On August 6th, 1945, nine-year old Mihoko was swinging in her elementary school playground in Hiroshima when the world’s first atomic bomb dropped and thrust her under rubble. In the teaching of history, the bomb is often lauded as a triumph of USA’s science and an end to what was a painful war period. For a girl just struck by it and many like her, it comes unwarranted and at the expense of a happy family.

On a summer afternoon, Mihoko sat on a call with her son and myself, attempting to recall anything she saw on that walk home…

The song “Ojos Del Sol” by Y La Bamba plays over a scene of a father and son waking up in their van and eating Pop Tarts. The song carries through the rest of the two minutes of the episode as both prepare to leave Los Angeles permanently for a town two hours away. …

I remember pedaling my mother’s bike machine as “BABY BLUE” by Fishmans — a Japanese dub band prominent in the 90's — popped up in my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist. The song was simple and long: six minutes of a repeated keyboard chord on every upbeat of the drums, supported by an occasional flute-like melody in the background and a bass-line that you wouldn’t notice unless you listened carefully. It sounded like any modern indie song with its nostalgic feeling and high-pitched vocals, yet it maintained its own uniqueness that left me repeatedly pressing the back button.

I was surprised…

Focus becomes an annoying thing to both lack and have. For example, I’m writing this now because I couldn’t focus on reading my book because I got so fixated on the author’s stream of consciousness that I began to think that maybe it wouldn’t be so boring for people to read a memoir about me, and particularly a scene in that memoir in which I’ve discovered a new band I love. Actually, it’s an old band who broke up in the 90’s. But to me they’re new. …

Dear guy with the deep voice talking loudly in the coffee shop,

I get it, you’re a social guy. You love telling stories and having people listen. Or perhaps you’re just lonely. But whatever your story, I’d prefer not to contemplate it instead of doing the work I came here for, which likely is the same amount important, or unimportant, as the shit you’re talking about.

Let me return to trying to write my masterpiece in the most social environment of today’s world. Let me instead choose to distract myself every two minutes by talking to the friends I came…

Mirrors and planes always play a huge role in lots of my writing. Everything is a self-portrait, and life is always in motion. I had a moment last week looking in the mirror, feverish, coming off of two weeks of fasting for Ramadan with fatigue so intense my eyes bulged out of their sockets and my cheeks began to flatten. Endless minutes went by as I ate a whole cauldron of soup without my body responding-no urge to pee, no bloating, nothing-as if it was getting back everything it lacked the past two weeks. The same thing I sought to…

“On a scale from 1 to 5, how comfortable are you with your cultural identity?”

“3 most days, some days it’s a 5 and others it’s a 2. It just depends on the scenario.”

I think back to this conversation I had with someone who interviewed me for a class, now a friend of mine. It’s the foundation for everything I write that deals with my diasporic identity, because it was the first conversation I had with somebody that addressed the issues we’ve faced being children of immigrants, from religion to dating to self-realization.

It seems that this generation of…

Boring, I thought. The first time I listened all the way through Rosalía’s debut album, Los Angeles, all I could think about was that, boring. 12 tracks and an hour later it felt like I had listened to the same song over and over again, the same guitar strum repeating itself with some off-beat vocals scratching on top of it.

This had been right after discovering Rosalía on J Balvin’s new record, Vibras, in which she delivers an interlude (“Brillo”) that completely overshadows Balvin and the rest of his guest features on the album. The hype built up later as…