David Pierce | The Verge | June 12, 2024 | 7,191 words
Even before I read this feature about the Excel World Championship, I had been charmed by its design. The visuals are chef’s-kiss perfect: paragraphs rendered as spreadsheet cells; an old-school palette of green text on a black background; bitmap-style illustrations that chunk together as you scroll them into view. Even the footer and credits tab feel considered, consistent, and—most importantly—not so assertive that they overwhelm the reading experience. (Achieving a balance between spectacle and legibility is all too rare in the post-“Snow Fall” era.) Thankfully, the piece’s creative director, Kristen Radtke, shares byline billing with author David Pierce. But don’t ignore Pierce’s role in a fantastic story. This is a scene piece of sorts, in which he heads to Las Vegas for his completely unrealistic shot at the big prize, but it’s also a surprisingly lyrical meditation on what makes a program like Excel both powerful and poetic. “In a spreadsheet world,” Pierce writes, “everything is comparable, reducible to some base figure that eventually explains everything if only you know how to ask. Spreadsheets promise the world isn’t actually complicated — you just have to know the formulas. I don’t know if that’s beautiful or bleak or both, but it’s certainly big business.” What’s so lovely about the project as a whole is that the story and art work in perfect concert. Neither takes itself too seriously, yet both execute at the highest level of their form. I smiled as soon as I opened the tab, and I didn’t stop until I finished the last word. An easy formula to hope for, but a hard one to accomplish. —PR
C.J. Chivers | The New York Times Magazine | June 6, 2024 | 7,449 words
Some of the finest journalism of the last several years has been about the opioid crisis: the people who created it, the ravages it has inflicted, the inequities it has deepened. C.J. Chivers’s masterful feature is a new kind of entry into the canon, one that bridges widely known consequences with increasingly available solutions. Chivers focuses his attention on the fishing industry, populated by contractors who pride themselves on their grit and independence. Substance abuse is rampant in this grueling line of work; virtually everyone in Chivers’s story—whether workers, their families, or their friends—have been touched in some way by addiction. In 2021, one fisherman, just 72 hours into his career, fatally overdosed at sea, and his death prompted a family-owned fleet to consider keeping Narcan on its vessels. Why not make the nasal spray that can reverse an overdose as ubiquitous as, say, fire extinguishers? Chivers chronicles a handful of people’s efforts to save lives and transform an industry, the travails of which he depicts with gorgeous prose. “Hands worked fast, flicking adductors into buckets and guts down chutes that plopped them onto greenish water beside the hull. Large sharks swam lazy circles alongside, turning to flash pale undersides while inhaling easy meals,” Chivers writes of 11-hour shifts worked on a scalloper. “When enough buckets were full of meat and rinsed in saltwater, two deckhands transferred the glistening, ivory-colored catch into roughly 50-pound cloth sacks, handed them down a hatch into the cool fish-hold and buried them beneath ice. Everyone else kept shucking.” (Shameless promotion: read this feature, then, if you have the time, check out The Atavist’s story “Revive,” about the little-known, deeply personal origins of Narcan.) —SD
Paige Kaptuch | Runner’s World | June 5, 2024 | 4,568 words
Paige Kaptuch begins her piece with a powerful image: an unidentified woman in a prairie dress with “a collar buttoned up to her chin, sleeves down to her wrists” running up and down a hill in the 90-degree heat of a Utah summer. When Kaptuch spotted this woman a few years ago, she knew she was a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), a community living in Short Creek. Kaptuch has a clear fascination with the FLDS, touching on her own family connections to it. But it’s Darlene Barlow Stubbs who is the focus here, a former FLDS member who discovers running after fleeing the group in 2005. Stubbs leaves at a time when Warren Jeffs is the “prophet,” a leader who normalized not only polygamy but underage marriage and child labor. By 2018, things had changed: Jeffs was in prison, the land was in different hands, and the Short Creek population had plummeted. Returning to try and reclaim a family property, Stubbs sees that she can help her old community, and starts the Short Creek Running Club. This club—about health and fun, and nothing to do with religion—would have been impossible 10 years ago. Kaptuch writes how the group finds healing as they run against the backdrop of “jagged red vistas that have been featured in so many documentaries and news stories about the area . . . often accompanied by haunting music meant to evoke the unthinkable crimes that took place here.” They are reclaiming their lives. Kaptuch does some lovely storytelling as she weaves through the years, ending up running with the club herself—everyone in sports gear, not dresses. —CW
Michael Adno | Oxford American | June 4, 2024 | 4,991 words
Somewhere in the Apalachicola National Forest in Sopchoppy, Florida, Gary Revell is using a piece of black gum wood, known as a stob, and a heavy metal file to conjure worms right out of the ground. Audrey, his wife, is picking worms as they surface, storing them in a bucket. They call it worm grunting, which is also known as worm fiddling, worm rubbing, worm snoring, and worm charming. The Revells sell worms as fishing bait to local stores and to walk-up customers on the honor system. “The Revells’ intuition was like that of the fishermen they were collecting bait for, a catalog of knowledge assembled from spending time out here and bound together by deep curiosity,” Michael Adno writes. As fourth-generation worm grunters, they’ve earned a seasonal income this way for the past 54 years, one that has survived the advent of small plastic fishing lures and nightcrawler farming. I’m powerless against a story like this—one filthy with history and culture, complete with a mystery that gets solved along the way. Adno writes well about Florida, and this piece is now my favorite of all his work. One pass of the file over the stob is called a roop. Rooping creates vibrations in the soil, urging worms to move to the surface for picking. Through the Revells, Adno reveals the lore and scant history of the practice. Things get even more fascinating when Kenneth Catania, “a neuroscientist with a bent toward ecology and biology,” arrives to test a scientific theory that reveals why grunting works. Does it have to do with moon cycles? Cosmic vibrations? Incantations uttered while rooping? I couldn’t possibly spoil the surprise for you—read this piece and you’ll be glad to find out for yourself. —KS
Jessica Winter | The New Yorker | June 5, 2024 | 1,664 words
In this piece, Jessica Winter discusses great examples of adult creators using their parents in films and TV shows over the years. Think back to John Cassavetes’ 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence. Or the amazing scene in Goodfellas when Tommy, Jimmy, and Henry have a meal with Tommy’s mother—played by Martin Scorsese’s real-life mother, Catherine—right after they kill and stuff a dead guy in a trunk. Or, more recently, the Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, in which the gay comedian interacts with various people on his quest for love and connection, including his parents, who’ve struggled to accept his sexuality. I initially dismissed Winter’s piece as a Top 5 contender because it’s shorter than most longreads. But I kept returning to it, and to one beautiful line in particular: “[It] can be a twentysomething rite of passage to realize that your parents are more than your parents; that they had a life before you; that they were beautiful and moved beautifully and were desired, and still are.” It’s a profound realization, and one that’s taken me into my 40s to really grasp. (For this reason, I got a kick out of the recent wave of #80sDanceChallenge clips in which TikTokers filmed their dancing parents, moving like they did in the ’80s, to the unmistakable beat of “Smalltown Boy.”) For a while now, I’ve wanted to do something similar—not record my parents letting loose to catch a glimpse of their younger selves, but to sit down with them, and all of my aunts and uncles, to ask them questions about their lives, especially their early years: their childhoods in the Philippines, their many firsts. As Winter explores here, the process of turning our parents and elderly family members into entertainment fodder can be fun, emotional, and rewarding, but it may also become tense and uncomfortable, revealing complex generational and family dynamics. This is a quick yet thoughtful read, with a few must-click links that go to Francesca Scorsese’s delightful TikToks, in which she records herself with her famous filmmaker dad in genuinely warm and funny exchanges, like this one where she asks him to identify feminine products. —CLR
Emma Copley Eisenberg | The New Republic | June 7, 2024 | 1,923 words
Emma Copley Eisenberg calls out the publishing industry for weight prejudice in this fascinating essay. Reading the piece, you will realize how few times you have experienced an overweight main character while reading fiction. And that will make you think. —CW
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“Go to Las Vegas to compete in the Excel World Championship” is the sort of assignment any tech-adjacent journalist dreams of getting. But few could pull it off the way David Pierce does for The Verge—with descriptive reporting, humor, and more than a little insight into how a spreadsheet program became arguably the most important piece of software since the dawn of personal computing. Add in some of the best design I’ve seen in an online feature this year, and you’ve got a winner.
Rose says go, and the most problematic thing about competitive Excel becomes blindingly obvious to me once again: it is damn near impossible to figure out what’s going on. All eight players are moving so fast and doing so many things with keyboard shortcuts and formulas that there’s practically no way to see what they’re doing until it’s already done. What’s happening around me looks like a sport, it’s lit like a sport, and the anxiety levels suggest aggressive competition, but even the other competitors in the room can barely keep up. They’re squinting at the screens in front of each workstation, trying to decipher each move. Really, they’re mostly just waiting for the score to update.
In the commentary booth, du Soleil and Acampora are doing their best to keep up and explain the maneuvers, but watching eight spreadsheet whizzes simultaneously requires multitasking brainpower I’m not sure any human can attain. And if you can figure out what =SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””) means in the few seconds it’s shown onscreen, well, you should come to Vegas next year.
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In this inspirational story, Paige Kaptuch explores the life of Darlene Barlow Stubbs (a woman she has competed against in marathons without even knowing). Raised in an FDS community, which she later ran away from, Stubbs shows us how running can help to heal and build community.
The route takes us on some back roads at the edge of town, revealing the jagged red vistas that have been featured in so many documentaries and news stories about the area. Shown on film, the view is often accompanied by haunting music meant to evoke the unthinkable crimes that took place here. For many in the Short Creek Running Club, being called a runner is part of a new identity. Participating in a club that has nothing to do with religion is a novel concept. And a run with me, an outsider? Ten years ago, it would have been out of the question: Darlene tells me that “play” and “fun” were once like swear words here.
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Krista Diamond reflects on the temporary housing she lived in while working at various national parks in the United States. Given her transience and impermanence in these spartan, often dilapidated spaces, she considers what it means to make a home for yourself. Sharing the landscape with the insects, mammals, and amphibians that inhabited these wilderness outposts, she comes to the realization that home is much more than simply a location.
The contracts were short. A summer. A winter. But I moved in like I meant it, like I was staying forever. With each new park, the cycle began again. On each first night, panic and regret and loneliness transformed into a desire to make the bed, put clothing into the drawers, hang photos on the wall. And with this homemaking came a home. And with a home came community, familiarity, a sense of belonging. And then, the season ended.
The goodbye party, the packing of boxes, the stuffing of clothes into garbage bags. Enough gas money to drive somewhere new. Everything back in the car.
The cruel irony: by the time you get settled, it’s over.
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Last year, on June 18, 2023, the Titan submersible imploded during a dive to the Titanic wreckage, killing all five people on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. In this WIRED story, Mark Harris sheds light on the development of the company’s submersible technology and the events leading up to the tragedy, sharing information from internal OceanGate emails, documents, and photographs. It’s clear, from the tens of thousands of pieces of evidence, that in his quest to conquer the deep sea, Rush cut corners financially and viewed tests and safety practices as hurdles that stifled innovation.
Titan reached a similar depth again in April, with a crew of four including Rush. While OceanGate touted the dive as history-making proof of its submersible’s bona fides, even Rush was getting worried about loud noises the hull was making at depth. Then on June 7, three weeks before Titan’s maiden voyage to the Titanic, an OceanGate pilot inspecting the interior with a flashlight noticed a crack in the hull. He sent Rush an email warning that the crack was “pretty serious.” A detailed internal report later showed that at least 11 square feet of carbon fiber had delaminated—meaning the bonds between layers had separated.
This time, Rush couldn’t ignore the data. The hull that was meant to last for 10,000 dives to the Titanic had made fewer than 50—and only three to 4,000 meters. It would have to be scrapped, and the Titanic missions would be delayed for yet another year.
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The opioid epidemic has made fishing, already a dangerous job, even more deadly. When there’s an overdose at sea, fishermen have to take care of one another. C.J. Chivers examines how one man’s death in 2021, a mere 72 hours into his fishing career, may have prompted a sea change:
Eight days after Brian Murphy died, Kelsey and a co-worker showed up at the Ocean Wave, one of Alexander’s scallopers, to train its crew. The instructors mixed demonstrations on how to administer Narcan—one spray into one nostril, the second into the other—with assurances that the drug was harmless if used on someone suffering a condition other than overdose. The training carried another message, which was not intuitive: Merely administering Narcan was not enough. Multiple dispensers were sometimes required to restore a patient’s breathing, and this was true even if a patient resumed seemingly normal respiration. If the opioids were particularly potent, a patient might backslide as the antagonist wore off. Patients in respiratory distress also often suffered “polysubstance overdoses,” like fentanyl mixed with other drugs, including cocaine, amphetamines or xylazine. Alcohol might be involved, too. With so many variables, anyone revived with naloxone should be rushed to professional care. In an overdose at sea, they said, a victim’s peers should make a mayday call, so the Coast Guard could hurry the patient to a hospital.
After the partnership trained two more Alexander crews, Warren heard positive feedback from his captains. He issued his judgment. “Now it’s mandatory,” he said. Within weeks of the Jersey Pride’s mayday call, Narcan distribution and training became permanent elements of the company’s operation. Alexander-Nevells credits Murphy. He spent about 72 hours as a commercial fisherman, died on the job and left a legacy. “He changed my dad’s fleet,” she says. “I know for a fact that without Brian Murphy, this program doesn’t exist.”
In New Jersey, where Murphy’s family suffered the agonies of sudden, unexpected loss, followed by the humiliation of being ghosted by those who knew what happened to him aboard the Jersey Pride, the changes to the Alexander fleet came as welcome news. His brother, Doug Haferl, recalls his sibling with warmth and gratitude. Their parents divorced when the kids were young, and their father worked long hours as a crane operator. Brian assumed the role of father figure. “He took me and my brother Tom under his wing,” he says. The thought that Brian’s death helped put naloxone on boats and might one day save a life, he says, “is about the best thing I could hope for.”
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For Oxford American, Michael Adno follows Gary and Audrey Revell on the hunt for earthworms. The Revells—fourth generation worm grunters—have used a piece of wood called a stob and a metal file to harvest earthworms, earning a seasonal income for the past 54 years in Sanborn, six miles west of Sopchoppy, Florida.
“Alright, Mama,” Gary said to Audrey before changing into a pair of boots, fastening knee pads, and slipping on gloves. We walked through the burnt palmettos, coated in a film of black soot, before he pointed to a few holes in the soil. They were clues to where worms were and where they were headed. He took his stob, one his son had hewn out of black gum, and knocked it a foot into the earth with his steel file before rubbing the file against the stob’s head. He called each pass a “roop.” With every roop, he mirrored the sound himself, groaning first in a low pitch then ascending to an abrupt stop. Gary would roop, pause, tell a story, then start again. It didn’t take long before a dozen large earthworms began crawling around the earth between us as Audrey gathered them by hand.
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The latest entry in the annals of coverage of the Netflix reality show Love Is Blind goes behind the scenes for the filming of season seven. Creator Chris Coelen drops a new group of singles into his “experiment”—and wrestles with the lawsuits against the show:
Love Is Blind’s production company, Kinetic Content, of which Coelen is the founder and CEO, has denied all the allegations. They are a continuing source of irritation for Coelen, who often brings them up unprompted. Our conversations are studded with long, off-the-record interjections. He is aggravated by what he views as an untruthful characterization of the show. From Coelen’s perspective, participants decide whether to have sex, whether to drink, whether to get into fights—that’s all on them. From another perspective, calling it a documentary can be a way to avoid liability for what happens during production.
And Love Is Blind is, of course, not a documentary. The stories may not be produced in the same way “soft-scripted” reality shows are, as Coelen puts it. But in practice, the lines are blurry; producers are neither as fully controlling as some cast members believe nor as purely hands-off as Coelen suggests. There is both coercion and freedom on Love Is Blind: Producers do not script what cast members say, but they do ask leading questions, and some cast members have said they’re encouraged to stay even if they’ve expressed a desire to leave. The interactions I witness are like a form of influence, making some paths feel easier than others, making some choices feel like rebellion and others like following the rules.
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Karen Solie may be known for her poetry, but judging from this essay, her prose is no slouch either. As she details her trip to (and immersion in) the music scene of Austin, Texas, she pulls together disparate strands, braiding loss and joy and creativity into a single stirring chord. All the more affecting for its spareness.
To cover a song you need to study it, understand its phrasing and changes. You need to dwell in its caesuras, hear how your voice might carry there. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind. The process is intuitive and technical, and what I learned from studying songs is that technique and intuition develop together and can’t be separated. Inside this relationship you learn your range and, with it, your limitations. If you can’t, say, lower your voice on its rope down to where the first words of “I Fall to Pieces” live as though at the bottom of a well, and if you can’t, at the apex of the first verse, allow its confession of failure to escape with the high note out of the aperture, follow it with your voice almost the way you would with your eye—then you should carry on practicing awhile longer in private, out of respect. You learn respect for how difficult it is to make a song seem simple, for the mechanics that make possible an immediacy of feeling, and you learn to love the difficulty. I can’t find it, we’d say, searching for the note, the timing, the tone. I can’t quite get there. The apprenticeship of covers never ends. It’s not about imitation, though may need to begin there. You can’t get creative with the problems songs pose until you can identify those problems. You can’t create your own songs, your own sets of problems, until you can get creative with the problems you already have.
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For IVF patients, especially women in their 40s, every day counts. As Zoya Teirstein and Jessica Kutz report in this story, more than half of fertility clinics in 13 states—including Florida, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Delaware—are at risk of hurricane damage. In this collaboration between Grist, Vox, and The 19th, Teirstein and Kutz follow Kirsti Mahon, a woman in Naples, Florida, undergoing IVF, and recount how Hurricane Ian nearly shattered Mahon’s dreams of having a baby. The piece is part of a larger series that focuses on how climate change impacts reproductive health.
On Wednesday morning, Justin injected Kirsti with the last dose of her medication. Southwest Florida was flooding, and parts of the state were losing power, but they hadn’t heard anything from the clinic. Their appointment was supposed to be the next day. As far as Kirsti knew, the procedure was still on track.
Ulrich said she’d love to see clinics establish better relationships with other fertility treatment centers in their region so that patients could transfer to them in times of disaster. She also encourages clinic staff to review their emergency action plans to ensure they are prepared to meet the changing nature of storms, and to be ready to make decisions quickly to salvage cycles and protect embryos. All clinics store embryos in nitrogen tanks, which do not rely on electricity and are typically safe from blackouts or issues with electrical grids. But the labs that embryos mature in before they are frozen do depend on electricity — and if a disaster takes out power for too long, even backup generators can run out of fuel. During Hurricane Katrina, embryos were lost at one clinic for this reason.
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If you’re on social media, you couldn’t have missed the flurry of #80sdancechallenge posts shared across platforms, in which people posted videos of their parents showing off their ’80s dance moves while grooving to Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy.” In this fun read, Jessica Winter discusses great examples over the years of adult children using their parents in film and television projects—from John Cassavetes’ 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence to Max’s Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show. Really, though, the best links in the piece go to Francesca Scorsese’s TikToks, where she records herself with her famous filmmaker dad in genuinely warm and funny clips. It’s a short but thoughtful piece on role reversal, generational drama, and sometimes complex family dynamics.
Across the spectrum of the reverse-sharenting canon—from TikTok teens stunting on their immigrant folks to Oscar-winning directors—a primal generational drama unfolds: how the near-absolute authority of a mother or father gradually wanes, but does not entirely abate, as their kids mature and seize some of that authority for themselves; and how this redistribution of power is further complicated if the adult child attains unusual creative clout, prominence, or wealth. In Carmichael’s reality show, in his standup, and in his interviews, he repeatedly brings up the fact that, despite his parents’ refusal to embrace him completely after coming out, he paid for the house that they live in and he covers their health insurance. This is a multi-edged disclosure. It’s a gotcha on his mother and father, for sure—they accept what he earns but not who he is. But there’s also the plaintive suggestion that he is trying to buy their affections. And, if the viewer senses that their participation in his series is somewhat reluctant, it seems possible that a hint of financial obligation is also in play.
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With our distance, what I miss most is our car rides. You listen to Little Saigon Radio on AM and I prefer to bypass radio frequency with my Spotify playlists. Together, we settle on so-called “easy listening.” You still use a physical map in the rare instance you go somewhere new. I use Google Maps for the most familiar of places. Our final destinations are usually different.
I learned the most about you sitting in the passenger seat. The most memorable conversations with you have been on Beltway 8 en route to the Houston airport before I fly away again. I still haven’t figured out why these drives have literally been the vehicle of our relationship—perhaps it’s the desire to mask the terrible soft rock station, or the monotonous freeway scenery, or your need to be candid since months will pass before we see each other again.
This trend started when I was 18, a few hours before I traveled to Washington, DC, for my first day of college. Our conversation began in your car and continued into terminal A of Houston’s Intercontinental Airport. We sat on a bench a few feet from security. Like always, we were too early.
On the Vietnamese zodiac, you are a water buffalo, typically steady in your movement and words. Like an egret, I relied on you for protection and nourishment. On this day, you were out of temperament. You had talked about your childhood in the car and, now at the airport, you had become an adult. You said, “Did you know that your grandfather died in a reeducation camp?”
By then, I had to go through security. It was time for me to take flight. It was perfectly timed or ill-timed, I’m still not sure. All I know is that I’ve thought and written about that conversation for years. I became obsessed with arranging the historical details of our lives.
In the decade after college, I still needed to be driven to the airport. One early Saturday morning, my final destination was San Francisco—the city I considered home, albeit second only to Houston. I had spent the past 10 years piecing together my family history and you were much more open to all my questions about your life—the escape from Vietnam, the lonely arrival in the United States, and the constant, lingering struggle of life as a Vietnamese man with US citizenship.
“Can I ask you something?” you said, interrupting the synth melody emanating from the “work-friendly” radio.
I was anticipating another significant life event to add to the patchworked narrative in my mind so I said, eagerly, “Sure, Dad.”
“What do you think of me dating again?”
I was baffled. No one coaches you on how to react when your father casually informs you that a family member died for political reasons in a reeducation camp. Similarly, no one tells you how to approach a dating conversation with your aging father. You finally needed me as much as I had needed you.
More confounding: this was the first time we didn’t talk about your past or my next steps. It was about your future.
I wish I had come out to you in the car. Instead, I started that journey alone on a December morning during a visit home. Born on December 25th, you have shared your birthday with what was formerly your wedding anniversary and what is always Christmas day. We often bought a single cake that forced a decorator to write a triple message in buttercream. Now the holidays also commemorate your lesbian daughter coming out.
Dad, it was strange to “come out.” I imagine it was like what you told me at the airport about my grandfather and on all the car rides across Houston. We never learned how to talk, so we kept things inside until we couldn’t.
In San Francisco, I volunteered at an organization where young people lined their office walls with colorful artwork depicting stories and slogans of coming out and being proud. I wasn’t like those kids. I hadn’t said anything to you yet.
I imagined my own artwork. I would draw a picture depicting my Vietnamese parents embracing me. I conjured the full conversations I could finally have with you because I thought my sexuality was the biggest barrier in our relationship. I thought of all the doctor’s visits and therapy sessions where I relayed vague symptoms of anxiety, fatigue, and stomachaches—the signs of being closeted, apparently cured with a serum called coming out. The narrative was too good for mere daydreaming.
I decided what I would do the night before. At daybreak, I positioned myself on the cream-colored polyester couch facing your bedroom door. Do you remember where that was, Dad? I know it has been years since the divorce and since you had to leave that house.
I was still a twentysomething who went to bed late and woke up later. You were a veteran of the South Vietnamese Air Force and maintained a rigid morning routine despite being decades removed from the war and nearly 10,000 miles away from Saigon. With a circadian rhythm more like a sloth than a soldier, I forced myself to wake up before you. As always, I was up, yet so tired.
I remember jolting at the familiar sound of your sticky door. The doors of our rooms expanded and contracted with Houston heat and artificial cold, never fitting perfectly in their frames.
The doors of our rooms expanded and contracted with Houston heat and artificial cold, never fitting perfectly in their frames.
“Jenny?” you said, inflecting my name in confusion. “Why are you up so early?”
“I have something to tell you I’m gay,” I heard myself say. The words fumbled out of my mouth without pause, as if stopping would halt my momentum and propel me back into the closet. Is that how you felt when you told me about my grandfather?
I vaguely recall your reply. It was either an “okay” or a misplaced pleasantry like “thank you” or “I understand.” Although I don’t recall the words, I remember what I didn’t feel: catharsis, relief, or the heaviness that was supposed to lift from my body. All I felt was cold. As I withdrew into my head, you disappeared into your morning walk.
Here is what you did not see:
I paced as the sun rose, awaiting your return, wondering, “What’s supposed to happen after I say it?”
Pauline’s door opened shortly after you left. She was being a dutiful daughter too, home for the holidays. With a drowsy shuffle and a satin sleeping mask on her forehead, she saw the scene: me—alone, confused, upset.
When you returned, I was relieved you decided to come back. I wasn’t used to either one of us returning so soon after an announcement. That relief turned to regret when you began to cry into Pauline’s shoulders.
“What’s going on?” I heard Pauline say.
“What did I do wrong?” you said softly.
I also wondered what I did wrong.
Years later, I now know what went wrong. It wasn’t you or me.
I should have known that before any other identity, I am Vietnamese American first. Before I knew I was gay, I knew I was your con gái—your youngest daughter. Before I was Jennifer, I was “Jenny” because Vietnamese elders flattened the “er” sound from its harsh pronunciation.
I should have known that before any other identity, I am Vietnamese American first. Before I knew I was gay, I knew I was your con gái—your youngest daughter.
I was Vietnamese American in the way I approached the world, always feeling like the underdog fighting someone better. It’s in the arrogant guerilla-like confidence of knowing I have a chance to win despite the odds. It’s in my inclination to add fish sauce to a dish to add depth, how I prefer my beer watered down, enjoyed on a hot day. It’s in my preference for taking my coffee dark roasted, iced, and blunted by dollops of condensed milk.
Most of all, it’s in my way of talking or lack thereof. It’s always with contradictory deference to and skepticism for those who say too much. You always taught me to trust actions, never words. After all, in Vietnam people talked a lot, especially the Americans.
What was more important than talking was our ability to hold secrets. From you, I learned the many shapes of silence—how it can be used violently or as a powerful form of restraint. Rarer was silence as the embodiment of peace, where two people can sit together without words, but in mutual understanding.
Most of the time, we used silence to protect ourselves. You could tell no one of your escape from Saigon before it fell. Otherwise, someone—you, my grandmother, your father—would have died. Like you, Mom survived because she boarded a fishing boat leaving the country having told few people. Unlike those who lived, I imagine that your father died because someone extracted his secrets. Maybe he admitted that he worked for the South Vietnamese government, that he was a high-ranking civil servant, that he wasn’t a communist. He suffered the same ending as those who were open about who they were: he died far away from his family at the hands of the so-called enemy. Years later, no one has told you what actually happened.
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I also had secrets that felt scary to say out loud. The fear of death was not the reason I couldn’t tell you about my sexuality, though at times it felt like the end of the world. I didn’t want to add shame to your difficult life, so instead I tended it myself.
In your years working and living in America, you had to learn English beyond asking for food, water, and shelter—to not just speak English, but to talk in English. Like silence, there are contours to talking. There’s transactional exchanges and intimate conversations filled with emotional depth. You were fixated on talking as deception.
“Talk is cheap,” you often say. It’s your favorite American saying. Similarly, mine is, “Say what you mean, mean what you say.” From you, I developed an aggressive bullshit meter. I learned to listen with one ear and watch with both eyes. You distrusted Americans, but also Vietnamese people of unknown origins, politicians, coworkers, and sometimes your own family.
Dad, talking with you was not just cheap, but also rare. There was safety in keeping secrets, but you were also Vietnamese with limited English and tired from American life. I was too American with deficient Vietnamese and disinterested in our cultural history.
We were both displaced from each other. The divide meant I couldn’t tell you much—like my favorite bands, my day at school, the girl I liked. Instead, dinners were always wordless and so were most of the car rides. This is where silence was disquieting.
Looking back, we never had conversations, just announcements with no expectation of response.
“We’re going to the store right now.”
“I’m going away for college.”
“Your grandfather died in a reeducation camp.”
“I’m gay.”
Dad, you have trained me to be disappointed by talking and its lack of resolve. It worked. I had “come out” many times before I did so with you, all to less than satisfying results. I was so focused on just saying the words that I was never prepared for the responses.
I remember the first time I said “I’m gay” to Pauline. I rehearsed as I had seen on shows like Ellen. We were at a Brooklyn bar in autumn. I was in college, but still underage, so she bought me one of my first beers. I remember the bitter taste and my nervous tick in drinking liquids to quench anxiety. Once I finished, I began to scratch off the blue label, blending the paper with the bottle’s icy residue until a cobalt paste formed at my fingertips. By the time I had finally said “I’m gay,” the bottle had been completely stripped of its label. It was naked and transparent.
As it turns out, Pauline could have been gay too or at least a typical student at NYU because she gave me literal packets of “So You Think You’re Gay” information. Don’t worry, Dad. Your other daughter is, in fact, very heterosexual and a good ally. She didn’t seem phased except when she said this:
“You know, things are going to change with our family.”
Of course, we didn’t really talk about what this meant.
Then there was coming out in college, first to two of my closest floormates. They said something to the effect of “cool” and the conversation continued about something that wasn’t gay like chemistry class and dorm food. My statement was more of a comma than an exclamation in our dialogue.
The most disappointing experience was coming out to my first crush. I had imagined a situation where one of two extremes would transpire. She would either express her love for me as well or she would throw her lunch at me, telling me I was a disgusting fag. I had internet-stalked her enough to know she had used that word once.
From you, I learned the many shapes of silence—how it can be used violently or as a powerful form of restraint.
Neither transpired. We had lunch in Houston during one of our college breaks. I was eating a sandwich when I told her.
“Thanks for letting me know,” she said as if I informed her that I would be running late.
“And you were my first crush,” I added to provoke something—anything—beyond the tepidness of the moment.
“I’m honored,” she replied, grinning through a bite.
I continued eating my sandwich. I drove home in a “why did I hold this in so long, what good did that do” silence.
Dad, in all of these instances, I was working up to you.
We were both taught that secrets would hide and protect us from pain, but perhaps we had less choice in the matter. There’s a difference between being silenced and being silent.
Vietnamese history is a long list of people trying to silence us, of our ancestors remaining quiet for survival. First, it was the thousand years of Chinese rule when we were merely a tributary state, meant to be a vassal for someone else’s trade and culture. Then there were the Catholic missionaries with their colonial conquests. They romanized our language so that we had to relearn how to read, write, and speak with each other. Then came the Japanese, who were cruel and led with disquieting fear and famine. When the French came and went, as most colonizers do, we stopped talking and began to fight each other for power. It was the North, the South, the mirage of the 17th parallel dividing a country along fictitious lines. Most famously, it was the Americans who decided to wage a proxy war with their ammunition and anti-communist messages. Like most hawkish powers, they left and so did their promises.
You and mom were supposedly the lucky ones. You became refugees. You left Vietnam and had two daughters in America where the silencing was passed to the next generation. In this part of our history, I now fight something that obstructs my ability to talk to you and be fully Vietnamese: American assimilation.
Dad, it was probably too hard to talk to me about the violence you witnessed, just as it was too shameful to tell you about my sexuality. To have a conversation requires an engagement or an exchange—something we could not do since we were in constant translation. To you, I was an American girl in a Vietnamese family living a life that you could not recognize. We spoke in updates, never in dialogue about relationships, sex, life in Texas, or your life in Vietnam.
In college, one of my goals was to learn how to talk. More specifically, I was practicing one of the most American traditions—talking about myself. For a long time, all I had were the words and narratives of others. In college, I was thrust into a world of queer activism. People were always late, used big words, and spoke academically. It didn’t sound like home. Instead, it confused me and made me feel stupid. My peers were encouraging me to watch coming-of-age movies and shows, which was a reel of early aughts life looped with raucous parties. It was the Pittsburgh warehouse parties of Queer as Folk and the gabby Sunday brunches of The L Word. Always a quiet person, I struggled to be heard and seen in these depictions. I listened to the coming out stories of others—the relief and acceptance that many of them felt almost immediately. I wanted to be afforded the same pride. I should have known that my narrative would be different.
In our household, you and Mom did not need to put on a performance. We never said the ultimate exchange of words: “I love you.” To be honest, I didn’t care. Like you said, “talk is cheap.” Words could be misunderstood, powerful, malleable, liberating, meaningless. Your actions said all I needed to hear.
The fear of death was not the reason I couldn’t tell you about my sexuality, though at times it felt like the end of the world.
I think about your response a lot. To be honest, there’s never a perfect “coming out” reply. What’s most interesting is the wording of your response.
“What did I do wrong?” you asked out loud.
Not say—do.
Dad, when I married Tracy, I kept my last name. It was partially out of laziness, but mostly because my surname is one of the last things about me that is purely Vietnamese. Everything else from my so-called mother country is broken and bastardized.
Now, I wrestle with whether I will have children. I mull not having a family, but I’m sad that I may never pass down the Vietnamese parts of us to someone else, just as our occupiers had once intended. Am I silencing us once and for all?
Our relationship is complex, woven with feelings of guilt, misunderstanding, and lost history. There’s a tension that naturally develops when two people share a similar personality, but are divided by historical luck, cultural upbringing, and a generation.
Part of my silence was the shame I felt in being able to live out my chosen future when you could not. Whether real or imagined, I used to think of my success coming at your detriment. The more I assimilated, the more it harmed you. Equilibrium in our relationship felt impossible.
There’s a tension that naturally develops when two people share a similar personality, but are divided by historical luck, cultural upbringing, and a generation.
A few months after I graduated from college and proudly landed my first job, you lost what would become the last job you would ever work. Our working-class family has always been susceptible to the ups and downs of an oil-dependent economy, but the cycle never came back up for you. Our splintered symbiosis meant you were cast aside despite years of loyal labor, yet I was allowed to ascend.
As I entered my long-term relationship with Tracy, your 30-year marriage was formally dissolving. As a bystander to that marriage, it was a long-due decision. Your union was a strained pairing that evolved from simmering pain to relentless wounds. I remember sitting in a hostel in Paris, simultaneously writing transatlantic postcards to the person I would eventually marry while reading your divorce paperwork transmitted via email. It was an odd feeling to write in cavalier, romantic language and to read, in legalese, all the reasons Mom needed to leave you.
Now, as I try to build a full life with Tracy, you work to minimize your belongings and luxuries to fit into your single life on a slender budget. No amount of phone calls or digital infusions of money can bridge the physical and emotional gulf between our lives. In the United States, you are always giving and I am always taking.
How American, right? Even my thinking has assimilated.
Since that moment I said “I’m gay” that December morning and you sobbed “what did I do wrong,” I can see the many years spent slowly moving toward one another. I had to pivot toward how we communicated best—some listening and a lot more doing. I slowly learned from your example and from Tracy, who introduced me as the Vietnamese girl from Texas, eventually shortened by her Chinese mother to just “the girl.” There was never a formal coming out. I didn’t even have to say anything. Instead, I showed up to dinners, baby showers, birthdays, days of death.
I learned that if you show up, you had better eat or do something. Here was the girl driving Tracy’s mom to the dentist. Here was the girl mediating conflict between our twin nieces. Here was the girl dancing with the 3-year-old nephew. The girl did this, the girl did that, the girl, the girl, the girl. I don’t think anyone remembered what I said.
Similarly, we began flying down to Houston together once every year, then twice a year. This was a strategy. I had Tracy install a Wi-Fi router at your house to help you access the world. She marinated meat for your Christmas-birthday BBQ. She showed up to every winter holiday for eight straight years save for the one year she couldn’t.
“Where is she?” our family asked. I knew then that our strategy had worked. We read books, we held babies, and we danced with toddlers to Bruno Mars. We drove people to the San Francisco International and the Houston Intercontinental airports and back. We brought beer to the parties, we attempted to cook, we ate, and we hosted. If someone needed a piñata, we bought it.
When Hurricane Harvey came along, Tracy was up despite the time difference looking through flood plain maps, calmly telling you and Mom what you could do next—where you should stay or go. For Mom it was leave, for you it was shelter-in-place. It’s no surprise that, just one week after Hurricane Harvey, I proposed to her. You seemed happy for me.
Along the way, the more I appeared fully, the more space there was to practice listening and talking, especially with you.
From you, I developed an aggressive bullshit meter. I learned to listen with one ear and watch with both eyes.
One July afternoon in Houston, I was home again. It was the usual checkup on your dry-rotted cabinets, your sputtering air conditioner, and that car with hundreds of thousands of miles. Amid the process, you allowed me to ask more questions, like a work-learn exchange. You told me that you left Saigon on April 28th at 10:30 PM. Your squadron leader said to your crew that “it’s over” and you had two choices: go back to your family or escape. You tried to go back home, but you couldn’t make it out of the airport because of all the shooting and killing happening outside. So, you escaped. The EC-47 took off despite a runway full of burnt planes and bodies.
Then it was a fall afternoon and I was glad to be back for another visit, a feeling that I started developing with age. We may have been at a Vietnamese restaurant on Bellaire Boulevard eating yet another plate of mì xà o giòn. You let me ask another question as we waited for the greasy pan-fried noodles. You told me what happened after April 28, 1975. You landed in Thailand and stayed on a US Army base for four days. Again, you were given two choices: Guam or Wake Island. You wanted to follow all the refugees to Guam, so you were placed at a refugee camp there waiting to see if your girlfriend, mom, or dad would arrive too. They never came. Instead, you left the camp alone, headed to Pensacola, Florida.
“What happened to your girlfriend,” I asked.
“It’s a bad story. It hurts. It’s a bad story,” you replied.
There I learned to respect the boundaries of silence.
Jumping ahead to early 2020, it was the week before California decided to lock down from COVID-19. I happened to be in Houston. Newly 70, you were a perfect receptacle for the virus. In the morning, you ate one of two items stocked in your freezer—a Jimmy Dean sausage sandwich or a pepperoni Hot Pocket. You prepared for the pandemic with nothing else. I arrived at your house with soap, Emergen-C, and some vitamins. I wasn’t sure what I was trying to do except show you I could be helpful.
You refused the items, but eventually relented with: “I survived the war, I will survive this.” Do you remember this moment? I do because the war was no longer a whole story that I had to mentally prepare for. It was a hyperbole, a transition in a conversation, just one part of a full discussion.
A few years after the worst of the pandemic, we reunited again. Separated for so long with the fear of losing each other, I was more eager to talk and so were you. This time, you didn’t need prompting. You told me that your father died in 1976. He was a good man who never gambled. In fact, a director in the department of agriculture. Your mother could not leave. Instead, she died of cancer years later in Vietnam. That’s life, you said, the cycle of having children and dying.
In the process, I uncovered all the reasons you may have been silent.
“Không thể,” you said once. You can’t say because it’s too hurtful.
“I don’t want to talk too much about my life and blow it up. If you’re a loser, you keep your mouth shut. That’s the Vietnamese way,” you had explained to me.
“I love you, I want you to know. But not too much,” you said a few times before.
In a way, it all made sense. We had to talk about the silence for me to understand it and accept it. I had to show that I would not weaponize your secrets like others had before.
One-minute calls have stretched to five minutes, our conversations an even distribution of how my life was going and how you are doing. You call me after mass shootings like Colorado Springs and beg me not to go out. You spend a lot of time asking me what I am cooking for Tracy and whether it will be good. Cook for me one day, you now consistently joke. I will, I always reply. I like that part of the conversation.
Cook for me one day, you now consistently joke. I will, I always reply. I like that part of the conversation.
My favorite exchange was on my wedding day. Do you recall that windy fall Sunday in San Francisco? It was your first time visiting me. Before I walked down the aisle, you held my hand. I was wringing yours. Our rare moments of physical touch usually solicit thoughts about the callousness of your machinist hands, the cuts that never seem to heal, and the awkwardness of holding each other. Instead, we were at the doors of the Randall Museum—on the verge of walking outside, down a sidewalk typically leading people into the museum, and onto a grassy knoll. My hand, moist and tense, gave everything away.
“You feel really nervous,” you said to me.
“I’m a little nervous,” I replied.
I felt you lightly squeeze my hand.
“It’ll be alright,” you assured me. That’s all I needed to hear. It quelled the voices in my head. Together, we were in perfect silence.
Then came the cue of our music. I took a small shuffle, then a big step. Together, we began walking.
Dad, we have worked so hard to free ourselves from silence—to give ourselves permission to talk when we choose. I became a writer because I wanted to learn all the ways to twist a narrative for protection and personal provocation. You are now free to move about your days not having to quietly endure a difficult marriage, a job that cut your hands on a regular basis, and the stress of having to raise American children on a working-class wage. For the first time in centuries, Vietnam is no longer under foreign occupation and can wrestle with itself. Dad, I know you and I are luckier than most people.
We also have a lot to work on. We still fight with the same Vietnamese stubbornness that is in our blood. I struggle with knowing far more English than Vietnamese. As you age, I fret about the ultimate silence of losing you. Although this dynamic will never go away, there have been new rhetorical tools to soften our challenges. Phrases like “I’m sorry” and, more recently, “I love you.”
I no longer want to think of our lives as an American zero-sum game. I hope we are creating something else, to allow us to move beyond coming out and toward just being together. That feels much more Vietnamese to me.
Dad, in this lifetime, you lived into your zodiac sign as the steady water buffalo, rooted in Houston, working steadfastly until your body broke. I was the egret, always able to fly away when needed, only coming back when convenient. In a different existence, I imagine a world where our pairing is swapped—where I can be the water buffalo and you can transport yourself as an elegant egret. I want you to fly above the world, through the clouds, to another place where there is life beyond war and peace. Then, upon your return, you can tell me what you saw and I can tell you what I did. We can be together in motion or in stillness, whatever we choose for ourselves.
So, let’s go back to the start of our circuitous journey, where we can begin again.
“What do you think of me dating again?”
I looked at you anticipating self-deprecating laughter that usually rescues me from responding to your statements. You were serious.
I’ve engaged in dating conversations with countless people, most of whom are not you and not over 65. Many of those conversations end with my watching with fascination as they swipe left or swipe right on their apps.
Is that what he is asking for, I wondered? To help him start a dating profile?
I thought of the steep learning curve you—a man who spent a lifetime cutting pipes for oil companies—endured to learn how to use a smartphone. You handled it with the same finesse you would use to mercifully kill a spider—jamming your finger into the glass with disbelief that a machine can transmit touch to action.
Say something, I thought. Say something other than “please don’t use Tinder and date someone my age.”
“You supported me being with Tracy,” I responded. “So, I’ll support you in the decision you make.”
I started to count the green exit signs to prevent myself from crying.
“Okay, good to know,” you replied.
Lost in the emotion, I don’t remember the specifics of what we said next. All I remember is that we talked all the way to the airport.
Jennifer Thuy Vi Nguyen is a creative nonfiction writer and proud native Houstonian currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared inEmerge(where she also served as editor), The Offing, Foglifter, the Ponder Review, and New Rivers Press as the winner of the American Fiction Award. Her writing has been supported by the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Vermont Studio Center, among others. She writes humorist pieces in “Thursday Letters with Jen” via Substack. She is working on her first book, “A Writer from Houston.”
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This is the story of Debra Stevens, who found a second family amongst the elephants of Botswana. Complete with beautiful video clips, this piece immerses you into life at Elephant Havens, then threads back to a different journey of discovery back in Stevens’ home of Dallas, Texas.
The mood turns sober when the young elephant stumbles out of the truck, into the boma. Her eyes were wrapped in cloth to help keep her calm on the journey, and she blindly bumps her head along the inside perimeter of the posts until Bee manages to reach through and loosen the blindfold. The elephant shakes her head, and the cloth falls. Once she sees humans, her ears flare out wide, contradicting her emaciated frame. A backbone juts up like a curved fin, and her hide hangs in loose folds where limbs meet midsection. After getting her bearings, she rushes in our direction, stopping short of the posts.
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