What Stinks?
* Lillian Li * I eat the stinky tofu on my second day in Beijing, passing up two metal carts before finally biting the bullet at a stand in Wangfujing. I hand over ten kuai and watch as the vendor...
View ArticleLove Letter to My Fanfiction Past
* Lillian Yi * Remember when you were a fan of just about everything? “Please don’t scream in the car!” your dad would shout when you became overexcited by a dog we had just driven past, or a...
View ArticleClean Sweep
* Lillian Li * August 7th was moving day, a day I had anticipated with equal parts dread and excitement since the dead-end of January.
View ArticleMy Preoccupation
* Lillian Li * Here are the things about me that you could glean from a quick glimpse at my search history: I hurt my calf kickboxing and I want to do something about it. I have a crush on my...
View Article“The Collective,” Divided: A Review
*Lillian Li* Don Lee’s prose is not pretty, or even particularly effortless in his novel. He tends towards wordy, didactic passages and heavy-handed, eye-rolling dialogue—one racist bar customer calls...
View ArticleLittle Instructions
Going through my parents’ bookshelves, where all the books of my life end up, is a distinctly pleasurable activity. Like a song, the titles stacked along the shelves contain distilled memories, and the...
View ArticleSentimental Value
* Lillian Li * After my grandmother died, my mother was given all of her possessions. There was a lifetime of sentimental trinkets, of furniture that had never gone a day without its dust-protecting...
View ArticleSmall Talk
Writerly small talk is no less terrible than all other kinds of small talk. I expect that the coffee table or cocktail conversations of botanists, estheticians, and Sunday school teachers all have...
View ArticleFound In Translation
As evidenced by my previous blog posts, I have been drawn by the predicament of writing race, or writing difference. Without a doubt, I am still bothered by this question of how we, or really, I, want...
View ArticlePerfect Vision
I do not remember the first time I tried on a pair of glasses. I know that it was the summer of third grade, and in pictures, the glasses are small and delicate. My bad eyesight was due to a penchant...
View ArticleSentimental Value, Pt. 2
As I've written before, my grandmother's apartment holds a particular place in my head. I keep revisiting the floor plan, and the room that glows brightest in my memory is the kitchen. The kitchen, I...
View ArticleThe Love Hate, Joy Luck Club
My mother tells me that if I want the novel I’m writing to be a bestseller in America, I should put in a couple of ghosts. Americans love ghosts, especially Chinese ghosts. I stammer back that I’m not...
View ArticleA Weekend and a Week: My Attempt at a Writing Retreat
All of this is to say what so many writers have already said: it’s hard to write a novel and act like a human being. You can’t have a foot in both worlds, half in and half out of your mind. So some...
View ArticleSnapchats and Secrets
When I was a kid, I used to trade secrets like baseball cards. We moved around a bit when I was younger, and I wasn't good at making friends. I was better at observing the kids around me, and analyzing...
View ArticleIn Defense of Small Talk
Some may be surprised to hear this position. After all, I harangued writers for over-relying on the small-talk topic of "What have you been reading?" Hopefully, this contradiction goes away by the end...
View ArticleFirst Readers
Reading that first chapter, I was so self-conscious. I made him lie down and turn his head away from me. I stopped frequently to ask if he’d fallen asleep. But slowly, as I reached the end of the first...
View ArticleHome Visits
Many of my friends live all across the continent from me, in San Francisco, in Cambridge, in New York and Philadelphia. They live in places that are built for visitors, with landmarks and historical...
View ArticleA Traditional Thanksgiving
I see how tradition can curdle; how tradition can camouflage and domesticate violence, excuse ineptitude, and encourage ignorance. I see, around me, people questioning tradition, plumbing its darkness,...
View ArticleThe Apparent Agency of Adults
Adulthood has often been explained as the moment you are supposed to know what you are doing. With your life, your job, your hair. Yet judging from the think pieces that continue to trickle out of the...
View ArticleClusters
To end this cycle without limiting myself to just one book at a time, I am attempting to curate the books that litter my home. I’m trying to cluster books together, to avoid, as best I can, the erasure...
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