Sublime

To make myself, and by proxy other Asian Americans, more human and a little more relevant to American culture.

The notebook is not an end, but a means.

He has a kind, round face and the relaxed, easygoing manner of someone who’s spent most of his life in California.

To recite my poems to an audience is to be slapped awake by my limitations. I confront the infinite chasm between the audience’s conception of Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don’t look the part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don’t even have enough presence to be considered real minorities.

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,” says poet Naomi Shihab Nye, “you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”