The Opinionist

*All the strange line breaks, punctuation, and grammar inconsistencies are intentional. After Don DeLillo. It is a frayed painting. The edges, fraught, where the fine watercolor paper tore in soft layers like scissored pieces of flesh. Perhaps that is what it is. An organ cut from the fine pigmented lines of the artist’s eye. Messy color— not even framed? — What will be your mother’s inquiry at the mummy-wrap file folder, creased in half, the casket-exoskeleton; you, a collector now, perhaps—newly minted; the yellow-peach framing still and cool where a wet mud footprint wraps around its front. Owning this feels like sacrilege. Words are your primary craft ( thing ) and they (you have never thought of this) elude possession. That the imaginary and metaphorical red velvet rope is not here, naked and alarming blankness. You can touch it, you can fray it, dirty with your mud-stained shoes, spill innocuous liquids, ownership is permission, ten million ways to kill what exists in preciou...

I grew up alongside ants. My sister and I sometimes left our snacks carelessly on the floor of our first-floor apartment. The next day the ants would find them—cracks between carpet fluff blooming with moving clusters of brown. At Mom and Grandmother’s orders, we hunted them down, coating the bottoms of our slippers in brown sugar. They always came back. There were always more to kill. It was a thrill to be so colossal—so powerful, gargantuan. In the summer of first grade, my sister, our neighbor Tony and I created an Anti-Ant Club to purge our neighborhood clean. We poured water into the anthills, swollen brown blisters in sidewalk cracks, watching them deflate and darken like punctured balloons. Our list of crimes went on. The balcony teemed with tiny, restless footsteps. Tape dispenser in hand, lure them onto the adhesive quicksand, where the small black bodies stuck like sesame seeds between teeth. A newspaper sheet of wriggling fine print. Prepare the scissors, the surgeons. Cut. ...

School clubs, I’ve realized, are breeding places for specialized lingo only accessible to those who share that manufactured social context. The strangest I’ve encountered is in Model UN, which I suppose is understandable due to its premise, but it is distinct enough to have its own name and actually set of rules—like a glossary—structured enough to even have significance in weighing a delegate’s performance. And Parliamentary Procedure is one of the most important characteristics of MUN that make it, definitionally, what it is over something else. We have grievances over the formalities and strange unspoken rules of speech—and rightfully so. Polite speech is that—polite, but can also be annoying, inefficient, and insincere. Corporate jargon is exhausting. And the general wishy-washiness and calculated language manipulation of politics is deliberately misleading. Under Nixon, William Zinsser writes in the classic writing how-to book, On Writing Well , was when “civilian casualties” bec...

Even three years after living in the country, every day I am forced to confront the fact that I still do not feel Chinese. There are less obvious signs of it—my pronunciation is better than most of my ABC friends who grew up here, many whose last visit to “the homeland” was years ago; I feel more comfortable speaking in Mandarin to my friends’ parents even over English; and the like. In China—one time in a very blue moon—I happened to score the highest points on a Chinese essay in my grade, and I still remember my classmates looking at me like a saint. In China I had done everything to qualify myself as “Chinese” enough by the standards of that culture. I completed my arc from an academic failure to getting into one of the best high schools in my city through the Zhongkao; I was taking an extracurricular class at the time on Chinese literature (a very rough translation of 古诗文, but I digress), which some of my classmates had not even heard of; sometimes they deemed me more Chinese than ...