Continued from Untitled Fairy Tale: Part 1. Continued in Untitled Fairy Tale: Part 3. Once upon a time, a well-meaning, hard-working, but mentally complacent knight named Grant fell from the top of an enchanted tower where he had been hanging by his fingertips because he forgot to hold on. His descent was witnessed by his loyal […]
So much of Manhattan is patches of slick tourist traps bristling with selfie sticks and oversized billboards. But if you look carefully into the perpetual scaffolding, you can still find the hotel where Tesla died in love with a pigeon, or where Washington was inaugurated around the corner from TJMaxx. If you care about that […]
Once upon a time, one of those beautiful princesses you always hear about lived in her very own tower on top of a high(ish) mountain. The tower was a proper fairy tale tower, so it was surrounded by brambles and thorns and lined with slimy moss. On the ground around it, like trampled flowers, lay […]
(cont’d from Nineteen Cent Chicken) Dad went to grad school with Aunt Mimi’s ex-husband–the one who left her the night she arrived in America. I heard he was tall and good looking, so I always imagined him with a strong square jaw and chiseled cheekbones. Dad on the other hand was short with an almost […]
My grandmother turned 80 this year. I burned all my poetry, she said. We shared a room when I was little I watched her stealing out of bed fumbling for her glasses in the dark when a line was too good to wait ’til day I burned all my poetry. She wrote in pencil on scraps of […]
“Chicken was nineteen cents a pound,” says Aunt Mimi at our post-Thanksgiving lunch. “We would buy twenty pounds of it and fill our freezer. Then I had to cook it. Everyday we ate chicken –curry chicken, fried chicken, soy sauce chicken, garlic chicken, chicken soup…When we finally could afford to buy anything else, I didn’t […]
“Did you walk the narrow streets winding between the buildings?” he asked. “Yes, of course,” Eliza said. She saw them in movies and glossy magazines. She had studied Madison’s Facebook thoroughly as well. There was one picture where the moon reflected off the wet cobblestones onto the stucco walls and then reflected back onto the path […]
“Don’t take a taxi.” the girl at the hostel said. “They can tell you’re not from around here.” “But I’m Chinese too,” I said. “But you’re not from here. Your skin, the way you dress, the way you walk. And then you open your mouth and you’re definitely not from here.”
The Game: There were five classes a year. Grades were given every semester. Goal was to get the highest average. Regular classes counted for four points, Honors for five, AP for six. (Those were for A’s, of course. B’s were an integer lower, C’s lower than that. But if you had to worry about B’s […]
Beilin Ye 