Or so everyone thought when I went to Bora Bora with my dad. — “Would you like to renew your vows on the beach with a traditional Polynesian ceremony?” is a question that shouldn’t make you feel uncomfortable in your own skin, unless it’s just been directed to you and a 64-year-old Nordic-looking man wearing a Hawaiian shirt, on to which has been embroidered…

Hillsborough, California — 2005 In elementary school, I longed to be full Chinese. I belonged, after all, to an elite clique of Chinese girls. We ruled fifth grade with our calculated indifference, colorful arsenal of gel pens, and our adolescent sense of intellectual superiority. But I was clearly the black…

A meditation on unidentifiable mounds of flesh A giant glob of a carcass. It washed up in November, 1896. Weighted down by its seven tons of pasty flesh, the blob had sunk, halfway, into the St. Augustine sands. The lump of protoplasm had a pinkish, pearly sheen beneath the Florida…