My essay for The Boston Review, selected as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2024, highlights a hidden history of anti-Asian violence in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s and gestures toward Black-Brown solidarities, past, present and future: “In the tension between the idea and the reality of “who we are” and “what we stand for” as Americans, I do my work as a writer. I consider myself a lucky embodiment of the American Dream—lucky that my body was not broken with bricks or baseball bats for living it and lucky to have a body that, in a society beset by anti-Blackness, did not hinder my chances at it. Ever since the Dotbusters showed me how words could be weapons, I try my best to use America’s uneven, ironic blessings to illuminate how we have been led to hate each other and how we might transcend that history.”
