When I was in middle school, I had this nemesis. His name was Monty Espy. Yes, I said Monty Espy. Recently, when recounting this story to a friend, they remarked, “Seriously? That was his real name? It’s a movie villain’s name if I ever heard one.” Monty teased me all through middle
How I met Oprah and let out a shrill inaudible sound that doesn’t normally come out of humans.
In the first decade of our friendship, Raya never owned a car. Yet somehow, she was rarely without one. Certain people have a special charm in their life – always getting rockstar parking, primo seats at a restaurant, vintage clothes shopping flair. Raya had car benefactors. When she and I
My second job in Seattle was waiting on tables at a restaurant called The Blowfish Asian Café. It was on the bottom floor of the Paramount Hotel in Seattle, a block away from the famed Paramount Theater. At the time, pan-Asian food concepts were on trend, and The Blowfish had
Raya* and I had been friends for nearly a decade when she asked me to get the Suddenly Slimmer treatment with her. When she and I first met, I immediately disliked her because she was so often ridiculous. But it was her relentless spirit that won me over in the
Hi, I’m Giyen Kim. It’s a highly problematic name. Not quite Korean. Definitely not American. No one gets it. My birth name was supposed to have been Jiyeon or Ji-yun, which the internet tells me was the seventh-most popular girl’s name in South Korea in 1980. I tried to figure