Hua Hsu

The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories.

Immigrants are often discussed in terms of a push-and-pull dynamic: something pushes you from home; something else pulls you far away. Opportunities dry up one place and emerge somewhere else, and you follow the promise toward a seemingly better future. Versions of these journeys stretch back hundreds of years in all different directions.

I’d never be like the poseur in my civics class who started humming “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and then singing the words “And it smells like / teen spirit.”

It’s fucked up the way it is sometimes.

Someone began decrying an ideology called “neoliberalism,” which confused me, because I didn’t know what the term meant. I assumed this was just a new and better version of liberalism, which didn’t sound that bad.