“Piyali Bhattacharya’s Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion was the book I had been waiting to read my entire life. Finally, a book about us. A book that represents us. Us South Asian American sisters who straddled multiple worlds and did our best to find a balance that most of the time was always going to be just out of reach.” For Wear Your Voice Mag, October 2016.
“It started out like any average evening, me scrolling through my Netflix queue to see what was expiring soon: Sophie Fiennes’ 2012 documentary A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology featuring Slavoj Žižek, my first introduction to the man and his brilliant mind. For the next 2 hours and 24 minutes I experienced the growing pains of my entire worldview shifting, and when my ideological tectonics stopped quaking I turned to a horror movie for some entertaining release. But no horror movie, or any movie again, would ever be the same after this introductory encounter with Dr. Žižek. And so, alternating between Chills City and Fever Town, I wrote the following.” For The Mary Sue, September 2016.
“For as long as I can remember, I wanted to get married. A huge part of this desire was most certainly Disney movies and romantic comedies, where a dorky bookworm like me takes off her glasses, becomes beautiful, and weds the hunk everyone else covets. Another part was that getting married felt like an escape from my own dysfunctional family, where I’d be whisked far away and have a chance to build a new life with someone who actually loved and respected me.” For Wear Your Voice Mag, August 2016.
“As an avid consumer of books and especially fiction, over the years I’ve developed a special shelf of particularly beautiful and inspiring works by women of color that help me not only walk around in another woman’s experiences, but also situate my own culturally and ethnically fluid self within a canon of women writers. Being a half American and half Sri Lankan Third Culture Kid — and a woman of color author myself — who has lived in 13 countries and 18 cities around the world in her 30-something years, I’m drawn to stories that negotiate race and culture in distinct and sensitive ways, and each of these books brings something unique to the cultural table.” For Wear Your Voice Magazine, July 2016.
“While food is one of the two fundamental pillars of human survival — water being the other — how often do we stop to think about food in a socio-cultural sense? For Zeynep Kilic, sociology professor, Fulbright Scholar, and Turkish transplant in Alaska, Turkish food has been the link between her new world in the US and her upbringing in Turkey…” My 34th article for HuffPost, and my first feature for HuffPost Taste.
