The Unpacking Series
The Unpacking Series
e.
Hello, I’m e. I don’t often allow myself to finish thoughts, so I write about things I try to bury and intentions I try to keep. Thanks for being here.
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We’re so different. She brought gifts from Hong Kong: a moisturizer, hair mascara, hair treatment oil, and face masks. I know what the moisturizer and face masks are for; I have no idea what hair mascara and hair oil are supposed to do....
You’re six when you fly for the first time. You tell the girl beside you in class that you’re moving away. You don’t know where. You’re not her friend. You say goodbye anyway. The next day, you cross an ocean ten thousand kilometres away...
K.: “Just because things don’t go according to plan doesn’t mean the world is going to go up in flames. You need to relax and just let things happen.” How do I do that when it feels like a moral failing? When it feels like proof that...
Mom, on the phone: “There are raccoons outside. That’s really lucky, right? I woke up and saw them in our backyard. They’re looking for food and playing with the water. They usually only come out at night, so seeing them during the day...
K.: “You let them take and take from you and every year there is less and less of you.” It’s bleak, but I don’t think I can stop them. At some point, there’ll be nothing left to take, right?
A complete stranger: “Wow, I don’t hear an accent at all when you talk. Where are you from?” I could have this conversation in my sleep. The only time I can count on this particular conversation not happening is when I’m speaking to...
Every Saturday, we would walk twenty minutes from home to the nearest dim sum restaurant. We would order the same dishes: taro dumplings, curry squid, lotus leaf rice, and sometimes Malay sponge cake as dessert for me. Then we’d walk...
U.: “We’ve talked about the impossible standards placed on women before. It’s absolutely insane how normalized we’ve made it where sacrifices are just expected of women, and the selflessness that is required should somehow be limitless,...
Dad: “I was pulled over for drinking and driving. It’s only a 24-hour prohibition. Don’t tell your mom.” I thought he’d grown out of it. I thought I’d grown out of feeling anything for this.
Mom: “You’ve lost too much weight.” No, Mom, I’ve always been this thin. You’re only just now seeing me.
Talking to people, friends and strangers alike, has always been its own kind of nightmare. My heart races if I even think about having to talk to someone. I lose confidence before I’ve even started. Wait, is it possible to lose something...
Talking to people, friends and strangers alike, has always been its own kind of nightmare. My heart races if I even think about having to talk to someone. I lose courage before I’ve even started. Wait, is it possible to lose something...
I looked at the words I’d spent a year exsanguinating. There were rivulets of loathing—a rainbow of rust—but there was a smattering of red and yellow and green, too. I thought the capillaries would become rich with prismatic brilliance...
Driving has always been a study in contradictions. It’s liberation and confinement. Capability and diffidence. Exhilaration and terror. More terror than exhilaration, sometimes. My dad scared me silly when I first learned how to drive,...