Before the Rain

Nature is something that frequently captivates me; I enjoy using photography to capture the beauty I see. This photograph, Before the Rain, was actually a lucky mistake. I had forgotten to adjust the manual settings before taking my photo; the aperture was not large enough and it lacked exposure […]

Don’t Look Back: The Rose-Coloured Nostalgia of Rouge and Happy Together

Nostalgia is a common theme across the Hong Kong cinematic canon, particularly in the New Wave films created during the transition period between the 1984 signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong. This essay will focus on how nostalgia is configured and located in Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1988) and Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997) […]

Weekend I.

We burn the needle over a lighter Mimi found in her mom’s purse. Then she lies on her pink sheets, facing away from me as I kneel next to her head. With clean hands I tuck a dry bar of soap behind her ear and poise the needle over the dot she drew. […]

Racism, Ableism, Exceptionalism, and Imperialism: Jane Eyre as Antifeminist

In “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress,” Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar quote Richard Chase: “Well, obviously Jane Eyre is a feminist tract, an argument for the betterment of governesses and equal rights for women” (338). This essay will argue that the novel is not at all this straightforward, and by some definitions, can be considered antifeminist. […]

The Reimagined (Anti-)Origin Story: Examining Nu Wa’s Diasporic Identity Through Body and Birth

For immigrants of any generation, or members of any underrepresented group, the pressure to define and explain one’s origin or identity is always complicated. In the novel Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai, birth and the body are reframed to justify the difficulties in classifying oneself. Through confronting conventions of birth and the use of shifting bodies, the novel challenges the notion of pure origins. In particular […]