My Year Abroad: A Novel

opium bed

haole

Keep on singing, bromeo.

I understood at last that it was a con I needed. Now and from the beginning. For maybe your favorite teacher or coach or best friend conned you, too, into believing in a version of yourself you hadn’t yet imagined, a person many factors more capable, a person who might not have otherwise bloomed.

He tailored these pitches for sure but what I admired was that they weren’t in the least fake or overflogged. Pong offered them the angles they needed and wanted to make a free and confident decision that you could see became ultimately theirs and theirs alone. Pong, I realized, made himself their partner, not the other way around.

be greedy in your appreciations. Practice extravagant gratitude. Savor whatever your portion. This may sound like carpe diem but what I really mean is for the dies to carpere te, to have the moment, the person, the world, grab you right back in their full rankness and glory.

a semidiasporic postcolonial indeterminate like me

Jamesonian view of capitalism’s

“You have a business,” Pong said to me quite seriously. “You just don’t know what it is yet.”