some small way. Though reading and writing are often solitary and personal journeys, they also revolve around connection. Whether we deliver or receive the words, we are being seen and heard to a degree. A certain catharsis exists in that. It is also a gift, I think, to discover this kinship amidst all our different walks of life.

Being an author is a difficult career choice, especially for underrepresented writers. What challenges have you faced and how did you overcome them? How do you think your unique perspective contributes to the broader literary landscape?

Regarding All the Tomorrows After in particular, my experiences have been lovely thus far. I have the honor of working with some truly special people who immediately shared my vision for this story. They have provided a wealth of wisdom, guidance, and support over the months. I do not take this for granted and am so grateful.

Like many writers, I have faced rejections and a range of feedback on my shorter fiction, running from very constructive to disheartening. Some revolved around my stories being too specific to my heritage and impossible to relate to. On the contrary, I’ve also been questioned why, as an Asian-American woman, I do not explore identity issues deeply enough.

While critique is subjective and can be contradictory to various degrees, it still isn’t easy, of course, to receive invalidating comments. I can’t say there has been a set approach to overcoming these challenges. At the risk of sounding corny, I’ve continued to write what I believe in.

As a daughter of Korean immigrants, I still have so much to explore within the history and culture I have inherited, in addition to my personal journey through grief, healing, and chronic pain. I hope these stories from my small corner contribute in some way.

While this is your debut novel, you’ve been in the writing industry for many years now. How would you say your writing has evolved and how do you keep yourself growing as a writer?

I believe unearthing and gaining trust in my voice has played a large role in growth, along with better understanding the types of stories I want to write. I have learned that there is strength in vulnerability, and that stepping past my own barriers, however terrifying, is worthwhile. As with everything, it is an ongoing discovery, and my voice and style will likely continue to evolve in the years to come.

Since this path is often nonlinear, it’s difficult at times to see tangible progress. But I do try to learn from past obstacles, which run the gamut from self-doubt and creative blocks, to difficulties with plotting and pacing. It may go without saying, but I also find that reading, and exposure in general, is essential to pushing past the boundaries.

What do you hope your novel will contribute to the ongoing conversation about diversity and representation in literature, particularly in terms of Asian-American voices?

As a Korean-American with a more traditional upbringing, I’ve long observed a culture of silence surrounding such topics as grief, mental health, and trauma. Intentional communication on these matters has not come easily, due to the general stigma that often accompanies them. I don’t imagine this to be uncommon.

All the Tomorrows After revolves around a protagonist who is firmly both Korean and American like myself, and whose trials and gradual self-discovery inform much of her perspective. While I am not certain exactly how this book might contribute to the broader conversation, I do hope it will speak to the validity of these struggles. To openly address the inevitable challenges that come with existence is not shameful, nor is it something to fear. I am still learning this as well.

Tell us a little about your upcoming book and why you wrote it.

All the Tomorrows After follows a Korean-American teen dreaming of escape who agrees to spend time with her estranged father in exchange for payment. When she discovers a secret her father has been keeping from her, she begins to question everything: her conviction to disappear, her future with the boy she didn’t plan to fall in love with, and what it really means to be family.

This story is a close exploration of grief, rage, first love, found family, forgiveness, and difficult intergenerational relationships. It is heavily influenced by my grief journey and heritage, as elaborated on in an earlier question.

I have learned over the years how invasive and isolating grief can be. I imagine many traversing their own journeys might feel similarly. All the Tomorrows After was born of a desire to understand the enduring shadow of loss and to seek the light in the broken, however elusive it may feel.

I have long found homes in the honest and intimate words of authors I admire. It would be an honor if this story, too, were to touch readers in any way. Above all, I am grateful for the opportunity to share it.

All the Tomorrows After is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster / Atheneum on August 19, 2025, available wherever books are sold.

To stay up to date with all Joanne is doing, follow her on her website or Instagram.

Periphery is 100% reader-funded. Your paid subscription literally runs this publication. Consider supporting this publication through a subscription or a one time donation.

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Announcements

• Don’t forget to get your entries in for Periphery’s current submission period (deadline June 30)! Theme: desert. Submission guidelines.

• ’s DEBUT NOVEL, The Lights of Shantinagar is coming out next week on June 5, 2025!
  
  Aspiring quantum physicist Sumi is newly married and has moved into her husband’s family home. Here she observes that the beguilingly tranquil middle-class town of Shantinagar is not very different from her beloved quantum world: the happenings in one house are cryptically entangled with things next door, objects mysteriously disappear and unexpected interactions reveal surprising truths.
  

  As the line between right and wrong begins to blur, new discoveries force the residents of Shantinagar to reflect on what they truly know about themselves and the ones they love. Meanwhile, Sumi must blend logic with love to make sense of her new circumstances.
  

  The Lights of Shantinagar is a warm and lively portrait of family life set in modern India where new philosophies are reshaping old traditions and one woman’s astute observations can change everything.
  
  Preorder Nidhi’s book here.

Do you have news you’d like included in next month’s issue? Email me at tiffany (at) peripherylit (dot) org by June 20, 2025.

This issue of “From the Margins” is brought to you of Silent No More.

I’ve been an advocate for others since I can remember from childhood through my teen years.

After graduating high school, I became politically active, lobbying on Capitol Hill, participating in forums, marching in demonstrations, and writing opinion pieces for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

In the early ’80s, my activism turned to one-on-one support as a volunteer for the local rape crisis center. In the latter part, my world turned upside down and I began the long journey of addressing my childhood abuse.

Since the ’90s on, music would become the focus of my activism as I brought original songs and written performance pieces to vigils for victims’ rights, asylum seekers, and candlelight memorials for the Students of Tiananmen Square.

I’m multi-racial, half Canadian French (father) and half Asian (mother). I strongly identify with my Asian roots, even as I was raised to be white and suppress the Asian in me under my father’s best efforts.

I’m so grateful to Tiffany Chu for giving me this opportunity to immerse myself in strong Asian voices this month.

Each one of these Substack writers speaks to a part of who I am—activist, healer, artist. They are all powerful.

Stop Fixing Yourself. You’re Not a Problem to Solve

— writes Another Shot at Life

As a survivor of childhood grooming and sex abuse, the healing journey is central to my life. It’s the path I have walked to reclaim my identity and my voice. Akanksha writes about the healing journey. Her voice is compassionate, her insights invaluable.

In “Stop Fixing Yourself. You’re Not a Problem to Solve.”, she writes:

Most importantly, you don’t need to ‘fix’ yourself to deserve love and acceptance.

Move forward with curiosity about who you become—rather than fear about who you’re not. And watch your confidence soar.

This hit home, because in my healing, I’ve had to disentangle the deeply embedded message that I’m inherently flawed. So, for a long time, growing for me has meant fixing that. This article reminds me that it’s not about fixing but moving forward, with curiosity and kindness, closer to what and who I am becoming.

Akanksha brings this empowering perspective to all her writing.

Another Shot at Life

Your space to quit self-doubt, unlearn toxic conditioning and heal—without drowning in the process.

By Akanksha Priyadarshini

The Angry Daughter

— writes Ask the Patient

Dr Zha is a primary care doctor who serves marginalized communities. She is a primary care physician and advocate for her patients. She writes about social justice, medical ethics/racism/misogyny, and reproductive rights. Oh, and she’s a children’s author. Her newly released book, Why We Eat Fried Peanuts, is about her great grandmother, “the most important ancestor without a name.”

The phrase, “most important ancestor without a name” went straight to my heart on so many levels.

An essay that deeply touched me is The Angry Daughter, where she connects with the daughter of a patient who was an immigrant to the US.

“What did you say?” Lynn asked, her guard still up.

I met her gaze. “My parents don’t speak English either,” I said. “And if I ever feared they weren’t treated fairly, I’d do exactly the same.”

Lynn’s shoulders loosened. The fire in her eyes was not extinguished, but tempered by something else—recognition. She waited for the “but.” It never came. Because this wasn’t the prelude to an excuse. It was a truth laid bare.

A silent pact between two daughters who refuse to let their parents be overlooked.

What I love about Dr Zed Zha’s writing is that she puts so much of herself into each telling without getting in the way of the story. It amplifies the story, making it both personal and universal.

She is present as a writer. I can imagine how present she is with her patients.

Ask The Patient by Dr. Zed Zha

A love letter from a doctor (and human) that gives patients their voice back.

By Zed Zha, MD (she/her)

A Tyrant can’t fix your dating crises. You can.

— writes Huey Li and the News

Sometimes, things are so bad you have to laugh, and sometimes, you need a little help. Huey Li helps.

Let me give you a few examples from his essay/podcast episode, A tyrant can't fix your dating crises. You can.

“I’m not a dating expert, but I have some advice that I can guarantee will help you. You won’t believe how simple and costless they are.

Firstly, do the fucking dishes! Put it in your Tinder profile! I do dishes! Capitalized, OK?”

And this one:

You want to flirt? Stop sharing your stupid dickpics. Nobody gives a fuck about your private parts. Send something you just cooked. Dishpics, not dickpics. Get it?”

Then this one:

I read this article on Substack. The author is not a hardcore MAGA guy. He’s definitely well-read because he has a way bigger vocabulary than I do. I needed a dictionary to read that shit. But you know, nerds can be incels too. That guy’s basic argument was that feminism will kill “civilization” because straight men will lose their motivation to work.

Wow. If men are that fragile, maybe they should be replaced by AI. Like, get it over with. You know what I mean?

Huey Li writes about economy, politics and political science, and also just life. He does it with expertise, clarity and humor, and if he can’t do it with humor, he’ll stab it with all due sarcasm that’s quite satisfying.

Huey Li and The News

Jargon-free videos on politics and political science

What Was the China Doll?

— writes Half-Caste Woman

For most of American media history, what little there was of Asian representation reflected the bigotry and biases of the larger culture, blending diverse Asian cultures into two-dimensional stereotypes, one-size-fits-all.

Only recently is it beginning to change appreciably. Hopefully, it will forge on through today’s anti-diversity sentiments and decrees.

Katie Gee Salisbury, author of Not Your China Doll, a biography about Anna Mae Wong, is an amazing historian, researcher, and writer.

In What Was the China Doll?, she writes:

I came up with the title Not Your China Doll before I’d ever written a word of the book itself… I liked turning the idea of the China doll on its head, a stereotype that Anna May Wong was so often made to play, and remolding it into a statement of defiance. No, I will not play your China doll anymore. Because I have thoughts and dreams and a voice. I will not be bound by the fantasy you project onto me.

She weaves part of her story into her writings about other people, her perspective, what brought her to asking the questions she asks. I feel like I’m listening to a personal conversation with a well educated and empathic friend when I read her work.

Turning stereotypes on their heads, humanizing the people hidden behind them, and helping to see your own self clearer is the magic and prose of “Half-Caste Woman”.

Half-Caste Woman

the life and times of Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star, from the author of NOT YOUR CHINA DOLL

By Katie Gee Salisbury

Chinese woman detained by US border patrol dies by suicide

— writes The Rebel Yellow

This newsletter is like a newsfeed of information. In the “About” section, they write:

We are a pioneering newsletter dedicated to amplifying Asian American stories. From community issues to global events, Rebel Yellow dives deep into the stories that matter to Asian Americans.

Within the essays the author(s) provide links to where they sourced their information. I appreciate that. I prefer essays that link to resources, where appropriate, but because the author(s) are anonymous, these links are even more important to me.

The opening introduction in The Rebel Yellow – Issue #53 shows the content covered in this issue.

A Chinese woman dies by suicide in U.S. border patrol custody — and Rep. Jayapal says “there’s no excuse.” The U.S. quietly bans romantic ties between diplomats and Chinese citizens, while Southeast Asia scrambles to respond to Trump’s tariff war. Plus: Myanmar turns to China after a deadly quake, and Gabbard drops climate change from the U.S. threat report.

Also inside: Miyazaki’s legacy meets AI art, a Black samurai sparks gaming’s latest culture war, and Japan’s royal family logs on to YouTube.

I like having “Rebel Yellow” as part of my news intake. It’s easy to have our community overlooked in legacy, or mainstream, and much of independent, media. Nice to have this information in one place.

The Rebel Yellow

Stories and insights that matter to Asian Americans.

Korean Table Manners

— writes Everything About Korea

I found out, courtesy of Ancestry.com, the family story I was raised on, that I was Chinese-Not-Japanese (all one word) was incorrect.

Not only am I, indeed, Japanese in addition to being Chinese, I’m also Korean. While I ran away to China in my mind, where I believed I had family, when I was being abused, and while I had memories of my time in Japan when I was very young and a deep heart connection there, I knew nothing about Korea.

I was delighted to find this publication by La Seoulite, a friendly introduction to Korean culture. His writing is conversational and informative.

In Korean Table Manners:

One of the biggest cultural shocks—an unmitigated shock—came when I learned that a son-in-law could call his wife’s father by his first name. To any Korean, this is unthinkable. For those of you who may be dating a Korean (or Asian) boyfriend or girlfriend, you would do well to remember this.

This practice may be shared by different Asian cultures, but other practices are not. He, also, goes on to state that:

Unlike Japan and China, you’re not supposed to hold the rice (or soup) bowl in your hand close to your mouth. In the old days of Joseon up until a few decades ago, that was how street beggars ate, and you obviously don’t want to replicate that.

La Seoulite also posts videos of Korean music and art. I love the personal guide and story-telling way to learn about Korea.

Everything about Korea

History, People, (Pop) Culture, Politics, Food, Travel, Language, & Bizarre Stories of South Korea

By LA Seoulite

“Refugee” for (white) me, but not for (brown and black) thee

— writes Katie Phang

I lean toward discovering smaller or relatively unknown creatives, writers, and activists, because they are an essential part of the wealth of American Asian diversity, perspective and voice.

Katie Phang is neither small or unknown. She’s a well-known and respected legal analyst who recently left MSNBC. But I still picked her as part of this my recommendations, because she is someone I would have loved to have looked up to when I was growing up.

She’s a nod to my inner child.

Most of Katie Phang’s work is in videos, but she does write a few essays on her Substack. Refugee for (white) me, but not for (brown and black) thee is one. She writes:

[W]hile the doors to America have been decidedly slammed shut to true refugees who are attempting to escape persecution in their home countries, this Trump Administration is tripping over itself in its haste to roll out the red carpet for white Afrikaners.

Katie Phang is a brilliant legal analyst. She’s witty, funny, and articulate. She’s also practicing law again as a form of her advocacy for democracy as she continues to serve as a legal analyst.

I’m entering my 70’s this year, but she can still be someone I can look up to, maybe not to be like her, but to be like me with the same excellence and passion she holds for herself.

Katie Phang

Law and Disorder

This issue of Periphery features was curated by of Silent No More. Thank you, Demian! If you enjoyed these picks, be sure to subscribe to her Substack.

Silent No More

Silent No More: Pro-Democracy 🇺🇸 /Personal Healing 🦋/Creative Expression ✍️/and Song 🎶

By Demian Elaine' Yumei

A very warm welcome to the newest additions to the Periphery Directory!

and .

Glad to have you all in this growing community.

To join the directory, you can fill out the form here.

By — Miró Justad

I wonder what it would mean to uncover the secrets of my mother and lay them out on the table under a warm light on a cold spring evening. For this reckoning, I desire solitude. When the stories come to life and their iridescent words soar across the oak table so quickly, I can scarcely claim their meaning. I need to hear nothing but the passage of cars whirring back and forth outside, spacecrafts embarking on their own risky endeavors.

In an attempt to contend with my ancestors, I dig through spectral bins of archives that elude me just as I grab hold; my youth was filled with dark hints in passing and the eerie suppression of silence with noise. I inherited a whole choir of whispers passed down from mother to daughter, to mother to daughter. Even the history of the war still carries a peculiar non-ending in our collective minds; a veil not only dividing a country into two ghastly halves, but also suffusing countless people with the necessary survival technique of not examining the past. Instead, we tend to our hidden wounds by sharing richly spiced soup made originally for, and by, peasants to align with fiery spirits and to assuage homesickness.

My therapist told me that we spend the second half of our lives decoding what we intrinsically accepted from our guardians during the first half of our entangled childhoods. I understand this, and also, I want to peacefully convene with the ghosts on this particularly gloomy night in a straightforward fashion—defying the cyclical nature of healing. It is the final full moon of spring after all, and they are calling it the Flower Moon. Korea, as a psychological space for me, conjures up images of peonies, abject terror, and tough grit; a powerful concoction to make one feel uneasy but to never fully understand why. Once I stood with my mother on our chipped red porch in Seattle, steaming from a bath in the sharp cleansing air, and she revealed a secret. Her voice was directed out towards the street and less at me as she told me that her sister overdosed during a full moon, so whenever one rose into the sky, she thought of her. Those few words were the closest we came to discussing her grief.

The unheeded calls of the dead are meant to bloom in their own time, picked up by the hands of a child in a land separated by a long bumpy plane ride from the place which both defines part of their identity, and is also foreign to them. I make tea, something herbal and good for digestion, and lean over my laptop, asking myself these unanswerable questions which live on in my body; a luggage bag of desires which I keep from myself, adding small tokens of unknowing over to the years. Outside, the sky darkens and I walk around my kitchen, turning on more lights. I want science, data, facts, and bullet points to comfort me through this process, but those measurements of truth can only help me scavenge the shallow end of the human experience that comes from reducing the universe into manageable plots of land to be extracted from and observed. I’ll never find a clear record of what I was not told, and yet, I live with the burden of their riddles nonetheless.

When I visited Busan with a friend, we ate at a small seafood restaurant on the second story of a building which looked out at a shoreline disappearing into blackness. We had pan fried fish and pickled side dishes together and took small sips of soju as we clanked our metal chopsticks. The middle-aged Korean woman with a short bob brought out our Kimchi jjigae soup. It was sour and made with a single block of tofu bubbling in the center. I questioned if my mother had ever eaten soup in Busan before she was torn from her home country, but I already knew that, of course, she had. I was enveloped in the aromatics of a woman who I missed more than I could say, and who had also missed someone more than she had been able to express to me.

We had traveled to this region of Korea to visit the town where my friend’s biological mother had given birth to her. We took the train out of Busan and to the industrial yet beautiful town of Ulsan where icy aqua waves swelled and crashed into large black rocks that jutted upwards towards the sun. The hospital where she had been born was long gone, so instead of visiting some address mapped out on our phones, we walked along the coast. Our hair whipping our faces violently and our laughter dying upon the whistling wind brought us closer to the truth than staring at an old concrete building trying to find meaning from its unfamiliar walls.

We do the best that we can with the luggage that is handed to us at birth and learn how to live with stories which aren’t our own, but still inform the flavor of our food and the way we hear a song. The aspirations and unfulfilled longings of my mother are threads of her spirit I had assumed left this earth with her dying breath. And yet, as I grow older, I recognize these parts of her live on in my gut, generating inspiration, love, and grief; I am a palimpsest of her mother and her grandmother and of a country that has always been fighting under the crushing fist of external powers and internal ruptures.

Tonight, writing this is my way of reaching out to that choir of whispers and letting them know I do hear them even if I cannot understand them. I do not have the ability to disrupt the cycle of their silences, but I can start to reconcile—grant them the agency of remaining unknown and also present, and find tenderness in the fact that I am never truly alone—even on this peculiar evening in my home under the moon which grows above the descending clouds.

About Miró

Miró Justad is a Korean American writer, director, photographer, and musician based in Los Angeles. Her writing has been published in numerous independent outlets, and she works on visual projects with musicians. Currently, she is learning about healing bodywork.

Miró Justad

korean american writer artist amateur cook avid reader interested in holistic healing based in LA 🐓🌻🐠

Want to write for us?

We are currently open for submissions based on the theme desert.

The deadline is being extended to June 30, 2025.

Full guidelines here.

By — About everything and nothing

That night, again he came into my dream. His crimson dhoti looked more orange in the yellow light in my room. He wore a matching garnet necklace that went all the way down to his belly and a fine line of shimmer down his trunk, so fine, you’d almost miss it, except, you wouldn’t. From somewhere within the many folds of his dhoti, Moushak leapt out and ran into my bedroom, his nails scurrying on my marble, setting my teeth on edge.

Ganeshji looked around my room. His eyes rested briefly on the bowl of now-cold dal-chawal on my desk before looking away.

From another fold of his dhoti, he pulled out a pen and offered it to me. It was a fountain pen, exactly like the one Amit had given me that evening, except it was light grey instead of turquoise and the phoenix was black. The nib was pristine and perfectly round.

“It’s a magic pen,” he said. His voice was soft but came with surround-sound effects.

“Does it write well?” I asked. I met new pens with a mix of excitement and scepticism.

“Like butter. You’ll have trouble stopping.”

I scribbled my signature on the last page of my notebook. He wasn’t exaggerating. It was smooth. Probably the smoothest pen I had ever held between my fingers. The scribbles flowed and flowed, almost on their own, pulling my hand along to keep up.

He waddled over to my dining table and examined the fruit tray. He carried his ample figure with grace, his anklets jingling shyly. He threw the rotting banana in the bin, proceeded to open the fridge and found the mithai dabba. There was a half-eaten besan laddoo. A baby cockroach climbed out of the box.

“Thank you,” I said. “I needed something like this. Maybe this will unlock my words.”

“It will. You can write forever with this, the ink won’t run out…” He sniffed the laddoo, inspected it from all sides and put it in his mouth gingerly.

“Ever?”

“Mmm…hmmm.” The laddoo must’ve melted on this tongue, sealing his mouth from the inside.

“Magical indeed,” I said. I drew wavy lines in my notebook.

“That’s not the magic though,” he said. He walked over and lowered himself onto the bed beside me. He hesitated before adding, “It has an eraser.”

I looked at the top, bottom, inside the cap, no eraser.

“It’s invisible,” he said. “And erases the good bits.”

I looked at him. He did not make eye contact.

“I can write them again?” I offered. It was a good pen. I wanted to keep it.

“It will erase them again…anything that reads well, and leave the rest on the page.”

“So I’ll be left with reams of mediocre writing?”

He nodded without looking at me. 

“And that helps me how?” I didn’t bother hiding my irritation.

“You wanted to write...”

“Yes, and I want to write well, stuff that people will want to read. They won’t be able to read what they don’t see unfortunately. Some of us are mere mortals here.”

He stared at his feet. They were pedicured. It was a deep maroon, the colour of red wine on a sunny winter afternoon. Like my Lakme Fearless. In fact, it was Fearless.

His face fell, then brightened again. “I can tweak it, you will write well, but not so many words. Will that be better?”

“That’s what I do right now, thank you very much.”

His face fell. “Sorry, this is all I have.”

He rose with a sigh and summoned Moushak with a squeak. Moushak came out of my bedroom, a large cockroach in its mouth.

“I don’t bring meat in the house,” he said, getting defensive, “But he’s allowed outside.”

I dismissed it, grateful for the free pest-control. Moushak climbed into a fold of his dhoti.

I gave him the pen back. Ganeshji cast a last look around my room and stepped out of the window. I followed him to see where he went. There was no sign, except for an orange sari drying on the balcony below mine.

***

I could tell if Amit had had a bad day by the number of questions he shot at me about mine. Here we were, at Cinnamon, another café we hadn’t tried before, him asking me, again, how I planned to finish my draft if I spent all my time editing other people’s work. The real problem, of course, was his own soul-crushing job and his boss, who refused to acknowledge his existence. There was an opening in the Mumbai team that he wanted to apply for without her knowing.

“Why don’t you just tell her?” I asked.

“And face her wrath?”

“She’ll find out anyway, sooner or later,” I said. “She might appreciate the honesty and maybe she’ll appreciate you more.”

“That’s not how corporate world works,” he said. “I need to negotiate the package before she gets to know. Plus I don’t really want to leave you. Who will keep track of yours words?”

He meant it helpfully, like a mentor. But I couldn’t remember the last time I had put in even one hundred, let alone five hundred a day, a magic number that he had stumbled upon somewhere on the internet in his research for writing advice.

The problem was not what to write. I had the idea. It was a nebulous one, but it was there. The protagonist is faced with impossible choices. She is in love with her drunk maths professor. She can either go for her PhD and become a professor like him, or stay back and marry him. She cannot have both. She wants the clean-cut world of theoretical maths, but not without him. She wants him, but her mind will implode without the maths. She digs herself so deep into this pit of what-ifs that she can no longer see the things in front of her. There was a whole book in this idea, but I just couldn’t make a headway into the opening scene. Once in a while a good line would pop in my head and I would put it on paper, which was about as effective as buying a duster to clean the house.

“Plus it will take you a while to join me there,” meanwhile Amit was going on.

It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. We had been together for four years now. The thrill of him picking me up from my office in Gurgaon and driving all the way to Rajouri Garden was beginning to wane and we were running out of things to talk on phone about for the hour it took him to get his own room in Noida. He never forgot a birthday or an anniversary, discovered new cafes for us to explore, listened while I whined about the self-important writers I worked with. There was not a new pen in the market that he had not gifted me.

But his constant nagging colored everything a flaccid grey. I wanted to tell him that I looked forward to going to bed these days, to meeting Ganeshji, but I knew he wouldn’t get it, he’d ask what was the point of it, it was just a dream, that I should not waste time on things that are not there. So I said nothing about it. Nor about the fact that I still hadn’t broached the subject of a transfer to Mumbai with my boss.

That night, Ganeshji came in a beige dhoti. He was missing his earlier ebullience. He waddled over to my fridge while Moushak headed straight to my room.

He pursed his lips at what was in the fridge, which was foul smelling milk and the end slices of bread. He walked past the dining table and over to my window sill to inspect a plushie of himself, another not-so-subtle gift from Amit. But even the god of beginnings had not been able to help me with the beginning of my novel. He studied his ow replica, flicked off the dust with a finger, slowing down he felt around the belly.

“Do you think this is a realistic rendering?” He looked at me earnestly, urgently.

I saw him sucking his belly in, ever so slightly.

“No way,” I said, waving his worry away. “It’s a plushie, it’s meant to be soft and cuddly.”

He wasn’t convinced. He then walked over to my nail paint collection. He examined all the bottles and started sorting them, keeping the dry ones on one side. To the slightly thickening ones, he added a bit of remover and shook them. He picked Mustard Master and came over to where I was and lowered himself onto the bed.

“Could I…?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. It matched his dhoti perfectly.

“I have something for you too,” he said. He handed me a pair of brown shades. “Wear them and all good things happen to you.”

There was no brand, no fancy case, but the shape was decent. It sounded too good to be true.

“But…?”

“You won’t remember any of it,” he said apologetically.

“You mean, I’ll be happy in the moment, but later when I try to recall it…” I went on, hoping he’d run with it.

He didn’t elaborate.

“I won’t remember it?”

He nodded emphatically, approving of my grasp of the deal at hand.

“So what will I remember? Nothing?” Was he offering to erase memory altogether? Or time?

“Everything,” he mumbled, “except the good parts.”

“Meaning I’ll be left with a stack of bad memories?” Best to confirm.

He lowered his head, trunk cradled in his hands.

“This is exactly like that pen, you just changed words to memories. You think we are idiots, or what?”

“You’ll live a good life. Just that you won’t remember it. It’s not a bad deal, would you at least consider it?”

Like a sasta door-to-door salesman who knows his products are third class, he persisted without hope. “I can tweak it if you’re not happy with it. Would you rather have bad stuff happen and not remember it?”

“Why does everything you come up with have to be like this?” I almost shrieked.

He shrugged. “That’s just how it is.”

He looked so despondent that I offered him a zero-sugar protein bar from my bag. He read the ingredients and didn’t look sure. I broke off a little piece and asked him to try it, just to taste. He obliged me, but politely refused the rest of it.

***

Amit accepted the transfer, although it wasn’t an attractive offer. All day, everyone at work kept congratulating him and he kept getting irritated. We were in a café called Coffee and Conversations. Their coffee was bitter and our conversation was not turning out to be very different. I tried asking when he would go, where they would put him temporarily, but any talk of Mumbai only made him more cross.

Instead, he started off. When was I going to ask my boss about moving to Mumbai? What was my word count looking like? What was I doing with a 20 rupee no-name ball-point pen, where was the fountain pen he gave me last week? When I told him I dropped it and dented the nib, he lost it.

He said I didn’t value anything he gave me, anything he did for me. It wasn’t the things, it was him that I didn’t like. He had asked for this transfer so he could earn more, so I could write, but it was not going to work if I didn’t do my share, was it?

I said this was not so, that I did appreciate him, his gifts and gestures, that I enjoyed editing, helping writers polish their work. Mumbai had never been my idea, but he had my support.

That made him all the more livid. For the first time in four years, he said he wouldn’t be able to drop me home today. He needed to go back to work on his handover. I said it was no problem, at which he banged his cup of unfinished coffee on the saucer, paid for both of us and stormed out.

He stormed back in to say that he would drop by on Sunday to collect all these things at my place, including all the pens he had given me. In fact, not just pens, all gifts, ever.

I sat there, caressing my bitter drink. The curtains were light blue sheer. They blew wistfully to the instrumental music. This was as idyllic as things could get. I took the poor, maligned ball-point pen and started scribbling on my napkin. When mine filled up, I wrote on Amit’s.

One of the waiters cleared my table and quietly left a stack of fresh napkins for me. From the corner of my eye, I thought I spotted Mustard Master on his fingernails, but I dared not take my eyes off my writing. I wrote without reading, without even thinking of what I was writing, only focusing on letting my brain talk to my hand. It felt good to see my fingers move that way. I wrote about Ganeshji’s spurious deals, about how I hadn’t seen the resident cockroach family in the last few days, about overpriced coffee, about how it might be a good thing for Amit and me to be apart for some time.

I ordered a vanilla shake and wrote about my protagonist as she visualised her life as a probability tree and followed one branch of it, where she was the professor’s wife. She watched herself making his home as he went to teach, his sonorous theorems echoing in classrooms far, far away, farther than they used to be, the distance between them growing more than she liked, she following him to college to prove a theorem of her own and finding she was correct, when was she not, him looking wistfully at a professor in a grey sari, sitting with her back to the maths department entrance, a very familiar grey sari, too familiar, her own grey sari.

The protagonist tiptoes in and around the big, round table to catch this sari-stealing professor’s face, but she needn’t have bothered for the professor turns to face her and she finds herself looking at herself from the branch of the probability tree, a logical impossiblity.

I wrote till my fingers hurt. It was good stuff. There was more that needed to be written about math metaphors and life conundrums. I switched to my right hand. It managed surprisingly well, but it was much slower and cramped easily. The café was about to close. The waiter had changed out of his uniform and was headed out, helmet in hand. I tipped him and went to the loo. When I came back, the tissues had been cleared away.

That night when Ganeshji came, I was ready with a bowl of cashews, walnuts, almonds, pistachios and raisins. He settled on my bed cross-legged, picked out the raisins with his trunk and delivered them to his mouth slowly, one by one. He put my nail polish between us and cleared his throat.

“How about a nail polish that never finishes,” he said, mustering some old enthusiasm in his voice. “Not just any nail polish, one that can become whatever shade you want it to become.” He looked at me proudly. He had obviously put in thought in this one. “The only bottle you’ll ever need.” He said, cheerily, jingle-like.

I wondered how I’d say no without breaking his heart.

“It could even auto-select, if you want. It can detect what colours you’re wearing and change on its own. Hain?!”

I walked to the dining to choose my words and brought him a banana. He was looking at me expectantly, like his happiness depended on me taking his deal.

“Let me guess…no one else can see it?” I asked.

“You’re not going to take it, are you?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Thank you,” I said, squeezing his hand, “but I’m ok. And you can keep this one, it looks good on you.” I pushed the Mustard Master back toward him.

“You don’t like any of the deals?”

“I’m sorry, no,” I said, as gently as I could. “But I enjoy seeing you and Moushak.”

“I enjoyed coming here too,” he said. He turned, put his legs down, raised himself with effort. “It’s not ripe yet,” he said, giving me back the banana. “Wait for it to become spotty.”

“You keep it,” I pressed it back in his hands.

Moushak emerged from my room empty-mouthed and climbed into the lowest fold of the dhoti.

“Thanks for everything,” he said.

“See you soon,” I said.

He looked at me like I had said something stupid.

“What?”

“I can’t,” he said.

“If I don’t take on of your deals, you can’t visit me? Why?”

“That’s how it is,” he said. He took one last look at the fridge, nodded to me, and walked out of the window.

About Nidhi

Nidhi has lived in India, Singapore and now London, but far prefers to inhabit the world of words. Her work has been featured in journals and anthologies including Best New Singaporean Short Stories, Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, Out of Print, Sonder, The Aleph Review, The Hooghly Review, Cha – An Asian Literary Journal, Muse India, Pluto and Tinkle. Her debut novel, The Lights of Shantinagar is coming out in June 2025.

To read some of Nidhi's work, please visit: https://linktr.ee/nidhiarorawrites

To pre-order her book, please visit: https://unbound.com/products/the-things-we-see

About everything and nothing

Nidhi's Substack

By Nidhi Arora

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Do you have news you’d like included in next month’s issue? Email me at tiffany (at) peripherylit (dot) org by April 23, 2025.

Hi everyone,

This issue of “From the Margins” is brought to you by me, Tiffany Chu. It’s been a privilege to build this community with you. Thank you to everyone for making this a thriving place of support. I like seeing you pop in the chat to share posts and talk about whatever’s on your mind.

I hope you enjoy the picks for this month!

ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE CRITIQUE

The first article I’d like to share is from a while ago, but is interesting to read and still relevant. The thought has occurred to me at times: why is most Asian American literature lackluster? I have been lamenting to my husband about the many sorry Taiwanese American books I’ve tried to read in recent years. Is our only great?! Speaking of Taiwanese, some of the stuff coming out of Taiwan itself is also embarrassing.

There are a few gems, some of which I’ve mentioned in our Decolonizing Your Bookshelf series. Most books, however, fall into the realm of mediocre. Granted, it’s difficult to write and finish a book. To be published at all is already an admirable feat, especially for us, I’m sad to say. I think we can do better, though. Asians have much more to offer the literary landscape than what they can filter out by trying to conform to their western counterparts. So much of the bold, passionate writing comes from translated works.

Another excellent article on this topic is ’s Asian American Psycho. Both of these are long, but worth your time to read.

Asian-American literature is boring because liberalism is the mother-of-all identity shredders and our literary elites are approval-seeking strivers

— writes Decentralized Fiction

Why is Asian-American literature so boring? Why does it so thoroughly lack passion? Why are the characters so passive and never, ever, angry? Why do they almost invariably have nothing substantive to say about anything? Why does it so studiously deviate from anything interesting or controversial or innovative or offer a challenge of any kind?

In other words, why is it so deeply cucked by liberalism?

Continue Reading

DECENTRALIZED FICTION

The future of fiction is decentralized, pseudonymous, and cryptographically distributed.

By ARX-Han

PERSONAL ESSAY

This personal essay comes from the desk of , who writes about discovering her Writer Crush turned Soulmate turned ex-Fave Writer. At once humourous and heartbreaking, Ria gives us all a sobering warning not to elevate our heroes to pedestals, and that real love is built on being truly seen.

I’m sure we have all been there: admiring someone online from afar, sometimes forming a relationship with that person. In truth, there are limits to how much we can know someone virtually.

When I Found My Parasocial Soulmate

— writes Skinny Deep

It’s intoxicating, both the prospect of being seen and seeing someone. But maybe it’s more elusive than we think, despite how much access we assume we have to other’s lives. Maybe that’s exactly what we need to be wary of lest we start conflating things, like mistaking knowing a person’s work with truly knowing them.

Continue Reading

Skinny Deep

Essays diving into the maddening clutter of our modern lives, trying to recover what matters

By Ria Tagulinao

HEALTHCARE

Dr. Zed is a force to be reckoned with. Her patients are lucky to have her, and I wish she wasn’t such a rarity in the healthcare field.

I’m reminded of the time I had my first miscarriage (when I didn’t know I was pregnant at the time), and my primary care physician dismissed my ongoing bleeding as a result of my irregular periods. Despite multiple follow-up messages of me saying this had never happened to me before, that I had never bled for over a month straight before, she continued to message back with, “It’s fine; let us know if it doesn’t stop.” Only after I took a pregnancy test on the advice of ob-gyn friend did my PCP take me seriously—only because a risk of infection would have meant her career could be on the line. Sadly, my experience isn’t uncommon.

For those of us who have been invalidated, blamed, and treated as nuisances by our physicians, this post is one that might help restore your faith that yes, there are doctors out there who actually care about their patients.

The “Ungrateful Patient”

— writes Ask the Patient

He needed to know why, despite his every effort, he still felt powerless. He needed to know that he had done everything he could for his baby girl as he promised her he would since the day she was born.

And now, by telling me how he felt and asking the question that had been eating at him for far too long, he was giving me the chance to make it right for him. Even if only a little.

There was only one thing left for me to say — the truth that we owed him and so many patients and parents like him:

“I’m sorry that…we never listened to you.”

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Ask The Patient by Dr. Zed Zha

A love letter from a doctor (and human) that gives patients their voice back.

By Zed Zha, MD (she/her)

GRIEF

Part artwork, part personal essay, this one is a beautiful tribute to Kris’s mother. It struck me especially hard when I read it, as I witnessed my mother-in-law dying a couple years ago. My husband now brings up how he doesn’t like that their ages are out of sync—that she will never grow any older while he will, perhaps one day surpassing her years. It’s sobering to think about as we watch our parents age, their movements less smooth than before, tasks they once took for granted now more difficult.

At times, I think to myself, I don’t want to think about anyone else in my life dying. There’s been too much death in my life the past few years. Yet, no one can stop the slow but steady march of time. It’s coming for all of us. Its reality ought to turn my attention toward treasuring all our remaining moments, however many or few we may have.

My mum and me.

— writes Go get em tiger go

It’s been interesting to think about how relationships can continue to deepen, even when someone is no longer here. There’s a depth of understanding, relating, and witnessing of my mum that only emerged through the unfolding of my own life.

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Go get em tiger go

Living life and drawing about it.

By Kris Soebroto

FRIENDSHIP

I always love reading about friendships: what makes them work, what doesn’t, personal anecdotes of friendships that have survived against all odds, platonic soulmates. Like any relationship, each person has different needs and expectations, and it’s important to know what those are.

I really enjoyed this piece by Mansi, who lifts the pressure of making friendships look a certain way, and rests content in a mutual understanding with those who are life-sustaining for her. After all, friendship doesn’t need to come with banners or big get-togethers; they are often in the quiet moments that aren’t performative and don’t need proof.

Quiet Spaces, Deep Connections

— writes The Ripple Maker

Because real connection isn’t built on shared laughter alone.

It’s built on the friendships that exist in silence. The friendships where I don’t have to fill space with stories or jokes or presence to matter.

The ones that hold, even in distance.

And so I move in this world now without a need for proof, without a need to feel validated by a group, without a need to feel I belong.

Continue Reading

The Ripple Maker: Tokens & Tales by Mansi

Creating Connections. Spreading Smiles. Practicing Presence.

SIBLING RELATIONSHIPS

Sibling relationships are another type that often gets overlooked. As someone who has such a close relationship with my brother that people used to mistake us for a couple before we each got married, I appreciated this heartfelt reflection on an older sister’s love for her younger brother.

Like many siblings, my brother and I also fought like crazy growing up. At some point, that shifted into a deep love. We still have some ferocious fights on occasion, but we also know we unconditionally have each other’s backs.

I hope Kanchan’s essay about her brother’s illness awakening a fierce protectiveness will move you as it did me.

Of Brothers and Sisters

— writes Homebody Stories

My parents stood frozen in shock. But something inside me shifted, awakened. The annoying little shadow who'd followed me everywhere was now someone I needed to protect. That reluctant hand-holding transformed into a grip I never wanted to let go.

They say love grows slowly, like a garden. But sometimes it floods in all at once, like a dam breaking. That day in the hospital, watching my brother's pale face against white sheets, I understood what it truly means to be an elder sibling.

Continue Reading

Homebody Stories

Slow thoughts on finding meaning from one homebody to another.

By Kanchan Balani

POLITICAL

The last article I’m sharing with you is an incisive and sobering one from , which I hope will inspire thought and discussion. I’m certainly not the only one who has seen the multiple posts by people either saying they will or want to move out of America. While that sounds like an idyllic solution in theory, the reality is far less than rosy.

Lily touches on multiple angles, including American entitlement of expecting the country they move to to cater to them, Americans exploiting the cheap labor of locals—particularly in Asia—at the expense of residents (neo-colonialism), and the privilege of leaving the country. She references a few other articles which I also recommend reading.

The Great American Exodus

— writes Lily Pond

Don’t tell people what they should do just because their way of doing things is different from what you’re used to in America. Julia Hubbel tells a story in one of her articles cited above, of an American woman who couldn’t stand the sight of laundry hanging on lines outside buildings. She told the people to stop doing that! Can you guess the reactions of the locals?

Continue Reading

Lily Pond

Lily Pond covers cross-cultural experiences, intergenerational trauma within the immigrant experience, family dysfunction, violence & abuse against women, relational trauma, racism, emotional repression, healing, social justice and human rights.

This issue of Periphery features was curated by Tiffany Chu of The Untangling. If you enjoyed these picks, be sure to subscribe to her Substack.

A very warm welcome to the newest additions to the Periphery Directory!

, , , , , .

Glad to have you all in this growing community.

To join the directory, you can fill out the form here.

By — A YEAR WITHOUT WATER

It’s a nondescript Sunday when my grandmother calls me, as she does every week. When I pick up, I pause to check if she’s dialed me by accident. I know that she occasionally sits around with her smartphone open to my contact page, frequently accidentally clicking the call button; it cheers me to know that she’s always thinking about me.

She claims to call because she misses the sound of my voice. Each time, it’s the same set of questions, a ritualistic dance of words choreographed for us two. She inquires if I’ve already eaten, if I’ve not been neglecting my nutrition. Even if I’m famished, I’ll invent the meals that I say I’ve had in response, and I always reply that I’m fine—I never want her to worry about me. She notices the noises underlying my voice, the whirring of vehicles passing by or the chatter from my television, and asks if I’m outside, perhaps with my friends. To keep things simple, I confirm. I don’t like to explain why I’m at home alone.

Sometimes, she updates me on the latest family gossip. She wants to know if I’m happy, living by myself on the other side of the country. She reminds me to take care and to work hard so that one day I can afford a home big enough for her to live with me. In response, I say, yes, of course. I miss you. I’ll talk to you again soon.

Almost ninety years old, she does not know how to end calls on a smartphone; I have to do it. It doesn’t exactly break my heart to hang up on her in this way, but I hesitate for a moment before I do, listening to and parsing the background sounds from her end, wondering whether she’s in her bedroom or elsewhere, hoping that she isn’t solitary. Through the phone, I try to glimpse her life from afar.

Of my four grandparents, she’s the only one with whom I have a relationship. I grew up with my hands held in hers, learning Hunan-style mahjong from her before I could recite the English alphabet. She raised me, and—since we’re no longer in physical proximity—calling is all she can manage now so as to continue looking after me. She does so because nowadays it is only her calls that I will take. She avoids mentioning her daughter, my mother, to me altogether.

I was twenty-nine when I came out to my mother. I had, as a pre-teen, opted to delay this confrontation for a future date, for when I was no longer dependent upon my parents, because I did not trust them to understand. My mother, for example, supported politicians and laws alike that would imperil my ability to exist; I remember vividly when she voted in favor of California’s infamous Proposition 8, causing to be enshrined into legality the exclusion of same-sex marriage—it is a recollection that has forever colored my perception of her. So, when I finally left my closet, I did so only because I had nothing left to lose. I was going through the worst breakup of my life, and I no longer cared what anybody could, should, would think about me. I decided to give her a chance, for the first time, to be there for me as a parent should do.

My mother was born in Changsha, the capital city of China’s Hunan province. It is a region known for being the home of Chinese cultural behemoths, including the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park and blisteringly spicy cuisine (one of China’s great eights; I much prefer our stinky tofu to Taiwan’s, where one of my grandfathers was born in Hualien), and its people are passionate, resourceful, and multifaceted. I think that would aptly describe her as well.

She grew up in a post-Cultural Revolution climate, one of five daughters in a lower middle-class family. As the second-eldest, she often forwent meals to ensure that the youngest had enough to eat. I was told by multiple people throughout my upbringing that there were many instances of her resorting to eating weeds when there was nothing else to consume. Her father, who I never met but shared my Chinese zodiac, was the sole breadwinner. (Extended relatives say that he would have adored me, the first male born to the family in two generations; I sometimes wonder, wryly, whether his son preference would have withstood my coming out.) Her mother, my beloved grandmother, stayed at home to raise their children. My grandfather longed for but never had a son—my mother, as obdurate as any boy could be, was his favorite.

The anecdotes that my grandmother favors about her daughter are those about her being stubborn and clever. When the neighborhood boys were bullies, it was my mother who stood up to them. She was the one who excelled in school, and she displayed natural intelligence early on, despite later confiding in me that she didn’t love to study (I take after her in this regard, among others) but had to do it to try escaping what would otherwise be an impoverished existence. In her teens, she braved arduous commutes to Beijing Normal University, where she took her place as one of the few hard-won spots allocated to Hunan. Upon graduation, she accepted an instructor position at a college in Fujian. It is there that she was briefly married before breaking it off to follow an American man to his family in Oregon, in pursuit of the American Dream as many immigrants were wont to do in the 1980s. But, the Americans wanted her to be a stay-at-home wife, contrary to her disposition, so she left behind the promise of an easy, prescribed life to make her way to Los Angeles, where she ultimately met my father and gave birth to me.

I do not think fondly of him. To label him an absent father would be a bit of a misnomer—he worked hard to make ends meet, driving for so long on his commutes that he once fell asleep at the wheel and totaled his car in traffic—and I do not begrudge him for his efforts to provide for us, but he was an ineffectual parent, both before and after their divorce; I consider myself to have been raised by women. Primogeniture bestowed upon me all the hopes and dreams—and fears and failures—of my immigrant parents, and LGBTQ first-generation firstborns have long reported the fissures that erupt between our progenitors and us; I am sorry to say that my experience has been no different. I was the wayward child, physically beaten by both father and mother because they equally disdained what they perceived to be my constant disobedience. When my grandmother stayed with us, when she intervened, she was shouted down. At least she tried.

I longed for normalcy. When—or, because—my grandmother did not live with us, I wanted parents who did not seem to hate me without reason. I understood that first-time parents make mistakes with their firstborn that they do not repeat for their subsequent children. I could forgive the extreme stress under which lower middle-class immigrants operate, but I needed parents who loved me. It was true that they had each braved harrowing journeys across the Pacific to give me an American life, that they placed food on the table and a roof over my head—what more could, should, I want from them? Did it really matter if I just wanted them to stop telling me they would kick me out of the house as soon as legally permissible, to quit lording over my head that I had no personal agency because I lived in their home, to end their ceaseless refrain that I was never good enough? All my material needs were met—was that not love? Was that not sufficient? Growing up, I almost never cried. It was moot.

I struggled to process their words. I already knew, from when I was as young as ten, that I couldn’t tell them I liked boys—it would risk accelerating their plainly stated desire to evict me—and I intuitively felt that they were not right to call me a good-for-nothing loser, but a void from deep within the center of my being began to grow. If I knew it was moot, if I had enough fortitude to know what they said was wrong, why did that black hole inside me continue to expand? Why couldn’t my nascent dignity diminish that angst? Icy tendrils reached out from my core to touch the far ends of my every limb until I was fully numb and, between twelve and eighteen, my sense of self-worth plummeted. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t good enough—it was that my very existence was an aberration. I ran away from home. I fantasized about killing myself. I spirited kitchen blades away to my bedroom, testing their mettle against my skin, dreaming of my mother chancing upon my corpse and watching from the afterlife her mourning her loss, but that would imply I was valued, perhaps even loved. I was severely depressed.

I attempted past-life regression hypnotherapy in the first half of 2024. My therapist instructed me to sink my consciousness back in time to my happiest childhood memory, at which point I had a complete breakdown, choking back tears to try to explain to her that I could pick out satisfaction, I could locate laughter, but I could not for the life of me find true happiness. All I had were remembrances of my mother chasing me with a long wooden baton, the one I wielded during my performance routines at figure skating competitions, competing with herself to count how many bruises she could inflict upon my skin. As a teenager with nonexistent self-esteem, I did her one better: I took a knife to the flesh of my inner left arm and carved the letters L-O-S-E-R.

In 2022, when I came out to my mother at last, she was quiet. She had called to ask me something inconsequential, but I had just gotten off the phone after decompressing to a close friend about my debilitating breakup and I couldn’t keep up the pretense anymore. At that point, I was hardly alive, and I didn’t have any energy left to continue living a lie. I interrupted whatever she was saying with three words: “Mom? I’m gay.”

She listened to me explain that I had known since I was in elementary school, that I had had a decade of un-coerced experience to know for certain, that I was doing so because I thought I had finally found the one, someone for whom I was ready to risk everything to introduce to her because I felt he would pass her muster, and that I was so irrevocably shattered by his departure I was willing to turn to her for support. I had wanted to marry him, to buy a home and settle down with him, to spend the rest of my life with him, a man she didn’t even know was real until I spoke him into existence right then. She took a moment to digest my words, and then reverted with a sincere question: “Was it the ice skating [that made me gay]?”

Over the course of almost a year, our relationship normalized. When I returned to California to visit her, I found she had decorated the bedroom reserved for my use in gaudy live-laugh-love decor, plastered with the vacant sort of platitudes that would be marketed to devoutly Christian parents of gay children. (It’s okay to be gay!) Still, I recognized an olive branch for what it was, and I lowered my guard. When she later dropped me off at a female friend’s home on my way back to New York, she reminded me to take care of myself and said that I should find a wife as competent as that friend; I laughingly retorted that I was looking for a husband. For a brief period, we had an amicable rapport. It was nice while it lasted.

Months afterward, when she asked me to accompany her on a trip back to her hometown, I agreed, rationalizing that it would be meaningful to return as an adult to her—and my—childhood stomping grounds. On the way there, we stopped in Taiwan, where decades of friction came to a head.

Our initial few days in Taipei were chilly, and I shivered everywhere we went because I had forgotten to pack a coat. I like to assume that she felt bad for me because, on the third day, she led me to a generic clothing store and instructed me to pick out a jacket. She watched me sift through the clothes, suggesting that I pick the cheapest one. But, I disagreed: the least expensive option was also the one I was most unlikely to wear and offered the littlest insulation, thus rendering such a purchase functionally pointless. Instead, I had my eyes set on a down jacket for just twenty dollars more. Yet, she sniped at my choice, making comments under her breath about my spendthrift tendencies that spiraled into full-blown insults about my apparent stupidity for incorrectly packing my clothing. Having had a lifetime of experience with her propensity for nastiness and with the understanding that this was a proxy fight about something deeper, something latent, I refused to tolerate her attitude. I retorted that she was overreacting, being ridiculous and even miserly over such an immaterial price difference for a jacket I wasn’t asking her to buy. She didn’t love my snark. I had provoked her, and she began to scream at me in public, castigating me for my every wrong—my failure to get into an Ivy League college, my supposed mediocre career, my sexual deviance. I was wholly unappreciative of all that she had ever done for me, and I was a colossal screwup for not living my life exactly as she demanded I did, building up to the final sentence she ever spoke to me. To this day, her words haunt me still: “你就不是我要的儿子.” You’re not the son I wanted.

Harris, Chinese Canadian and one of my best friends, says his parental trauma stems from “having a crazed mother who yells at [him] for any small thing that could go wrong.” Thus, he has become “a pushover afraid of making any mistakes because [he] doesn’t want to argue” with his mother, with anyone; forced perfectionism births paralysis. I am the same and yet the diametrical opposite—I spent too many years being obsequious, so I am now always confrontational to a fault—no longer will I accept deliberate malice, and certainly not from anyone who has had decades of maturity to learn, to be, better. When my mother’s facade broke, despite the pure frivolity of the disagreement, I accepted her words verbatim: after thirty years of being shown that I am not the child she envisioned, knowing full well that she had terminated a pregnancy years before choosing to conceive me, that she had gone through all the heart-wrenching effort of having me only to decide she abhorred me, I encouraged her, egging her on. I wanted to hear her speak the truth. When it came, it wasn’t a surprise—it was a culmination of a lifetime of disdain. The next day, I went straight to the airport, leaving Taiwan. My mother no longer has a son.

My grandmother always told me that her daughter had lived a rough life. She had given up lucrative opportunities in China to start from scratch in America, emigrating with less than twenty dollars to her name. As I grew up, I watched her accept a series of odd jobs to make ends meet, from selling avocados to being a substitute Chinese tutor to hawking bamboo. Even as a child, I dutifully edited the written English in her work because I hated knowing that her colleagues discriminated against her for her non-native fluency. At length, I listened to her explain her inability to withstand hunger because it reminded her of her famished childhood years, and I felt those acute stomach pangs too when my own eating was drastically disordered in secret. I was there when life wasn’t easy, and I understood without question that she was doing her best, that nobody was perfect. Nonetheless, despite my every attempt, that knowledge does not, can not, will not help me absolve her harm. Equally, I recall all the moments when I wanted to come out to her, fantasizing about getting the same kind of acceptance I only ever saw other people receive, and stopping myself because I feared her reaction. I still remember trembling because I wanted her approval, not her reproaches, verbal and physical. I can not forget all the nights wherein I longed to disappear far, far away, cursing the fact that I was born to her because I thought it tied me to terror, to her, forever.

Can there be an end to filial piety? Am I allowed to step away? When I spurn my maker, do I hack off my nose to spite my face? If I know that some differences are simply too great to be bridged, what right do I have to remain aggrieved? I confess that I blame myself. These were not isolated events: I had endured similar incidents—public haranguing and private abuses—a million times, yet still I forgave because I wanted to be a part of the family to which I was born, blood being thicker than water and so on. I had spent my life vacillating between acquitting her mistakes and retaining enough self-worth to know that I am not one of those mistakes, but I felt guilty for resenting her implacability, for wishing that I had a “better” mother, for wanting a different life when life itself is so rare a gift. I felt wrong for hating the person who created me. It was the evergreen comparison between the illusion I desired against what was materially real; I knew that grass is always greenest where it is watered, but the greens I tried to nurture in my family’s plot had long ago expired.

As I write this, the calendar in the top right corner of my computer screen alerts me to today being her date of birth.

In the years past, it was customary for me to send her a bouquet at least twice a year: on Mother’s Day and on her birthday. As soon as I had my own discretionary income, I put in a standing order at a florist near her home to recur biannually because it was the right thing to do. Despite—or, resultant of—everything, all the good and the bad, it was important to me that she understood I did not take her for granted. I had wanted her to know that I loved her.

My grandmother’s daughter taught me that water is done boiling when it is quiet. She scrimped and saved to send me to figure skating classes, to chaperone me as I entered competitions across Southern California, to be there for me as the lone pair of eyes supporting me amidst a crowd of strangers’ watching me perform, because it had once been her dream.

The dark circles underneath my eyes are hers. The contours of my lips and the shape of my eyes are hers. My love for music, for travel and adventure, is hers. My disarming charm and natural curiosity, my instinct for self-preservation, my refusal to accept unfairness, my drive to go after what I want despite the countervailing odds, the voice in my head telling me that it’s not enough, that I will never be good enough, they are all hers—and yet they have become mine as well. The more I describe her, the more I describe myself.

My grandmother phoned me when she learned of our estrangement. She asked me to show her daughter grace, but I refused. I declined to mend a bond thirty years in the unmaking. Not once in my lifetime have I ever heard a single word of apology or even acknowledgement from her daughter, and still I am wracked with doubt about whether I should reconsider my decision to withdraw, whether waiting to hear the words that I know will not come is a Sisyphean exercise, but I am no longer forgiving enough to let it go. Forgiveness is a gift given to one’s self, I am well aware, but it is something that I simply can not muster. Ergo, I have selfishly chosen to sever relations, thereby preserving at least a modicum of my own peace.

I’ve been preparing myself for this irrevocable goodbye, knowing full well that time eventually returns us all to the earth, preemptively eulogizing her despite an omnipresent, nagging fear that I will miss her more than anything in the world when she is truly gone. I still have the nightmares, horrible dreams wherein she screams at me for my shortcomings; I still wake up with tears in my eyes.

So, instead, my grandmother calls me every week to ask if I am well.

I always say yes.

About Sam

Born a Chinese American and raised between Los Angeles and Changsha, Sam is currently a resident of New York City. He is a creative nonfiction writer and the author of A YEAR WITHOUT WATER. In his free time, he is a stinky tofu enthusiast and welcomes all inside information on the whereabouts of the world's best, most pungently delicious treat.

A YEAR WITHOUT WATER

A journal made public and a contemporary coming of age. New essays every Tuesday.

By Sam

You are welcome to interpret the theme in whatever way that resonates with you.

Creative Nonfiction, including, but not limited to:

• Personal essay

• Memoir

• Some forms of experimental writing

Fiction

• Short stories

• Flash fiction

• Novel excerpts (it must stand on its own)

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Not following all guidelines will result in automatic disqualification.

All submissions by a writer of Asian descent will be considered for publication. Priority consideration is given to those who are part of the Periphery directory.

Submissions must be complete, in English, and under 3000 words to be considered. No pitches, please!

• Only 1 submission per submission period permitted. Also note that if you were accepted for a previous submission period, please wait 12 months before submitting again.

• Submissions should be your original work and previously unpublished. This includes your Substack or personal blog.

• Attach your document in the following file forms: .doc, .docx, or pdf.

• All manuscripts should be in 12-point type, with at least one-inch margins, and sequentially numbered pages, double-spaced.

• In the email subject line, put in all caps: “[CATEGORY] SUBMISSION.” For example, “CREATIVE NONFICTION SUBMISSION”

• Include a brief bio (about 100 words) in the body of your email, and include your connection to Asia. Note any links to your website or social media if desired.

• Indicate the following in your email:

  • Title of the work

  • Word count

  • Subgenre (e.g., short story, flash fiction, personal essay, memoir, etc.)

  • Brief synopsis (1-2 sentences)

Simultaneous Submissions: We accept simultaneous submissions. Please contact us as soon as possible if your piece is accepted elsewhere.

Compensation: We are unable to offer compensation at this time; however, we are committed to doing so in the future.

Exclusivity: We request exclusive first publication rights for accepted pieces for a period of one month. After this period, all rights revert back to the author, to reuse and republish as you wish.

Response Time: We aim to respond to all submissions within 2-4 weeks after the deadline.

Send your submissions or questions to tiffany (at) peripherylit (dot) org.

Plans for a Print Book

Submissions are being compiled into a print anthology, to be published early 2026. This is still in the very preliminary stages, but here are my initial plans so far:

• Crowdfund through Kickstarter to pay contributing authors, printing costs and hiring an editor and professional cover designer.

• Pay contributing authors and ship the book to them, wherever they are in the world.

• Founding members will also get the book shipped to them for free.

• The book will then be listed on retailers to reach a wider audience.

Stay tuned!!

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Announcements

• is looking for a WRITING MENTOR with a focus on fiction writing. Please contact her at addiebara@gmail.com for more details!

• ’s NEW ROMANCE NOVEL, Something Cheeky, is being released soon on March 4, 2025! To celebrate, she has a book event in the D.C. area. See this page for all the details.

• ’s ESSAY COLLECTION, The Untangling, is now available on Amazon. These essays, previously available only to patrons, move fearlessly through territory both intimate and universal: a crisis of faith, the complexities of cross-cultural identity, the grief of losing a child, and the challenge of building a home in the aftermath of loss.

Do you have news you’d like included in next month’s issue? Email me at tiffany (at) peripherylit (dot) org by March 26, 2025.

This issue of Periphery features was curated by of Sanobar’s Newsletter.

Hi everyone, I’m Sanobar Sabah (she/her), enjoying the messy yet beautiful process of becoming in my 40s. Thrilled to be part of Periphery; I’m here for the community. Writing on Substack helps me reclaim my voice and, as an Indian Muslim neurodivergent mother based in the Middle East, I write to carve space for myself and, in the process, discover fellow space-makers like you.

Here are some of my Substack essays that I’m quite fond of: Writing as a Sacred Act, Thriving with ADHD, Family Honor or Truth? And, if you want to know how I use writing to protest injustice, please read Ashraf Ali Sayyed Hussain Is Not a Terrorist. The Cow Vigilantes Are.

Having lived all my life away from my home country, I’m reading plenty of essays by South Asian writers - especially Indian authors - as a way to decolonise my mind. Sharing with you the ones that have made me think, feel, and, when it comes to fiction (which I don’t write), sparked my imagination.

Please feel free to engage should any of the essays move you in any way. I’m truly grateful for your time and interest.

COMMUNITY

I want to begin by recommending reading Ochre Sky Stories - the sanctuary that held me in my darkest, lowest moments and showed me that I could not only write my pain away without shame but also, celebrate it. Follow Ochre Sky as they amplify the voices of South Asian men writing about family, depression and therapy, South Asian women writing about desire, leisure and money, and everything in between. And for good measure, there’s plenty of room for humour and fiction too. Like Periphery, Ochre Sky keeps extending their table, always happy to share their spotlight.

Ochre Sky Stories

Words that give permission - writings and other wonders from the Ochre Sky writing workshops facilitated by Natasha Badhwar and Raju Tai

BEING OTHERED

Next on the list is a piece written by Reem Faruqi. It’s about a brown hijabi Muslim woman going through US immigration with her husband and baby. The way she writes - sharp and unflinching - pulls you right into that moment of being othered. It’s a classic case of resisting through writing – it angered me, hurt me, and, as a third culture kid myself, made me think again about what ‘home’ really means. If you’ve ever felt like you don’t fully belong anywhere, this one will stay with you.

“Home”

— writes Reem’s Substack

Don't they see that everyone in this room is colored? That almost all the women are hijabed? And when the puffy man says Young man, No phones allowed to the Black man, does he realize that the man isn't really young, instead he's old? And your heart was thumpthumpthumping to be home, but now it's going pitter and patter and what kind of country, what kind of continent is this, that almost every time you return “home,” you are pulled to the side…

Continue Reading

Reem’s Substack

My personal Substack

By Reem Faruqi

ROMANCE FICTION

As someone who struggles to write fiction, I’m in awe of how Isha Jain infuses playfulness into her storytelling. This short story is a delightful mix of love, banter, and the kind of intimacy that feels both real and cinematic - Raj and Riva’s push-and-pull dynamic is pure fun. While Isha adds a TW for single poets out there (too romantic!), I requested her to add one for married folks as well - because honestly, this kind of romance sets the bar way too high!

A Lazy Afternoon, A Lost Bet, and a Little Love

— writes The Indian Story

Raj had made quite a good space in the middle with a comfortable rug, pillows, a lit candle, and even the book she was reading. But the light white cloth over the chairs, giving it the feeling of a tent, made it better. He helped her sit down. She laid lazily across him and picked up the book, "Well, this is nice."

Continue Reading

The Indian Story

Colorful tales from India, rich of magic and nostalgia. And happy rants of latest movies, shows and books. Every week.

By Isha Jain

PHOTOGRAPHY

I grew up in Abu-Dhabi, the slow, less glamorous sister city of Dubai. Mumbai, on the other hand, is where my parents decided to settle after their retirement in the Gulf. That’s why Mumbai has always been a city I’ve watched from the outside - close enough to be charmed, but never quite adapting to its nauseous pace. Gopal, the eye behind Mumbai Paused, does the impossible with his pictures: he brings this ever-buzzing city to a standstill. Every picture is a story with little to no captions – a treat to my overstimulated ND brain! If you’ve ever wanted to see Mumbai in a way that makes you stop and stare, his images will do just that. A picture like this and this show exactly what keeps me intrigued about the city.

— writes Mumbai Paused

Mumbai Paused

Photographs. Low tide smells from the Island City

By Mumbai || Paused

WRITING A MEMOIR

Rafia’s writing speaks straight to my heart. As an American Muslim memoirist, she wrestles with the moral challenges of writing one’s truth. In this essay, she discusses the inner conflict of writing a memoir: how much is too much, and can one share their story without betraying their faith or their loved ones? I cannot wait for her book to come out!

Black & White Thinking

— writes Raf Drafts

When the term ghiba (backbiting) was evoked by one of the scholars, I immediately thought about my memoir. I know my dad - pre-dementia - would have stopped at the first mention of anything less than idealized. I don’t know what he would have done, but he would not have been happy. I don’t know how my mom will respond. I’m not even sure about my Canadian-born siblings now that I think about it.

Continue Reading

Raf Drafts

All the unvarnished thoughts and reflections of a Muslim-American memoirist and the writing life.

By Rafia Khader

FATHER-SON RELATIONSHIP

Saving this for last because, honestly, I love unvarnished personal essays that normalize complicated family dynamics - and if that’s coming from a man, I’m sold straightaway! Rohan’s essay is a quiet yet devastating exploration of the unspoken distance between fathers and sons. As someone who’s always complaining about her craft, I read Rohan to learn craft. But encountering this essay of his was deeply moving - it’s gold in terms of depth and honesty, reflecting both tenderness and restraint. Told you he’s crafty!

A Letter

— writes More Letters, Less News

I will wonder if we could’ve spoken for longer if you were not a Luddite; if Ma was not the only bridge that existed between us, brought us together. But if we’re being honest, we will both admit it is not your blissful ignorance of technology that has kept - is keeping - us apart. We do not merely lack a means of communication; we lack a vocabulary, a shared language.

Continue Reading

More Letters, Less News

Humour. Travel. Running. Books. And a bit of this. With a bit of that. New issue every fortnight.

By Rohan Banerjee

This issue of Periphery features was curated by of Sanobar’s Newsletter. If you enjoyed these picks, be sure to subscribe to her Substack.

A very warm welcome to the newest additions to the Periphery Directory!

, , , , , , , , , , and .

Glad to have you all in this growing community.

To join the directory, you can fill out the form here.

Periphery is a publication dedicated to fostering greater understanding and appreciation of Asian cultures and experiences among a global readership. Subscribe to decolonize your reading and discover unique writing.

This issue of book recommendations was curated by , the author of khayāl | imagination, and member of The UNSPOKEN Collective She is a multi-award-winning poet and an alumna of the University of Waterloo. Selected works include “my grandma, so clean” and “What Will People Say?” If you enjoy this post, be sure to subscribe to her newsletter.

Hello everyone,

Like many of you I’ve been following Periphery for months, and I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to contribute to this publication! I’ve been working diligently to curate this post for Periphery over the past few weeks to highlight some of my favorite works by writers with Palestinian ancestry. Some of these are writers that I’ve already had on my bookshelf for years, and I hope that you agree with my observations on their powerful messages and high degree of literary quality. I am not Palestinian, but I have always admired many Palestinian poets for their talent, bravery, and innovation.

Before we get into the reading recommendations, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the situation in Gaza. One organization doing important work to highlight the present situation in Gaza is Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG). The WAWOG website states:

“As writers (and artists, and teachers, and more), we know that speech can both inform and take the form of action; that struggles for liberation can and must be advanced on discursive terrains; that old oppressive narratives must crumble as new consciousnesses grow. Armed with words, we will keep fighting the narrative war.”

To learn more about WAWOG, and the important work that they’re doing, you can take a look at their website here.

Nonfiction

Palestine as Metaphor by Mahmoud Darwish (2019). Mahmoud Darwish was an award-winning writer who passed away in 2008. He has been widely regarded as one of Palestine’s most famous writers. He was born in the Palestinian village al-Birwa, which was unfortunately destroyed during his lifetime. This text is a collection of five interviews that Darwish participated in that were previously unavailable in English translation. These interviews provide meaningful insight into who Darwish was, as well as his approach to the craft of writing.

“Palestine as metaphor means that the poet recreates Palestine through poetry. He immortalizes it by reviving its history, preserving its past, and transmuting its present. In this sense, poetry is not simulation but alchemy and transformation, realized through language, in this instance the Arabic language in which Darwish wrote. His poetry brings about Palestine, and immortalizes it.” (quote from page xv of Palestine as Metaphor)

Unarcheology: Anticolonial Aesthetics and Putting Things Back in the Ground by Palestinian-American writer Fargo Tbakhi was published as a chapter of a text titled Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage (2023). I found this chapter to be an eye-opening and essential read for both writers and readers of fictional and non-fictional depictions of works outside of our own direct lived experiences.

On page 180 of the text, Tbakhi describes what he calls the “archeological imperative” as,

“... a colonialist epistemological framework that shapes the way we tell stories about the past (and thus necessarily about the present and future), pressuring our narration to fit neatly within the paradigms of dominant power structures. We can understand archeology itself as a form of storytelling, which sorts the world into hierarchies of imperial meaning. These stories are ones it’s all too easy to find ourselves retelling in our own creative work. Recognizing this pressure in my own work, I wondered: How can we avoid becoming archeologists of our own dead, or of someone else’s?”

I read this chapter for the first time months ago, and I revisit it as I continue to reflect on how I can avoid becoming an archeologist in the sense that Tbakhi describes here. I have made it a habit to interrogate how I might ensure that my work is both accurate and respectful to those whom I choose to write about. If you’re interested in reading more of my key takeaways from this chapter, and how you might apply these learnings, please check out the section on “On Respecting Your Sources” in my post on found poetry.

Poetry

Birthright by Palestinian American poet George Abraham (2020). Birthright is an award-winning poetry collection that I feel deserves much more attention than it has already received. The first time I read the poem “ars poetica in which every pronoun is a Free Palestine,” my preconceived notions of what poetry could be were completely shattered, and replaced instead with awe for the innovative form and storytelling techniques that Abraham uses to express ideas that must be difficult to sit with, let alone articulate. These are poems that can demand their readers’ full attention, and teach writers about what it means to be a contemporary poet.

A River Dies of Thirst by Mahmoud Darwish (2009). A quote from this collection that is still with me, is one that appears on the back flap of my paperback copy: “Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.”

Many of the themes touched on in the poetry and prose that comprise this collection are still unfortunately relevant to the experiences of Palestinians today. In “Green flies,” Darwish writes,

“The call to prayer rises to accompany the indistinguishable funerals: coffins hastily raised in the air, hastily buried – no time to carry out the rites, more dead are arriving at speed from other raids, individually or in groups, or a whole family with no orphans or grieving parents left behind.”

You can read the rest of “Green flies” here.

Within this translation, I found many individual lines that were quite strong, and I spent extra time learning from these. I envy those who can read this text in its original Arabic as I can see how well written it is and know I must be missing out on a lot of what makes it great.

For writers looking to teach themselves the craft of writing, this text can also be a great resource with all of the references it makes to other significant works of literature and historical figures, ranging from the Muʻallaqāt to the Roman emperor Nero. Taking time to read up on these references as you come across them can help guide your self-study in literature and world history.

Selected Poems for Further Reading

Interactive :: House Saints by Hala Alyan

Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying by Noor Hindi

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha

War Machines Dress Up as Drag Queens by Mohammed El-Kurd

Jerusalem by Naomi Shihab Nye

Thank you, for introducing us to Palestinian literature! Be sure to check out her publication at khayāl | imagination.

khayāl | imagination

Welcome to khayal— where creativity fuses with connection. This blog is a space for learning, experimenting, and telling the truth (in both poetry and prose). Join the conversation, share your thoughts, and let's create something beautiful together.

By I. S. Bashirah

What stories of resistance and liberation have resonated with you the most? Please let us know in the comments below.

By — Good Things

She didn’t cry right after she was born, but her eyes were wide open. She looked straight into me as the midwife placed her on my chest. I couldn’t stop saying, “Oh my god,” over and over again as I held her so delicately. Adrenaline rushed through me, my body reminding me to be vividly present for this moment. It was two in the morning and the blinds were still drawn from yesterday’s sun. The untouched water pool sat a few feet away from my hospital bed and the tray of medical tools lingered in the corner of my eye.

I was numb from the waist down but felt a jolt of vulnerability as she side-eyed me. She stripped me naked with her unwavering ten second gaze.

We’d spent 39 weeks together. People praised me for “doing a good job,” but I often felt like I was taking credit for something that I, my mind, and soul, didn’t have any play in. It was my body that did all the work. I was an idling passenger to her. While she built our baby, organ by organ, I sat on the couch and shoveled mashed potatoes into my mouth. While she meticulously architected her skeletal system and painted the hues of her irises, I only endured the symptoms of her work and trusted her process, awaiting what was to come. The first time I threw up from morning sickness, I smiled. I figured, if nausea, fatigue, back pain, bleeding gums, carpal tunnel, hemorrhoids, mood swings, brain fog, and a small bladder were the cost of meeting my first biological relative, then so be it. It’s something I’ve tried picturing before, in the same way a child dreams up fictional stories.

I met her in that hospital room and asked myself, “Who is this baby?”, delirious after 55 hours of labor. She looked at me as if she wanted to say, “I know exactly who you are. More than you know yourself.” But more likely, “Who the hell are you?” Her hair was matted with blood and amniotic fluid, her eyebrows stitched ever so slightly in a curious frown.

When I think back on this moment, I laugh. But questions about my entrance into the world have intruded on my thoughts ever since. In the oldest portrait photograph, I am no younger than four months. It’s a black and white headshot of me staring into the lens. The image is soft, as if someone has airbrushed the edges of my round and very bald head. This photo is my genesis. It has carried the weight of where I come from, even though its background is blank. It is the only photo that exists from the time before I met my mothers who adopted me. If this photo was an object, it would feel heavy, saturated from my endless gaze over the collective years.

I’ve studied details in my adoption papers. Searching and reading them again and again, hoping to discover something world shattering. It’s like repeatedly opening an empty fridge when you’re hungry, all while knowing nothing new will appear. A new hunger for the unknown lingers with me. It is the duality in everything I experience related to motherhood, as if I’m processing everything twice, once for me and once for my birth mother.

“This is to certify that Guo Youxin, female, was born on Nov. 25, 1995. She was found at You County on Jan. 15, 1996, and then transferred to our center by the Birth Control Committee of You County on the same day. Our center hasn’t found her parents and relatives.

Zhuzhou Children Social Welfare Center

Apr. 16, 1996”

I stare at You County on Google maps.

Population of 819,845 and covers 1,023 square miles.

My name, Guo Youxin, is often the first confrontation with my existential questions.

In Edinburgh, my colleague, Professor Ping, read over my papers in her office on her lunch break. “What an interesting name, Youxin. I haven’t heard it before,” she said as she opened a bag of pretzels, and the sound of a toilet flushing across the hall filled the quiet.

“Oh, you mean my last name?” I pinched my knees together as I sat in the wooden office chair next to her. Glancing over my shoulder, the door was closed. My afternoon was free from meetings, so I figured this would be an appropriate time to break open artifacts from my unknown past.

Like a click of a hammer severing a rock, revealing a fossil, Professor Ping said, “Your first name. Your surname is Guo.” I watched her eyes glance over the white page that had dulled with dust and time.

My mind paused for a minute. I understood Chinese naming conventions—last name followed by first name—but this never registered personally. It felt like such an obvious fact and realization, but what spooked me the most was that I never made the connection myself.

“What else am I ignorant of?” I thought to myself and felt ashamed. Looking back, though, I’ve wondered if it was ignorance or a declaration of loyalty.

Years before, I faced the Beijing Capital International Airport immigration gate, waiting to get through to my two days of work in the city. The tired man in a booth examined my passport, then gave me a surprised look. “You were born in China?” he asked suspiciously.

“Yes.” I replied.

“Do you have a Chinese name?”

“No.” I lied, thinking that I was doing him a favor by cutting to the fact that, legally, my Chinese name was irrelevant.

“But you were born in China?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t have a Chinese name?” He wondered how this was possible.

“Yeah.”

“Ok.” He gave up.

The white, fluorescent lights buzzed above us. In my mind, I shouted, “Yes!”

But Guo Youxin was only a fictional character, a ghost from an old life. She was not there at that moment. Only a mythical creature, my own Chinese folklore. To find her, would require to embark on a quest; to helm a ship across the sea, conquer great beasts and walk strange lands. All while unknowingly if it would lead to something or nothing or a labyrinth of more questions.

Freezing her in time as my dear keepsake, gently cradling in my heart, protecting her from the unkind world, has often felt easier.

Although I’ve sometimes distanced myself from my Chinese name and identity, my mothers still made sure that I had every opportunity to know her, to love her. Meticulous scrapbooks documenting every childhood moment, adoption day celebrations, Chinese language classes, Lunar New Year parties, adoptee culture camps, and trips to China. They filled my cup and collected the excess that spilled over when it overflowed. Stitched together, their efforts made a beautiful tapestry of culture and community.

They also saved everything worth a second glance. Plane tickets, home videos, baby blankets and clothes, printed emails from adoption agencies, news articles, nursery notes, birthday cake toppers, letters from grandma, Mother’s Day crafts, heaps of photographs, art projects, English essays, angsty journals, yearbooks, and dance costumes. All representing the afterlife of the baby in the black-and-white photo. With a keen weakness for nostalgia, they fill me with deep gratitude and longing.

My phone routinely reminds me that my storage is full—full of photos of my baby that I can’t bring myself to delete. Duplicates and all. Every moment feels fleeting and perfect knowing the simple fact that these moments exist and I get to bear witness to them. I rarely fight the urge to hoard them all. She was here. I am too. How precious this present feels. The beautiful, the frustrating, the exhausting, and the silly.

“No, I don’t want to see how heavy her diaper is,” my husband shouted from the kitchen, wondering why his wife was so weird.

“But it’s the fullest I’ve ever felt!” I rebutted, attempting to convince him to feel its weight, to feel this very important evidence that she is indeed growing. She changes a little bit more every week. I can see her father in the fullness of her cheeks, the shape of her lips, and the strength in her arms and legs. I look for myself in her and wonder if the glimmers I see are a lineage that I never knew. She reminds me of an old curiosity.

I wonder if my birth mom had the comfort of her mother beside her in the first month of her baby’s life as I did. I wonder who was the first person she told after finding out that she was pregnant? I wonder if she, too, ugly cried in public because of the flood of first trimester hormones. A million questions render my imagination and make themselves known in different ways, fiercely rumbling into my mind like an angry storm cloud or appearing like an air bubble rising to the surface. “Did she smile when she felt kicks? Did she know the gender before? Who held her hand during contractions? Was she coerced into giving her baby away? Did she have another name for her?” I wonder about her dreams, her fears, her trauma, her joy. Everything that felt abstract before has come into clearer view. Although she is still invisible, she is vivid in my heart.

Living with an adoption story is like a balancing act between the light and the dark. Every birthday that passes, I wonder if she is still alive. This year I’ll turn 30. The quiet math of her age works like a ticking clock in my mind; if she was in her twenties when she had me, then she must be in her fifties. If she was in her thirties, then she must be in her sixties now. Maybe my life began with a side-eye; maybe it began with a cry. Maybe it began with a hello; maybe it began with a goodbye.

It makes me wish that there were physical symptoms that I could experience somehow, to know that she is still there, like with my daughter when I was pregnant, going by what I felt in my body when I didn’t have medical scans or documents as reassuring proof. To feel a prick in my thumb or an ache in my gut to know that she exists somewhere in this world. That we still co-exist in this lifetime, connected by our bodies that once lived and grew together. To send her back a busted knee or tightness in her temple, to tell her I’m still here, her granddaughter now is too, and that we love her.

But then, there is my daughter still staring at me, eyes wide open. I wonder what she is thinking about. How sweet it feels to be seen by her. I wonder if she knows how happy she makes me feel when she looks at me. When she smacks her lips together, drool sliding down the side of her mouth, I realize that she simply longs for my breast.

About Adaline

Adaline Bara is a freelance designer and writer from Kansas City, now based in Edinburgh with her husband and daughter. She co-created the Whatever Next? Adoption project motivated by her experiences as an adoptee from China. She has appeared on BBC Radio Scotland, STV, and KSHB 41, and The Kansas City Star. Her writing has also been featured in 404 Ink Inklings.

Good Things

I tell myself that sometimes writing about hard things can be a good thing.

By Adaline

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This issue of AWC features was curated by of Scrupulous Pessimism, where they write about occasional musings. Their interests include public opinion, narrative formation, and how ideas shape the world. They also Write about middle power diplomacy & the impact of war on national identity. Popular articles include “The Values Gap,” and “Blended Identities”.

Happy New Year everyone. I write at Scrupulous Pessimism and primarily cover international relations, diplomatic history, and general musings on life. Some posts that I’d like to advertise are my review of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel-turned-series The Sympathizer and a list of some of my favorite novels.

Thank you very much for your attention and engagement. Below are some articles that I found particularly helpful or insightful.

WORK-LIFE BALANCE

This recent post was especially timely for me, and while the author shares her realizations through an intensely personal story, it is one that is universally relatable. Set in the context of a recent family visit to China to tend to her grandmother, the writer delves into the relationships between productivity and inspiration, contentment and work output, and life’s basic and plentiful sources of fulfillment. Describing her propensity to derive meaning from the fruit of her labor and her tendency to plan and prioritize in pursuit of the most efficient allocation of her time, the author narrates how she arrived at the revelation that the inspiration necessary for her work and the satisfaction she derived from the latter requires healthy spontaneity.

You Won’t Grind Your Way to Aliveness

— writes Becoming | More Myself

Back at home, when I suppressed my desire to be inspired and connected, I inevitably operated from disconnection. Yet, self-expression and creativity flow as a byproduct of harnessing possibility and wonder in our lives. Our best work rarely emerges when we’re deprioritizing our bodies and souls. By putting work and self-expression above all else, I closed myself off to drawing inspiration from other areas of my life.

Continue Reading

EVERYDAY WISDOM

This essay lucidly illustrates the truth in the phrase “You learn something new every day” through a series of brief narratives describing conversations at social gatherings with friends, acquaintances, and strangers. In this piece there’s an entertaining mélange of humor, insight, and personality which shine through in anecdotes involving an array of people at parties, church, and meals. Whether you wish to ponder faith, travel, or the influence of the ancients on us moderns, there’s food for thought.

Things I heard & Overheard At Parties

— writes Lola’s Newsletter

Then I celebrated my housemate’s birthday again at a pub. Nothing to report here. Conversation was nice and pleasant. I did meet her little brother and invited myself to his tech company’s Christmas party. He did say he would be happy to oblige, though.

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LANGUAGE AND ETHNICITY

This article discusses the role and future of literary Sinitic (popularly referred to in English as classical Chinese) in Vietnam’s history and identity. The author presents a brief yet thorough overview of Hán-Nôm and its presence in contemporary Vietnam as well as its noticeable retreat in the modern age. He raises the question of whether Vietnamese people can reconceive of literary Sinitic as truly their own despite its association with Chinese domination, a historical narrative that has been further complicated by the importation of Western concepts of race and ethnicity. The entire newsletter has been highly informative, and anybody with a passion for Vietnamese history will find it illuminating.

Appropriating Literary Sinitic

— writes Vietnam & Modernity

For Vietnamese like TTD, why is it necessary to appropriate literary Sinitic? Why can’t they just simply learn and use it? One appropriates something when one does not have it—that is to take something for one’s own use, without the owner’s permission. I think it has to do with how modern Vietnamese see themselves, see others.

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This issue of AWC features was curated by of Scrupulous Pessimism. If you enjoyed these picks, be sure to subscribe to his Substack.

Scrupulous Pessimism

Occasional musings. Interested in public opinion, narrative formation, and how ideas shape the world. Middle power diplomacy & the impact of war on national identity

By sunshine moonlight

A very warm welcome to the newest additions to the Asian Writers Directory!

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Glad to have you all in this growing community.

To join the directory, you can fill out the form here.