Creative Nonfiction

I cannot speak of voting without speaking of citizenship—the goal of many immigrants like me escaping home countries where they face persecution and death. Citizenship, for me, is a moving target.

The first time I dressed in men’s clothes, I looked in the mirror and cried.

A bomb is a bomb is a bomb. But each one blows apart a unique moment. Eight bombs kill three hundred and fifty people in 2019, and I’m spiraling back, thinking about the bombs that fell during the Sri Lankan Civil War.

My mother tells me to be careful.

I believe that writers should have a childlike sense of wonder about the world.

I sold my novel and bought a kimono bathrobe.

In Boston, I was immersed in queer and immigrant communities that nourished and sustained me. In South Dakota, all I had was this book.

The newest addition to Red Hen's Anthology Series, Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents is an anthology of flash memoir, personal essays and poetry edited by the adult child of an immigrant born and raised in the US. The collection contains contributions from sixty-five writers who were either born and/or raised in the US by one or more immigrant parent. Their work describes the many contradictions, discoveries and life lessons one experiences when one is neither seen as fully American nor fully foreign. Contributors include Richard Blanco, Tina Chang, Joseph Lagaspi, Li-Young Lee, Timothy Liu, Naomi Shihab Nye, Oliver de la Paz, Ira Sukrungruang, Ocean Vuong and many other talented writers from throughout the US.

"My love affair with women started when I learned about the female suicide bombers in Sri Lanka. I was five. It blew my mind that women—the make-upped, dark-eyed beauty queens of Bollywood movies—could be dangerous enough to strap on explosives under the folds of their sarees."

"This is a rage we’ve all inherited, folded up in the pleats of cotton sarees, transmuted from the heads of our mothers at the same time they scolded us for not knowing how to cook daal, and how will we keep a man happy? We learn our anger through osmosis, or maybe it’s in the breast milk, spreading through our veins long before we learn how to look only at the floor and walk without showing our ankles."

"My plan was to book a flight on my credit card. I would take a cab to the airport, arrive in a Midwestern town, rent a car, and drive to a gun shop. I’d buy a gun — a small, reliable pistol — and drive out into a cornfield."

"My anger has fragmented these stories. Perhaps it’s because anger is not sustainable as an emotion. I could write only little bits and pieces at a time, couldn’t make myself stay in the trance for more than an hour. Almost all of the little fragments in both stories were written at different times, sometimes years apart, and then put together into a coherent whole."

"The art, and only the art, must exist for me in that mind-space. Nothing else. And at the same time, I know that my mindspace, which was constructed by the lived realities of my life (including my identity as a transnational queer writer of color), will inevitably slant my writing."

"If you’re a South Asian writer who wants to get published in the Western market, the directives are clear: Write about a large family. Write about an arranged marriage. Give it a Bollywood ending. "

"Too many of the stories about South Asian people and culture that become popular in the Western world are told by white people (The Jungle Book, Life of Pi, Slumdog Millionaire, etc.). Shouldn’t we ask ourselves why white audiences seem to only want to read about brown people when, like Riley’s name, the stories themselves have been twisted and made palatable for them? Why is the consumption of brown stories still, at its core, about white people and their needs?"

"Carlos was sleeping in his oven when we found him. The gas stove on, unlit. Empty liquor bottles rolled through the cramped apartment, their quiet tinking vibrating the empty walls."

"It stings the back of your throat, something sweet on the top of your mouth, the underbelly of your tongue. Squint through the thick gray air, the yellow haze of safety glasses. This is gunpowder, invading your lungs, combusting starchy smoke. This was not your idea."