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Hi, you reached out to me on Twitter regarding the Strange Theater Fabulist reading at AWP Portland. Would love to have you on board if you are still interested. . Please send me an email where you can best be contacted for future correspondence. Best, Sequoia Nagamatsu

Hi Sequoia! Thank you for reaching out to me here and sorry I don’t check often enough. I did accept your friend request on Facebook and would love to be a part of the reading if it’s still happening! Let me Facebook message you back.

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I enjoyed "The Greenest Gecko," which based on what I know of recent Thai politics, read like a satire of same. I'm not quite sure of the symbolism of the 50 geckos at the end, though - what did you have in mind? Thanks, Jonathan Edelstein

Thank you for reading! There is no meaning to 50 geckos. Perhaps that the female body is especially disposable, easily manipulated, and easy to get rid of.

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October 2016 Updates

I’m here at the Anderson Center with these amazing ladies who continually inspire and encourage me. We managed to survive an American debates night together, though I can’t promise that Trump’s hate speech won’t give me nightmares. Some news:

1. I got accepted into HomeSchool Claremont for my first ever poetry workshop. How daunting! 

2. I will be going to Assisi, Italy for Arte Studio Ginestrelle in May 2017.

3. My story “How to be Hi-So” will be forthcoming on TAYO Literary Magazine.

And now, to celebrate my famous friends:

1. Mai Nardone and Luke Dani Blue are notable mentions in Best American Short Stories 2016. Woo hoo!

2. Henry Wei Leung and Jennifer S. Cheng both have new books out.

3. Sunisa Nardone has an interview where she talks about inspirations for her novel.

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Thanks for the headshots and pie, Bao Phi!

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Took a trip to Maiden's Rock, after one week at the Anderson Center.

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The little house on the Bay.

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Just arrived at Willapa Bay AIR.

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The travels continue. Up next, Willapa Bay AIR for some finishing-the-damn-manuscript work.

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Summer 2016 Books to Read

Happiness is sitting down at a table full of som tum and khao neow, to read these books:

1. Do Not Say We Have Nothing: Madeleine Thien I feel like Maddie’s personal publicist! I’ve heard an excerpt of this back in Hong Kong 2013, when I just started my creative writing program and wasn’t sure if writing was truly my calling or not. She got up to read a few pages of Swirl, looking at the second husband, remembering her first, wishing she wasn’t in the position she was in now and bam! I’m weeping in an auditorium. Later reviews have praised Maddie for her ability to capture the rush of these young musicians playing a symphony in her sounds of words, but I remember Maddie talking about how she listened to Proust while she wrote and I can’t wait to be immersed and lost in this novel.

2. Grief Is The Thing With Feathers: Max Porter The fact that the Guardian reviewed it and longlisted it for the first book award, and that Graywolf published it, should be enough of a reason to get a hold of a copy in your hands. There’s an imaginary (or so?) friend named Crow helping a family full of grief get over a death. Pushing the boundaries of language and genre, I can’t help but be drawn to this!

3. Multiple Choice: Alejandro Zambra I saw a clip of this on my homeboy Jamel’s instagram, and instantly thought: fascinating. As a lover of strange structures that bring out the poignancy of relationships, this sounds like some interesting shit to read told in an interesting way.

4. The Melancholy of Anatomy: Shelley Jackson  Can we just admit that GoodReads spoiled this for me? London, the city, has a menstrual flow. That’s enough to get me to click ‘yes’ on my Amazon Cart (and only because I couldn’t find this collection in any independent bookstore in San Francisco.) Not only she multi-talented in multidisciplines, Ms. Jackson is also the author of the Skin Project, where she got a story tattooed on 2,095 people. Nothing’s stopping me from reading this bad ass author now.

5. Forty Rooms: Olga Grushin

The New York Times poses a lot of great questions this book does not answer that leads me to believe it’s going to be as eye-opening as Ferrante’s books were for me on womanhood. A lot of my time spent at residencies this summer were really propelled by the strong bonds of sisterhood I’ve founded, where we talked about societal roles on women and why women writers don’t often enough get to pursue their writing dreams.

Those are just a few priorities for me - what are you reading in the last weeks of summer?

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But first, where do I have breakfast?

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Arrived at the Ragdale Foundation. If you ask me, the prairie is pretty idyllic.

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I’ve been converted to the light side of Biologique Recherche. After reading reviews on this french brand, my esthetician Christina at Spa Radiance put me onto this brand to rid my pesky little blackheads that commonly surface up during the summer. Let me be the first to say that this paraben-free, sulphate-free yeast-loving brand smells so nasty. Almost like fermenting bread left in the fridge over a decade and the smell lingers on your pillowcase, on your towel, in your boudoir air.

The regime has now been changed to this:

1. Wash face with Luzern Pure Cleansing gelee or Eminence Stone Crop Gel Wash.

2. Pat dry then swipe face with Biologique Recherche P50W on a damp cotton pad (it stinks a teeny bit, but not as bad as the P50 itself).

3. Massage face with Crema Dermopurifiante, which is thick, brown and smells much worse than the two masks. The Luzern Force de Vie gel has been reserved for hot humid summer days. I alternate between the Eminence probiotic mask and the Masque Vivant, both meant to clear my skin up from hormonal acne and those pesky little buggers. I’ll mix the Masque Vivant with equal amounts of baking soda and the entire thing is like a failed science experiment that foams up in my hand to look exactly like diarrhea. I guess if kopi luwak is a thing, why wouldn’t there be something similar for your face?

The results so far this week have been super smooth skin, like a porcelain plate but the spots are still there, darkening. Here’s to putting things that smell bad on your face: the smell scares away the germs.

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At the Bay Area Book Festival where literature is being celebrated.

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English not considered the right language to tell stories of Hong Kong.

“Needless to say, a collection of English fiction still has its limitations. English to some extent remains a language exclusive to those who are relatively privileged and well educated in Hong Kong, so the issues concerned in this book are frequently “upper-middle-class” issues.” - “Queen of Statue Square review, ”Asiatic Volume 9, December 2015 by Shi Huiwen, University of Hong Kong

If there is a language that divides the privileged and the under privileged in Hong Kong, it would be English. In 1894, King George V School was opened to cater the children of British expatriates living in Britain’s colony. At the time when I went there, you had to show proof of a foreign passport to attend, that you were not a native Hong Konger, that your English was fluent enough to handle a British school curriculum.

We weren’t allowed to speak Cantonese on the premises. That worked because we had a common tongue by which all students of all nationalities can communicate in. It maintained the traditional teacher-student power dynamic where we could not talk back or gossip against our teachers in a language they did not understand.

There was always a lot of prejudice against international school kids. They were rich, elitist, and lived in bubbles that excluded the rest of Hong Kong. These bubbles robbed most international school kids a life of one that would be more assimilated - why be in Rome and not do as the Romans did? Yet, there were plenty of international schools to choose from: Chinese International School taught classes in Cantonese, Mandarin and English (Can you imagine my shock of working in the world of real-estate where blonde-haired brokers spoke perfectly accented Cantonese? I envied their education) and even more culturally catered schools like German Swiss International or French International school, where children of European expatriates were able to study under the curriculums their parents studied under, to perhaps even go back to their native countries to work. Even Hong Kong parents, who had their eyes set on their child attending top universities of the world sent their kids to international schools, perhaps highlighting the bigger elephant in the room: what was wrong with Hong Kong’s public school system?

The English Schools Foundation received a lot of criticism because it was a school funded by the colonialists, and also because someone had to take advantage of the government stipend and buy oysters for lunch. 

One of my most direct confrontation with English as a privilege was playing rugby for the Hong Kong national youth team. At the time in 2004, there were only a few all-female teams in the country, and we played as DEA Tigers against the formidable Gai Wu. In fact, Gai Wu prides themselves in being the “all-Asian” rugby team to combat the British Colonialists at their own sport - their name is a mah jong term “to win” with the lower hand. Their goal was to upset those who were considered physically larger than them, the creators of the sport. They approached each game with a ferocity and determination that was unparalleled.

When we tried out for the Hong Kong national team, and ended up on the same team as native Cantonese speakers, one of the most difficult challenges was trying to find the right language to communicate in. It wasn’t hard to learn “yao” (right) and “jor” (left) for our passes, to let one another know where we were, to confuse and disguise our moves against English-speaking teams abroad or at the Rugby Sevens. What was hard was understanding that while we as international kids saw rugby as a certain kind of beer-guzzling, party-going lifestyle, half of our team saw it as a job. Some of our Hong Kong teammates saw rugby as a way to get out of the Chinese school system. Some of them saw rugby as a way to be a part of Hong Kong’s rich and diverse product from an oppressive past where their voices did not matter.

I don’t speak for all international students, nor do I speak for all of my international teammates on our team. But if English is the common language of reaching large publishers and publications, then why are those who write in English still getting the same flack? “Zuk Sing” (bamboo stem) is a Cantonese term to describe Chinese people born in Western countries, who are hollow inside in terms of their knowledge of Chinese culture and tradition, one that was brought up in Shi Huiwen’s review of the “Queen of Statue Square.” In America, the term is Banana, for when you are white on the inside but yellow on the outside.

But this term is not applicable to third world culture kids who are not hollow but in fact, full of many cultures and traditions, who are born into many cultures and traditions. A Thai girl who lives in Hong Kong and speaks Cantonese and English should be able to write about whatever the hell she wants without being coined as inauthentic by the “Authenticity Police”. How do you even sign up to belong to the Authentic Police Force? Terms that shame “inauthentic” story-tellers should be obsolete because in our ever-expanding globalized world, there is a place for many different stories, many different voices and an opportunity to have conversation about what it means to tell those stories, and who gets to tell them. Without this open mindedness, we risk narrowing our world for our children, and our children’s children.

1. http://linguisticpulse.com/2013/06/26/language-privilege-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/

2. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/84509/bdavila_1.pdf?sequence=1

3. http://clarissahirst.com/latest-post/do-you-need-to-check-your-linguistic-privilege/

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Thank you Evan Karp, Christine No, and Bel Poblador for having me at Quiet Lightning, and Jeff Chon for publishing this first in the East Bay Review.

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A visit to the SF MOMA prompted a whole series of writing exercises:

1. Quantum people: But what if we were composed entirely out of a different substance?

2. Describe a face that is blurred.

3. Write without breaking the sentence / Reuse punctuation to keep that feeling / that the next line is simply a continuation / of everything that came before.

4. Structure your narrative in a circle, make the rhythm circular. Round the ends.

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Most recently, at Quiet Lightning in San Francisco's Chinatown 

Photo Credit: 41 Ross Street's Ms. Gee.