But I was stridently noncommittal to them. I always left myself an out, an escape hatch in case someone offered me a new adventure, the adventure I thought I deserved. I looked forward to a time when I would be the finished article, my sense of the world innate and effortless, with no evidence that there had been any rough drafts.

When you’re young, you are certain of your capacity to imagine a way out of the previous generation’s problems. There is a different way to grow old, paths that don’t involve conforming and selling out. We would figure it out together, and we would be different together. I just had to find people to be different with, a critical mass of others to f

I really hope you can read this. I don’t care if you can see through me, I wrote, confessing to a list of imperfections and insecurities. Just as long as you can see me.

The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories.

Once, harmony suggested the possibility of sublime order, of resolutions so eternal and true that we wouldn’t merely recognize beauty; we would feel it vibrating through our bodies. Now it just made me feel sick.

The true account would necessarily be joyful, rather than morose, and surrendering to joy wouldn’t mean I was abandoning you. A celebration of how it began, rather than a chronicle of free fall, a tribute to that first sip, rather than all the spinning rooms that followed. It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred, and it w

There’s a telos of self-improvement baked into the immigrant experience.

thought I had a lot to say, but I felt timid about saying it. Making my zine was a way of sketching the outlines of a new self, writing a new personality into being.

I’d never been around someone with such a lust for life, an appreciation for its exultant highs as well as its darkest lows.