i'm a Which, not a Witch

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17 year cicadas

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Me watching the NBA Playoffs for the first time and trying to explain basketball to my kids...oy... I feel responsible for the Knicks losing!

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No-No Boy by John Okada

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The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante.

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Is it wrong to eat the Easter bunny on Easter?! Yesterday my kooky, no-mercy Dad (a.k.a. Unconditional Surrender Wai Gong) caught, killed, skinned, and gutted the culprit that's been eating up his garden plants and wreaking havoc on his fig trees. I was squeamish the entire time and, though I wasn't the executioner, felt like I had blood on my hands, especially when tasked with the responsibility of cooking up poor Peter Rabbit. As I hesitantly threw it into the pot, I felt like I could still hear the little squeals of the rabbit as it faced the end. Sizzle of the pot, squeak squeak, sizzle sizzle, squeak squeak. My Dad reproached me for my Americanness: "Come on, this is how we lived in the village. I learned this from your grandmother. You like your Shake Shack and you don't feel bad?? Eating the sacred animal of India!"

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Summary of the last eight years of my marriage

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Cone cabbage.

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From last weekend's Lantern Festival 元宵节

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The Buried Giant.

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Everything seems naturally black and white these wintry days

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Kimchi 🧡

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The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu.

My favorites: Good Hunting, The Literomancer, The Paper Menagerie, All the Flavors, The Litigation Master and the Monkey King.

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Happy moments despitethe pandemic. Miss you, dear nephew. You left this world much too soon.

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How The Storming Of The Capitol Was — And Wasn't — About Police

Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, says it's a mistake to boil Wednesday's events down to questions of police force. He argues we need a broader conversation about race, politics and justice.

“One of the major bulwarks of policing is not right wing extremists, it's centrist liberalism. It's the belief that what's most important is the production of order. And the willingness to to turn that problem over to police and the criminal legal system. And the kind of willful ignorance about what the consequences of that turning over are for the people who are subjected to it. So part of what's happening is a racial reckoning. That the folks who've been subjected to that system of order are unwilling to put up with it anymore.

And so this continues to be the problem: Whites who have benefited from this system of order continue to support order over justice. And what I think is being demanded in this moment is some courage. Some willingness to stare a little bit of disorder in the face. As a necessary part of producing a more just and ultimately more stable society, because, look, our state, our society, is a mess. The standards of living are declining for all but the richest. People are miserable. And to say that we need to hold on to that system at the expense of racial justice because it's less scary is a profound kind of cowardice.”

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'Good-looking for an Asian': how I shed white ideals of masculinity

Asian American masculinity has been linked to the model minority myth and a hierarchy of racist stereotypes

The last part of this article made my heart momentarily break!

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Christmas Eve hot pot.

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A labor of love - croissants!

#tartine