repeat after me:1. our immigrant families are not just ‘homophobic’ they are also ‘colonized.’2. our parents have histories, genders, and sexualities, too.3. they are just as broken as we are (but we have the words...

Grandma sees these things when she talks about them and gestures with her hands like she’s painting brush strokes in the air. The way Grandma paints her dreams for me, there’s a low sky.

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion;...

The young man pities his elders, fearing the day he, too, will join their ranks. The elderly man pities the younger generation, well-knowing the trials and tribulations that lie ahead of them.

27.So often, we go through our battles in private. As it was with me and with many of the women in my generation. We were taught and reared and molded to keep that stiff upper...

We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. … That is no gap between the generations, that is a...

Wart meets Merlin for the first time – only for Merlin, who lives backwards, it’s the last time. The old wizard weeps and the boy can’t understand why. It’s a powerful expression of the gulf...

Didn’t young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?