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Showing posts with the label immigrant

We Eat Margarine Sometimes

Money is a many splendored thing. I spend time worrying about money like someone who cares about the planet spends time thinking about all the ways Mother Earth could combust or collapse from all the fucking terrible stuff we're pouring into her. I dream about money, all the ways I could spend it, the clink-clinking sound of coins dropping onto cold, hard marble-topped counters ringing in my ears. Man, nobody wants money like I do. I dream of holding it in my hand, the green dollar bills crisp and tight and smelling like Wall Street Greed, which to me, smelled like bagels and lox. It smelled like high-end sofas and shit like that. It's a pity when when Gordon Gekko said, '' Gimme guys who are poor, smart and hungry," he forgot the girls and he definitely forgot someone like me. I kept a copy of the Wall Street Journal under my pillow at night and I read it like the Bible. People around me always aspiring to be doctors to cure cancer, engineers and lawyers- sure,...

Written in Mist: Speaking of Safer Things

She rolled the cigarette between two calloused fingers, savouring the feel. A wisp of smoke from between her chapped lips floated into the air, a silent song of something. 'Vol vol vol.' Indila's 'Derniere Danse' played in the cafe elsewhere, the melancholy song filling her ears and slowly falling into her. This is France, she thought to herself, a twenty five year old Malaysian immigrant with a baggage of hyphenated identities sitting in an isolated French cafe smoking a Chinese cigarette listening to a French-Algerian-Cambodian-Egyptian-Indian singer. As Indila works herself into a beautiful tragedy, she puts her head in her hands then takes a drag of her cigarette. There is a certain delicious irony in that ,she feels, especially with the rise of the National Front in France, people looking at her funny because of her name, the fact that she doesn't go to Church, mostly reads East Asian philosophers instead of Satre, eats neither pork nor beef, has a ...