The Writing Life
Intrepid Women at the Pitt-Rivers Museum
On the eve of International Women’s Day, a standing-room only crowd of a hundred or so people squeezed into an upper gallery of Oxford University’s Pitt-Rivers Museum, a place known to generations of British school children as where they saw shrunken heads. The tsantsa, or shrunken heads, were removed from their display cases in 2020…
Read MoreRowing the Thames
One of my recent discoveries in Oxford has been the Falcon Boat Club, founded by a group of pleasure-boating men from Holywell Church in 1869 and initially based out of of my local pub, The King’s Arms. Unlike most of Oxford’s rowing clubs, it admitted women as members from its beginnings, more than 150 years…
Read MoreHow a Sentence Reverberated
We’re all connected. I was reminded of that when a neighbor mentioned he’d read my story for Alta Journal about traveling to the Arctic Circle last fall. One sentence leapt out at him: “Nothing seemed fixed: water, stars, sky, or people. It was all changing and rotating and moving in a dance governed by randomness.”…
Read MoreArctic Adventures
Last fall, I took part in an unusual residency program in the Arctic Circle. I spent two and a half weeks aboard Antigua, a three-masted sailing ship with 29 artists and writers on an expedition to explore the Svalbard archipelago. It was quite a trip. I wrote a story about my experience for the current…
Read MoreRemembering a Hawaiian Queen
A few weeks ago, I was asked by a producer at Wondery if I’d be interested in being interviewed for the podcast American History Tellers about Hawaii’s last queen. I hesitated at first because my book on Hawaii had been published more than a decade ago. Agreeing to the interview would mean that I’d have…
Read MoreThe Safe Place That Became Unsafe
Early on in the research for The White Devil’s Daughters, I learned about a horrific aftermath to the story I was writing. My focus was on a group of women residents and staffers of a historic safe house who fought sex slavery at the turn of the 20th century. One day, while sifting through case…
Read MoreRemembering Judy Yung
Judy Yung’s death this month marks the passing of a gifted and generous scholar. Her groundbreaking work in the history of Asian American women paved the way for a new generation of thinkers and writers. Along with fellow San Franciscans Him Mark Lai and the Philip P. Choy, Judy Yung made an enormous contribution to…
Read MoreTalking with Min Jin Lee
Over this past week, I’ve been immersed in Pachinko. To be specific, I had the fortunate assignment to read Min Jin Lee’s masterful novel Pachinko, which is a family saga about the world of Koreans living in Japan. I’ve always loved the sprawling social novels of the 19th century – Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and…
Read MoreOvercrowded prisons in our back yards
I wrote this essay on San Quentin for an online class I’m taking titled “Reading and Writing the Very Short Essay.” It’s taught by one of my favorite authors, Lauren Markham. It was published in Sunday’s Sacramento Bee print edition and other McClatchy papers throughout the state on July 5, 2020 and appeared online a…
Read MoreHonoring Hawaii’s Queen
At a time when statues are toppling across the nation, one work of public art stands tall. It is the eight-foot-tall bronze of Hawaii’s Queen Lili’uokalani, who faces the state Capitol in Honolulu. This beautifully rendered artwork, by the American realist sculptor Marianna Pineda, is even more powerful today than it was when it was…
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