Archive for the ‘Identity’ Category
Being Yi Jie Xie
Calligraphy practice, the characters of my name “Yi Jie Xie, how do you keep your white skirt so white?” For some reason, I have never forgotten this sentence, uttered to me on a hot summer day in Yangzhou, after an afternoon watching Chinese students play table tennis against American students with quite sub-par abilities. We [...]
February 20th, 2012A day in Colmar [October 2005]
Colmar, France is one of the most amazing and charming little cities I’ve ever been to. I was a freshly-minted eighteen-year-old, and it was my first stint outside the United States. It was a liberating day for me, when we visited this French town on the German border, because I broke away from the group after [...]
February 20th, 2012But time makes you older
At one of my favorite childhood places, the children’s wing of the Dickinson County Library in Iron Mountain, Michigan, I have two specific memories. One is a compilation of the many hours I spent sitting in the carpet-lined claw-foot bathtub someone had brilliantly installed there, making it suddenly the most fun place to read a book. The [...]
January 21st, 2012Paris by my eye, 2005
I took French in high school over Spanish for a singular reason: West Laurens actually had a sister city in France, and did an exchange program every other year. In my junior year, my family hosted two French teenage boys in our home for a week, and then the people of Gerardmer, France returned the [...]
January 9th, 2012Michigan
I just returned from a week in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where both sides of my family have their roots, and where I was raised. There are lots of lovely things I’d like to share, but for now, I just want to share this stunning bit of cold, bright, beauty.
January 6th, 2012“In Small Things Forgotten”
The "aesthetic of the ugly" has persisted with the folk culture of making ugly-face pottery. Man, archeologists love them some old pottery, too. “Some things in our lives are so pervasive, that we give them little thought. A ballpoint pen, for example, or a rubberband. The coffee filter gets little consideration too.” It is a [...]
December 22nd, 2011Instead of reading for class…
… I’ve been reading a good old travelogue, like those which sustained my interest for a few years, when I first discovered the Travel Essays section of the bookstore, until I realized that mostly, that shelf does not have new releases very often, and I had read all the best ones already. The rest, I [...]
June 12th, 2011Protected: Adoption series: Jim & Kristen Weathersby, and adopting from Guatemala
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
April 20th, 2011A betrayal of identity: the dramatic unveiling of baby-stealing in Spain, and the lives that have been forever scarred
I have been thinking a lot about adoption lately. It is a subject that really fascinates me. I like the idea of scrambling things we think we know–like biology and genetics and “family”–and giving them far greater parameters. Over Christmas break, I read a book about the diaspora of Chinese daughters over the past twenty [...]
April 4th, 2011