Poetry — My grandmother left her father’s farm in Canton, leech-filled rice paddies of her youth, for the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, a train ride away. Only to scrimp and save in a shantytown, embroidering other people’s shirts and selling cigarettes, Raising seven children — She stitched and sewed her dreams for…

The struggle is real: advice from writers other than myself — I had to pee so badly it woke me up from dead slumber. The alarm said 7:11am — that’s sleeping in, for me. For the next hour and a half, I laid in the darkness while my wife continued to dream. She had her eye mask on so I knew…

But the uptick in violence warrants attention — Fourth grade. My friend Richard, god bless his soul, was hiding under his desk again, fresh after another episode of eating Elmer’s glue straight out of the bottle. It was my second week at my new school in Stamford, Connecticut. …

Thank you, Kamala Harris, from young women everywhere — At around 12:35 am, we woke up to loud talking and laughing. A group of guys from a wedding party had just returned to their hotel room next door to ours. At first, we thought they would settle down for the night. Half an hour passed and they were still…

Young people can have it, too. — There have been a few times, during the course of a digital rectal exam, when a patient has asked me: Why would you ever choose to go into this? I laugh. My joke is that I hate going to dentists as much as people hate going to proctologists. I always…

A social media movement calling out sexism is ablaze on Twitter — On the first day of our intern year, we were shown a slideshow of ‘appropriate attire’. Men were to wear suits and ties. Okay — easy. Women, on the other hand, had a hundred other rules imposed on us. No dangly earrings. Hair tied back. Minimal make-up. No low-cut shirts…

Discussing super smellers and super seers alongside an update of my nasal status — You know that feeling when you’re standing in a dark room and the door opens and you’re blinded by the light streaming in? That’s how I’ve felt the past few days as my smell slowly comes back. Every day there’s a moment or two as my nose is assaulted with…

It has to do with all our online meetings — I wrote a piece a month ago about how the pandemic made us better people. Here is one way the pandemic made us worse. On a recent seven am conference, the likes of which used to be held in a large auditorium, the presenter standing at the front of the…

The struggle between your life and your art is real. — Do I quit my day job? The short answer is: no. The longer answer is: maybe. The prophecy My seventh-grade teacher once said to me at a parent-teacher conference: You’re good at everything, so the hardest choice you make will be deciding what to do with your life. Well, Mrs. Friedman, I’m…