Other Writing

What Replaces Prisons?

In The New York Review of Books, I review Danielle Sered’s book Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and the Road to Repair. I discuss the extraordinary potential of restorative justice, as well as its limitations, and how it relates to the movement for prison abolition. Throughout Until We Reckon, we see people—mostly poor people of color—meeting each other, holding each other accountable, making promises, attempting together to repair their lives.

How to Disobey Your Tiger Parents, in 14 Easy Steps

In the New York Times I give advice to those of you who have immigrant parents with strong ideas about what you should do with your life. I wish I could say: You can disobey them and win their love. I wish I could promise you that your choices are the right ones, and that you won’t come to doubt them. But winning and certainty are actually not the point. The point is: Do you believe that failure is yours to have, rather than theirs to fear?

These Losers are Going Places

At the cusp of 40 and with a baby in tow, I took the leap and moved to Taiwan. This piece works through so many uncomfortable issues: status anxiety, impasses in marriage, American insularism, and hierarchical assumptions that the way upward is from East to West.