There isn’t a here, and some days there isn’t a people. Survival unmakes a person.
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My mother tells me all this, and I think of how I’ve never been to China, let alone Qingyuan. As she ties my hair with an elastic, I am uncomfortably aware of the lump in my throat. My hands feel too soft, my skin too pale, the soles of my feet not dirty enough. From across the dining table, my mother seems a thousand miles away.
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i am fragmented. let me talk about / gymnosperms, angiosperms, / let me stumble through explanations of flower/…i am fragmented. clementines, coarse skin, soft light. i cannot form a complete thought.
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“My goal in creating TREEHOUSE was to equate childhood with honesty. I wish that when I was 13 years old, going into middle school, I could've heard a project like this - where there’s this mad juvenile energy, and I'm saying particularly wild things mixed with really intense, intimate moments.”
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you never stop being a child / so beautiful as your mother presses you / against her baked brown skin / you swear the sun is in there
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There it is on the big screen: my happily ever after. / Play this on loop. I am allowed to be innocent here. / We can sit here forever, together. / You be Sam./ I’ll be Suzy.
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helen of troy / was never a living person. she was a corpse / that was passed around from Sparta to Troy / with paper-white, snow-white, Ikea-painted-white-bed-white / skin. with blackened eyes, highlighter-yellow cheekbones.
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“After a point I didn’t want to be a punching bag anymore, I learned to stand up for myself and I encourage everyone to speak their own truth. If I can offer any advice it is don’t be afraid and stand tall.”
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“Releasing music has taught me a lot about who I am and what actually matters to me. It can be stressful trying to get everything right. It's a growing experience to not be able to touch it at all anymore, and to just release it to the world. You’re letting go of a lot of control.”
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Keshi’s songs are tethered by the tensile forces of bitter and sweet, insecurity and assertion, inebriation and sobriety.
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In the story of Abel and Cain (victim first, they tell me), I become the murderer, the victim, and the witness. I become a moral, immortalized in a narrative I can never escape from. I am no longer a human, but a lesson to learn from, a cautionary tale for others like me.
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My lullabies and nightmares were made up of creatures like him, creatures with pepper-red skin and chiseled fangs: Dokkaebis, goblins that juggled their eternal lives stripping away people’s humanities or granting them beauty and houses full of gold.
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my mother cuts fruit for me / and i swallow it whole, / hope the seeds will grow in my stomach / tearing through my chest to sprout something clean and better.
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While we are marginalised, gaslit, scapegoated, hypersexualised, mocked, forgotten, I am still so proud to be Asian American. There is no phrase or sentence that I can encapsulate the Asian American experience in. It’s not bound by one set perspective. The fabric of the Asian identity is woven by so many different cultures stitched together into the very frame of America.
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“Real life stories constantly inspire me in creating art and more peaceful ways of relating with one another.”
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i’m scared that my yellow body takes up too much space. / yet, somehow, i feel empty and small
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There is something to be said about the life of a flower / Killed out of love, only for the lover
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“I’m inspired by relationships. Human interactions are incredibly complex, but when we reach mutual understanding, what was so hard to grasp becomes profoundly simple.”
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I finally found my words. Day one after the shooting in Atlanta, I had no words, only grief. By day two I was overwhelmed by fury and rage. Grieving together and supporting each other even just virtually has been so healing. And it inspired me to finish a painting I had preliminary sketches for back in 2019.
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“Music is my therapy. It’s how I feel I can be vulnerable and empowered all at the same time.”
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