“These days, learning a language feels particularly significant and necessary. Learning a language: a small multiplication of life in a world of multiplying death.”
The dining hall lurches with athletes. You sit down next to your friend’s maybe-roommate and she looks down at her own plate. “Wow,” she says, “you’re eating so little.”
One sunny Saturday morning, at the end of my first week in Japan, Ms. Shinako arrived, packaged gift in hand, bowing deeply and smiling as she stepped through the door. She was in her mid-twenties, petite and a little bit … Read More
I like full lips. Not so that the mouth looks large, just lips that look a little heavier than mine, so that they fall almost into a pout, curling, hanging. I like lips that say, “I’m here, I’m here to do something,” and spread to reveal a smile of wide, white teeth.
“Nails are too long,
can’t remember to cut them
they are colored with everything I hold
like the skin of orange peel—
a citrus flesh that never bleeds”
The first time I smoked a cigarette, I was sardined with six other middle-school aged girls in a shower of my boarding school dorm. The logic was that if Matron caught us lighting up we would hastily strip down, turn on the faucet, and pretend that we were just casually showering together in the middle of the night.
“If we stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by what we are—we can all be freer.” When Emma Watson made this call for freedom before the United Nations at the launching of a new gender-egalitarian pledge for gender equality, she knew what she was getting into.
