Month: August 2021

“Black and Other” touches upon some of the layers of my journey to my authentic self, some layers being race and color. When a light skin girl, with long curly hair tells you she’s Black and you think to question her. Think about how white supremacy has carved into us that being Black is not good enough. When she tells you she is Black, do not question her. Because being Black is enough. […]

In “An Ounce of Gold,” Hao Tran met with his kid brother on a special occasion and the two relived their past histories as Vietnamese refugees in the United States. The story about the brother was one of thousands of boat people who escaped South Vietnam after the end of Saigon and settled in America to live the stereotypical life of a well-assimilated immigrant. The story dives deeper into the trauma of their pasts and the ambiguity they find themselves in as citizens of no country. […]

i’m a chameleon with two tongues in my mouth / Punjabi and English / my mother tongue / and the other tongue / one the language of my blood the other of reason // i couldn’t speak anything except my mother tongue until i was five / Punjabi is what i spoke, it was how i was safe and survived/ Punjab comes from the Persian words panj, meaning five, and ab meaning water / it represents the five powerful rivers flowing across the lands / […]

This essay reflects on the life of a multiracial child growing up in a predominately white, isolated, rural town and the complexity of harboring identities seemingly misaligned. It questions the tokenization of mixed-race peoples and what it means to be mixed-race in a world still indoctrinated with the ideology behind the “One Drop Rule.” […]

This piece describes the author’s first queer romantic experience, which took place after she began working at a commercial BDSM dungeon. As the title suggests, the piece examines the gulf between fantasy and reality, courage and fear, desire and reluctance, as the author navigates a new world. […]

Heightened by the recent unrest in Colombia, a Colombiana-Americana describes the inner conflict of claiming both Colombia and the United States as home, rejected by both countries, and learning to embrace this duality as a gift. […]

As a Kenyan of South Asian descent, my sense of identity is deeply intertwined with the East African country that my ancestors chose as their home many generations ago. Growing up in Kenya, I knew who I was. But by moving to Canada, a country where you are defined by ethnicity and not nationality, I experienced a disconnect between how I looked and how I felt. I do not know where I belong anymore. This piece of writing captures an aspect of that realization, and loss. […]

This piece is about the subtlety with which harassment occurs at work. It comes in many forms and sometimes sweeps past us so swiftly that we hardly know how to respond in the moment, how to defend ourselves, or how to defend each other. […]

The short narrative essay “Getting Dressed” contemplates the relationships between physical appearance, cultural identity, and belonging through the one seemingly simple act: getting dressed. […]

“Haunted By a 4-Letter Word” describes changing personal, political, and societal perspectives on the meaning of the role of wife across fifty years, from the first issue of Ms., to more current discussions of hetero-normativity and marriage equality. The essay tells that broader cultural story through my personal narrative as a straight Catholic school girl of 16, to my current experience as a 68-year-old lesbian-identified bi- woman partnered, then married, to a woman for thirty-eight years. The essay concludes by describing newer meanings of ‘wife’, while acknowledging some of the current complexities of the label for queers. […]

In the thirty years that I’ve been living outside of my home country, Colombia, I have been asked numerous times if I am related to the drug lord Pablo Escobar. This is a predictable question since my last name is Escobar. This personal essay aims to understand why the question offends. Cultures are a rich tapestry of references, symbols, history, smells, landscapes, flavours, connections, and meanings. A migrant leaves most of her identifiers and references behind. Beyond a personal outburst of hurt, the essay tackles the effect of reducing a migrant to a stereotype. […]

When my mother was young, she was rich / So rich that her father bought her a coat / Straight from a well known department store / At ten after closing time by knocking on the window / And shaking a hand full of money at the manager. / It was a prepossessing coat. / Georgia clay red with a furry collar. / When my mother got a little older, her family was poor / And her mother and her had to share a coat. One had to wait for / the / other to come in, order to go out.It was a hideous coat. / […]

I know now that when you turn a man into a god, he does not die. He is inevitable; he is Poseidon with a beard; Hades on a chariot; Pan stealing the survival of the moon. My god sits constantly at my feet, on my shoulder, behind my eyes. Gods, of course, exist for us, silent and taunting, slowly conforming themselves into conjugal intervention until they know our bodies through entrance and scrutiny of entrance. […]

To get to your apartment junior year of college, you have to walk a winding path by your old freshman dorm, three newer apartments, and the community center before you arrive at home. Sometimes instead, you take a shorter path through the woods, like when it was below 40 degrees or you were running late to whatever class or club you’d committed to. On this particular night, you wrap your jacket tightly around yourself and opt for the shorter, if poorly lit, path. […]

“The Wedding Party” was inspired by an incident I experienced at a family wedding. In the light of the events of 2020, I revisited this moment in time, as well as many other racially charged moments in my life as a mixed race person, and the result was this essay. I hope this essay shares some insight into my experience as a mixed race person and hopefully illustrates the challenges of being mixed race in what often feels like a black and white world. […]

I do not know how to say what I am. Label me if you must. / All I know is this: / Nobody loves women as much as I love women. […]

“I’m gay,” I proclaimed to a sea of strange, blank faces. The word hung proud and uncertain, in the air just as out of place as I was, in this place and with these people, my new form and friends. Their chattering stopped dead, and a cold silence flooded the room. Hope hovered precariously on my tongue. Frozen, I stared at my dormmates, their shining, distant eyes fixed on mine. I swallowed. […]

As a mixed-race, Vietnamese person, Gabrielle Behar Trinh’s childhood often felt divided between two worlds. Sometimes, it was painfully obvious how much the world her mother existed in—Asian fruits and foods, language, ancestral traditions, and the memories of leaving Vietnam—thrived by remaining hidden from her father. Told in flashbacks of memories, including the grief following her mother’s miscarriage, this story touches on intergenerational trauma and living in-between. […]

My cousin told me not to discuss my engagement with her daughter, because I am marrying another woman. Through this experience, I reaffirmed how to best live my truth and take care of myself. […]

I wrote this Stand-Up comedy set for the Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity, who asked me to speak at a rally they held on April 22, 2021, in Jackson, Mississippi. I wanted to make my green card story funny. […]

My story describes a horrifying threat of violence I experienced at the age of nineteen, many decades ago. I recount the seemingly safe context in which it occurred, how I responded to the threat as it was unfolding and how profoundly the experience impacted on my character development. An important dimension of the story is how my need to be popular and offend no-one at the time led me to ignore my sense of impending danger. […]