Tag Archives: contemplating life
Rejection and My Love/Hate Read of Ender’s Game
I received my first rejection letter from a grad school today and the deep waters of my soul are troubled. It’s useless for friends to say rejection is a part of life — of course I know that. It still stings anyway. It still makes you feel like your insides are thunderstorming. My insides have […]
Goodbye to All That and More
It might seem overly simplistic to say that I bought Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York because I was leaving Beijing and could not find an anthology of elegiac essays bidding farewell to this grimy city instead of its more famous counterpart across the Pacific Ocean, but it would be true […]
This Is How The Entire Course Of A Life Can Be Changed
All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience — if only he had had them both at once — would surely have seen them both through. And then what unborn children might have had their […]
On Originality and Procrastination and Fall Reading
As I write this, I am wandering around my tiny apartment in my nightgown, wrapped inside a huge grey shawl, bedraggled hair tumbling down my back like some fallen lady in a Victorian storybook. It has been a morning of trying unsuccessfully to write my personal statement for MFA applications. I am feeling small and […]
On How A Construction Site Is Inspiring Me To Write
This is the base of a building that they are constructing on a plot of land behind my office. When I first moved into this office, there was nothing on this plot of land. If you look closely at the construction site, you will see a heap of garbage at the bottom left hand corner. […]
On The Cider House Rules and Nostalgic Recollections of My Adolescence
Good night, you Princes of Maine, you Kings of New England. I’ve been reading The Cider House Rules. Or rather, re-reading it. Has this ever happened to you? You can’t remember actually reading a book, but as you read it becomes more and more familiar, as if this is a terrain you have crossed […]
In Which I Read and Drool and Contemplate My Increasing Age
The first time I went to Black Sesame Kitchen, a small private kitchen here in Beijing, I was extremely apprehensive. Oh, not about the food, which I had heard was scrumptious (people need to bring back this word and retire delicious) but because it was to be a communal dinner. Just me, my boyfriend and […]
Buried Beneath All The Lies 