"How to be Chinese," by Celeste Ng
Illustration by Mel Paisley
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Editor’s Note
What does it mean to be of an ethnicity? What does it mean for a culture to be yours? I think for a lot of people in diasporic communities, especially here in the United States, these are questions we’ve been wrestling with, perhaps for our whole lives, and they’re questions that don’t have simple, straightforward answers. In Celeste Ng’s writing, both her novels and short stories like this one, she acknowledges the complexity and doesn’t try to force things with a pat answer. Instead, she asks the questions and ask them well and thoroughly, and in that way, those of us who have similar questions are invited in. Often, just knowing that other people have similar questions in their lives to the ones we’ve been thinking about can be a powerful thing.
Episode Credits
Host/Narrator: Mike Sakasegawa
Production & Sound Design: Mike Sakasegawa
Music: Sound of Picture
“How to Be Chinese” was first published in issue 26.1 of Gulf Coast.
© 2014, Celeste Ng
About the Author
Celeste Ng is the author of the New York Times-bestselling novels Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You. Her writing has been awarded the Pushcart Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors, and has been translated into more than thirty languages. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
(Image credit: Kevin Day Photography)
About the Illustrator
Mel Paisley is a writer, illustrator, and organizer based out of Savannah, GA. Mel has been previously published with Polychrome Ink, Meerkat Press, The Port City Review, Vox Poetica, Wussy Magazine, Dystopian Future, and The Harvard University Press, and has worked for Big Lucks Press, Winter Tangerine, and Madhouse Press. When not making things about mental health, queer history, and the Asian-American diaspora in the Deep South, they write strange fables about petty gods and dangerous dreams for The Nobility, a bi-monthly illustration series concepted by Brian Woodward.