It’s been almost ten years now since my grandmother died. My grandfather came to live with us later that year, and spent the whole time fighting with my dad. I didn’t speak to him while he was there – I … more »
Tamagawa Kanjin. This was my father’s name. He told me that Tamagawa is Japanese for marble river. Such a conflicted meaning–marble does not flow. Other translations, jewel river and bullet river, are just as poetic and unclear. But … more »
I always had a penchant for doing things I wasn’t supposed to, especially as a child. One hazy summer, I was poking around on my mother’s silver MacBook, feeling quite clever for having cracked her not-so-difficult password: my full name. … more »
A definition:
Liu [留]: to stay; to stay behind; or, to be detained as in JuLiu [拘留]; Xue [学]: to study
Liu Xue [留学]: to study abroad; or, more literally, to stay in a foreign country in order to … more »
Ichi.
It’s 6:30 a.m. The whole family is sitting around the dining table for breakfast. Gohan, tamagoyaki, tofu, sake, misoshiru. My sister and I eat one, two, three bowls of rice, each time with a different topping—nori, furikake, … more »
Obachan is a force to be reckoned with. She guides me through Tokyo Station with the speed and efficiency of someone less than half her age. Her body, eighty-three years in the making, carries its own weight, its own burdens, … more »
Rowena’s day used to start very early, long before the sky could conceive first light. She would see her husband off as he set out to sea, staying by the shoreline until the flickering lamp in his little bangka was … more »
1942 draws to a close with the Watada family still interned in the abandoned town of Minto, BC, during the beginning of the Japanese Canadian ‘evacuation’. Terry Watada reimagines his father’s experiences based on a diary written during the war … more »
My father was a handsome, rugged man; tough, fairly tall (five–foot-ten in his youth) and quiet. He was a lumberjack before WWII. In 1920, he was abandoned in Vancouver at the age of fourteen by his father. Since the inheritance … more »
Translation may be found everywhere we look, but it is paradoxically rarely seen. The many complex ways of translation continually shape our understanding of the world. From world maps, to philosophical treatises to holy scripts, translation since the beginning of … more »