Jan 25, 2013

“I love mangoes,” he tells me in his thick Congolese accent. And before I know it, he tells me his life story: how he came to London from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, why he takes boxes of mango juice to his apartment every week and drinks them so fast he has to buy an entire new case every Friday. He says that mango juice reminds him of his homeland.

Apr 16, 2012

I sit across the aisle from another writer on my 747 flight, an older woman writing in large letters. Her scrawl resembles my grandmother’s: messy but elegant, beginning large and then fading into smaller letters. She holds pages and pages of lined paper, off-white and yellow. I am fascinated by her style. I haven’t the slightest idea what she is recording,...

Dec 28, 2011

“Know all, and you will pardon all.” —Thomas à Kempis I hated Mozart for good reason. My grudge developed when I was 15 years old, mostly because performing his Violin Concerto no. 3 in G Major for the Southwestern Youth Music Festival was my most humiliating teenage experience.  After years of practice and preparation, I performed so terribly that I...

Sep 26, 2011

 “What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into a habit of thinking, this is the world, but it’s not true at all. The real world is a much deeper and darker placer than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.”—Haruki Murakami1 We were on vacation and had gone away to a cabin by the sea for a weekend. After we...