When my date suggested grabbing a drink Sunday night at the Golden Cicada in Jersey City, I thought that I’d discovered a kindred spirit.

There’s no better place to be disabused of the notion of homogenous Chinese American culture and to be reminded of how fragile and quickly-shifting narratives about a category of people can be.

Wrangling our psychological impulses helps free our minds for the real work of self-discovery.

I decided if I was going to get anywhere in my fern education, I’d have to immerse myself in the company of experts.

Asking Ma about life in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. My mother and I were decorating the Christmas tree during a quiet afternoon last week when I thought to ask her if the sorrow I have been inclined toward postelection is anything like w…

Taking to the streets for New York City’s Trump protests.On Sunday evening, after four days of involuntarily clenching so badly that my jaw had started to ache too much to fully open, I dosed myself with painkillers and melatonin and finally got a fu…

Every year, I take a Northeast Regional southbound to Charlottesville to visit two dear friends and their pair of gorgeous, sweetly neurotic German shepherds. I went once in the spring after moving to New York, but two years in the city had made me s…

Seeking out spirits in one of New York’s spookiest bars.You’d think it’d be relatively easy to pin down a ghost in this town, with all of its historic buildings and unsettled scores. Most of the haunts frequented by the city’s cognoscenti are s…

What should I bring on my writing retreat?I’m off to the woods to live deliberately! Or, just to live, as it were—all I can do is hope that my deliberateness (and discipline and patience) will kick in eventually, since my destination is an artist…

How a book about Chinatown made me remember my first New York date.I’ve spent much of the summer totally captivated by Tong Wars, Scott Seligman’s comprehensive account of Manhattan’s Chinatown at the turn of the twentieth century. The book narra…

How my mother’s accordion led to a chance encounter in Mao’s China.For years my parents have told me about a photograph that shows my mother shaking hands with Zhou Enlai, the first premier of China under Mao Zedong. The photograph was taken in 1962,…

How the Brooklyn Bridge became a living landfill.I too saw the satin ribbons, the scrunchies, the clothing tags, the fat knots of underwear and panty hose, had my eyes dazzled by the foil of a bag of potato chips, the ripped labels of Poland Spring w…

Andalusia and the ache of identity.You can judge how far outside of Atlanta you are by the gasoline prices. My parents kept calling them out every few minutes as we drove from their house toward Milledgeville to the farm where Flannery O’Connor onc…

Two trees grow in Brooklyn.Lately I’ve come to love the empress trees that stand at either end of the Union Street Bridge, which crosses the Gowanus Canal, in Brooklyn. The pair aren’t much in winter, but come spring their canopies grow heavy wit…

How the Internet makes memoirists of us all.I can’t recall the last time I didn’t know a writer’s face. See me pasting bylines into Facebook to find an essayist’s profile picture. Watch as I dive through tagged photographs to find out which …

Tending my Internet archive.This summer we’re introducing a series of new columnists. Today, meet Wei Tchou. My parents visited me a few weeks ago, when I was feeling blue for the normal New York reasons: another breakup, a looming eviction, the smel…