Movies
Finding My Mother—and Me—in the Women of ‘Girl, Interrupted’
Living with mental illness is a constant cycle of wellness and illness, and each recovery is impermanent.
‘Camelot,’ the Hollywood Failure That Taught Me to Live Again
I think now, what is life if not a rather ridiculous, fumbling, histrionic, financially ruinous, unwieldy thing?
How Ingmar Bergman Films Helped Me Grow Up in America
The self-regard that came with watching Bergman films helped me feel rich in something, for the first time since arriving in America.
What Mani Ratnam’s Films Meant to Me and the Women of the Sri Lankan Civil War
Underneath the shiny veneer of Bollywood, there’s something affirming about seeing people caught in the maelstrom of politics and war making choices—to flee or stay or fight.
How Watching Asian American Dads Onscreen Helps Me Face My Own
Our fathers may never know us the way we wish they would. And if we learned that ignorance is bliss, it’s because we learned it from them.
How to Survive a Disaster Movie: Be White. Speak English.
When Americans consume media that privileges white survival, what does it mean for which disasters earn our attention, our money, our likes, our grief?
What Wong Kar-wai’s Films Meant to Young Asians in America
Wong Kar-wai’s films showed me how to navigate that liminal space between tenderness and loneliness, connection and alienation, East and West.
How Truthful Depictions of Suicidal Ideation Help Me Resist My Own
If we’re going to spend so much time with suicide in pop culture, I do believe we are owed an honest reckoning with what ideation is, as well as depictions that are truthful rather than dangerous.
Imagining a Way Out of My Codependency
My codependency is always trying to convince me that it deserves to live. It asks me to keep the poison coming.
The Threat Within: Harry Potter and the Cultural Baggage of Orphan Stories
“Unlike most popular orphan characters, I wasn’t too young to remember my parents.”