You have been sent for and now you must memorize a name. A new name. A borrowed name. Nine thousand feet above sea level, the options are laid out before you: Get the name right and you see your parents again; get the name wrong and you never see them again. It’s that simple. The…
1. According to the Talmud, only three sins in Jewish law are so serious they are forbidden under any circumstances, even to save a life. These are murder, idol worship, and adultery. But in many interpretations, there is a fourth sin, equal to, if not worse than, these: lashon hara—literally, “evil tongue.” It is said…
“Sir, I am wondering—have you considered lately what happens in Hell?” No, I hadn’t, but I liked that “lately.” We were on our way from the San Francisco Airport to Palo Alto, and the driver for Bay Area Limo, a Pakistani American whose name was Niazi, was glancing repeatedly in the rearview mirror to check…
There are times I think the past is nothing more than a room attached to ours. We enter it a hundred times a day, argue with whoever’s there; we flatten a cowlick, move the vase, true the picture on the wall. I was looking out at the garden the other day (something I tend to…
“This structure has two helical chains each coiled around the same axis…It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairings we have postulated immediately suggest a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” —J. D. Watson and Francis Crick, on their discovery of the structure of DNA. I. In 1972, my father-in-law, Ron,…
First in a series of essays called, collectively, My Mother’s Story. My mother, Kathleen Klin Phoa circa 1948. Fact. A student at St. Mary’s Canossian secondary school in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Fact. Despite the hiatus that was the war, she was still a girl. Oh, she knew she was almost a woman, but inside,…
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago. You probably know these lines, either from Christina Rossetti’s poem of 1871 or, more likely, Holst’s setting of them as a carol. I used one of them as the title of a book, “bleak” altered to “deep” by the…
One Friday night, the winter I was twelve, my mom’s brother, Tío Erwin, showed up at my grandmother’s apartment in Jamaica Plain with his new wife. She was fifteen. They’d met during his recent trip to Guatemala. She looked like any one of my cousins, only she didn’t weigh as much. Her smile stretched, revealing…
I’m staring at a rush of players on the screen—fragments of knees and shoulders, a collision of helmets—when the two aides in front of me leap from their seats and yell, “Go go go,” as if they’re rallying with fans under a blue dome of sky rather than with patients in pajamas and robes in…
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