Sublime

Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted.

When she speaks Korean, my mother speaks her mind. She is sharp, witty, and judgmental, if rather self-preening. But her English is a crush of piano keys that used to make me cringe whenever she spoke to a white person. As my mother spoke, I watched the white person, oftentimes a woman, put on a fright mask of strained tolerance: wide eyes frozen i

As ambassadors of aloha, Hawaiian women have been susceptible to the eroticization of their bodies and the insistent commodification of their aloha.

generic, though gendered, Native.

we were perhaps avoiding.

As the poet Prageeta Sharma said, Americans have an expiration date on race the way they do for grief.

be noticed from afar.

rhapsodizing