Catapult

Porochista Khakpour reflects on her desire to write — at first about anything other than Iranian-America. Deeply conflicted about speaking from her perspective as an Iranian-American, she says, “Remind yourself that when the performance is honest two things happen: The essay will feel like it’s killing you and the ending will not be what you thought it might be. Learn to respect more than resent those parallel planes of living and the rendering of living.”

Michael Gonzales affectionately looks back on a romantic relationship where the partners share a love of Prince.

A personal essay by Chris J. Rice about finding the brother who was only a year old when she ran away from their abusive mother at 14. Like her brother, Rice wound up in foster care. Through higher education, she found her way to a better life, but didn’t emerge unscathed. Riddled with survivor guilt, she apologizes to her brother, who assures her she wouldn’t have been able to prevail over their mother and save him, even if she had stayed.

Noah Cho ruminates on why his mother, a blond “symbol of America, the homecoming queen” was attracted to his father, a “barely-bilingual” Korean immigrant who came to the U.S. to pursue a career in medicine.

“They were fallen angels, Satan’s henchmen, and they were everywhere.”

Ellen Wayland-Smith’s family came from Oneida in upstate New York, known for its nineteenth-century utopian community and fine silverware. She had never considered that the origins of that utopia had more in common with a cult than Christianity.

On seeing and “being seen” — the silent gift of bearing witness to one another and individual suffering as a way of offering comfort and hope.

America is a nation of immigrants, yet the country treats immigrants with increasing hostility. Recounting her Syrian family’s move to the US, writer Lauren Alwan wrestles with her own Arab identity, and she explores the ways immigrants shed their culture in order to assimilate, and the generational effects of invisibility.

Jaya Saxena’s personal essay on the complications of owning her three racial identities–white, Indian and multi-racial–and dealing with the many ways people see her, and feel entitled to define her.

Certain jobs feel like dead ends, but the community and memories you build in them can sustain you the rest of your life.