Asians have long been touted as unusually successful. Compared to white people, we earn more money, we commit less white-collar and violent crime, we score better on tests, and we are overrepresented at elite universities. We are hardworking, have strong family financial support and we seem pretty ambitious.
Trigger Warning: the obvious. I was suicidal as young as twelve years old and this isn’t a light read.
Hi there. I am alive. And this is me. The real me. For all my honesty online, I have never shared this story. To date, my family and only two of…
I famously have no work-life balance. I run an international org that has hundreds of volunteers around the globe and over twenty-five teams from video editing to engineering to mental health. We have community outreach efforts launched in Nigeria, India, Philippines, the U.S., and Pakistan.
To just keep it all…
Gen Z is screwed. I wish it weren’t true. I’ve spent years practicing gratitude, excited to wake up alive each sunny day and deeply appreciative of little things, like the fact my smartphone has YouTube. The great kings of old got to hear Mozart performed twice a year. I get…
When I was a kid, I was ugly. Not in the cute but wears glasses way. Actually, really ugly. I had a huge overbite, top teeth that stuck out, a scrawny and ungraceful body, and frizzy, thin hair.
People let it be known, too, and although I suppose it hurt…
The truth is I’ve always been unlucky.
Growing up, I had few friends and was constantly bullied, even physically attacked. There was pressure to be perfect in everything. Keeping up with Tamilians is a lot harder than keeping up with the Joneses because there is no amount of anything ever…
Sometimes it can be spirit-crushingly difficult to keep up with writing. For example, I spent a lot of early September learning the fastest routes to various emergency rooms, both human and veterinary. After a series of fiascos, I wanted to jump back into regular publishing with something comfortable: the literary…
The world today is broken, unfair, and filled with far more sorrow and pain than any civilization should be forced to bear. A couple weeks ago, for example, my husband, my sister, and I drove past flags at half-mast for a shooting while ranting about the devastation in Afghanistan. …
The Tokyo Olympics have been truly fascinating this year. And for those following along, it seems like there are two ways people identify every single competition: the sport and the gender. It’s women’s basketball and men’s gymnastics and women’s diving, never just water polo or running or the 100m butterfly…
I have never had an abortion. This is something that sets me apart from almost all of my female friends.* I repeat: almost all. And it is something I consider myself lucky for because I am not ready to have children, it would be worse for the whole world if…
