Marrakech, Morocco

It was a quiet limbo, she thought, when you cared too much to tell the truth but not enough to lie. The truth was always passively cruel, without motive or malice, yet sharper, colder, more pervasively unrelenting. She didn’t know what it meant to love, she knew that and could never admit it. A different breed. For her, love was not roses and rose-tinged words and easy daydreams of the future, but love was instead like sand, and you had to fight it, minute by minute, to stop it from slipping through your hands

111 Minna Gallery, San Francisco, California

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, I can only imagine the tremendous emotion, chaos, and disorder that must have erupted—the screams, the tears, the rumbles that shook the ground as the riots erupted for days.

Was it anything like the way the ground shook for my father as a child, watching his father, my grandfather, beaten for no reason and publicly humiliated?  Born into poverty, with fifty-six cousins and both parents working as government officials under the new regime, my father, twelve-years-old in 1968, could not understand why his father was being punished by the very cause he supported.  Whether you were branded “black” or “red,” a result of your socioeconomic status prior to the Cultural Revolution, no one was safe from the inexplicable wrath of the Red Guards.  “Volunteer Army” was my father’s original name; “Beat the English” and “Beat the Foreigners” were those of his sisters.

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Barcelona, Spain

When I think about traveling, my daydreams feel like flying. The world is so big and so small at the same time. Big enough to get lost in, small enough to explore. So that you have somewhere to go but will never quite know its nature. Home is my heart, but how could I confine myself to the same 300 miles for my entire life?

She is so in love with him; I can see it in the grooves of her neck as she turns to look at him, and when I ask her about him she mumbles only negatory sounds and says no words.

Though I have known her for years I have never before seen her in love; the softness of her face pulled taut over her bones, the flagging hope in her eyes, like the sweet fleshy crispness of the center of a ripe watermelon, gradually hardening as it spreads toward the edge.

My mother used to hoist up watermelons to her hip and smack them with the palm of her hand, listening closely to the pitch of the blow for ripeness. “Listen to that,” she’d say to the air, “this is the one.” But it was always a guess. You never knew till you cracked it open what you would get. And as surely as I know she loves him, I am sure too that he does not, as her eyes never leave him as he walks around the room, as he gazes at the shadows behind her back and lays his hand on her arm, never waiting to listen for the ensuing blow.

Cambridge, Massachusetts