Inherited Language

By Nick Almeida • If you had grown up in my house, “You’re dollaring me to death” would forever echo in your head. The phrase is one of my mother’s favorites, inextricably linked to any requests for small amounts…
By Nick Almeida • If you had grown up in my house, “You’re dollaring me to death” would forever echo in your head. The phrase is one of my mother’s favorites, inextricably linked to any requests for small amounts…
Content Warning—child sexual abuse Tansy My sister, Liberty, tells me I need to exercise, that it cures all ills. Well, I don’t see how swimming cures hers. All it does is dry out her hair. Jolee, my youngest…
1. When my mother first came to the United States in the 1970s, she was disappointed by the treeless tenements my father brought her to. She had grown up on a bustling island beach in what was then called…
4. It is prom night. A group of us are out to eat at The Urban Hive, on the rooftop. Couples sit in pairs around a table forged of meteorite. Smoky black, with a network of tiny bubble cells,…
He was standing at the corner where we met every morning to walk to work because we were young and carless. I had gotten on a train and moved 2,000 miles for a walkable city. He had always lived…
Essay by A. D. Carr • “Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us.” —Priyanka Kumar I didn’t start to have an interest in birds until my midthirties. No doubt this shift coincides with the transition from…
Here’s a secret about movement: speed cares only about distance, but velocity is aware of direction. Here’s another secret about movement: every living creature on this planet is moving fast. But the body tricks us into not noticing the…
In David’s previous life, he was a mad scientist. According to him, I was a lab rat. I’m chopping the remaining half of a watermelon and am more concerned about the ant infestation I had eliminated yesterday because I…
By Daniel Abiva Hunt • When I first began writing seriously, I was obsessed with character histories. Nothing would make my character feel more real and fully formed than a detail-oriented past, I felt, and I would turn over…
Later, you’ll claim there were warnings. Unusual bird calls. That double rainbow you snapped for Instagram. A knowing gleam in the eyes of the hibachi waitress. To make sense of a thing is to make it your own, and…
In 2016, I received a spammy text message declaring there were hundreds of beautiful Asian women waiting to meet me. Right away this offer made me laugh. I guess it was supposed to be sexy, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was actually really scary. I mean, hundreds of beautiful Asian women? That’s too many!
The first draft of this story was very different. Though the theme of vengeance was still there, I wrote it in second-person point of view, from the perspective of a man being terrorized by a mob of beautiful Asian women—a “you” observing a “they.” I was getting my MFA at the time, and I submitted the draft to my workshop, where it got a lukewarm response. I remember one of my classmates voiced a concern that the story wasn’t doing enough to disrupt the sameness of the beautiful Asian women. They lacked agency and distinctness. I agreed with her, but didn’t know how to fix it.
I put the story away and forgot about it.
Fast-forward to 2021: We’re one year into the COVID pandemic and anti-Asian hate crimes are on the rise. I thought back to that old story and it just clicked. I switched the point of view to first-person plural, direct address—a “we” talking at a “you.” With that change, the piece became more confrontational, more playful, and more political. The women were speaking for themselves, celebrating their collective rage.
I went back and forth on whether to cut the last paragraph. It’s on the nose in a way my writing classes had trained me to avoid. I was emboldened to keep it in part because of the ending to Marilyn Chin’s story “Moon,” another Asian-American revenge tale, in which the narrator breaks the fourth wall to explain the moral of the story and basically threaten the readers: “And you don’t know what I can do. You don’t know what is beneath my doing.” It was also important to me, in a piece that’s on its face very silly, to capture a more serious idea: the sense of false security that comes from believing if you only do X, Y, or Z, you can prevent acts of violence from happening to you. But you can’t. That’s the story’s despairing message, reversed and projected outward.
TESSA YANG is the author of the short story collection The Runaway Restaurant (7.13 Books, 2022). Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Cincinnati Review, Joyland, Foglifter, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Hartwick College where she is at work on a novel. Find her on Twitter@ThePtessadactyl.