Author: pinkbuddha.org
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Eating Envy
Photo courtesy xandreasw via Unsplash I read a book titled Adult Children of Alcoholic Parents. It described the fear a child feels when they see their parents’ behavior become erratic and aggressive; it addressed their coping behavior to control their parents. As children, they impaled themselves on the sword of self-loathing when they couldn’t extract
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Dog is God Spelled Backwards, part 2
Pablo “m’ama, non m’ama, m’ama” (she loves me, she loves me not, she loves me). Watercolor and pen. By Ayoung Kim Pablo, our monk-artist-deep-soul golden retriever, loved dancing with drag queens. At the time, I had been living in a three-story flat in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco with my sister and two friends.
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Dog is God Spelled Backwards, part 1
Pablo, our gentle giant. Photo courtesy: Ayoung Kim This is a collection of stories I sent to family members in the year before our beloved golden retriever Pablo’s passing. I never intended to publicize any of these. However, Pablo’s light shouldn’t be kept within the confines of our family. These stories bear witness to the
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This is What Love Looks Like
This morning uh-muh-ni came padding into the kitchen complaining of heaviness. My whole body feels heavy, I don’t know why this happens. She stretched onto tip-toes for a box of cereal from the top shelf. It’s been there for over a year. Fumbling with it she noted, Oh, I never opened this. Scrambling out the
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Teaching English in Taiwan
Students spooking a colleague on Halloween. Go home! The moment classes concluded and students spilled out into the hallway, the Taiwanese administrators hollered, “Go home! Min, go home! Benjamin, go home!” Yikes. I wondered what the students had done to piss off Anna, one of the administrators. She barked like a sergeant dressing down her
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Students in Taiwan
Students dance to a grammar song. Before meeting my students, I attended training for two weeks. The owner employed specific methods to teach subjects such as vocabulary, grammar, phonics, reading and writing. He observed me teach in person. He filmed my classes for a month to make sure I executed his method properly. However, regardless
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Morning Appointment
Photo courtesy: Karolina Kolodziejczak via Unsplash The other morning, we had to go to UCLA medical center for uh-muh-ni’s check-up. With an early morning departure time, uh-muh-ni had woken only fifteen minutes beforehand. She was scampering around in the kitchen in staccato movements: fixing her coffee, packing fried man-doo, and grabbing a bag of tangerines
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Living in Kaohsiung Taiwan
Love River, Zuoying, Kaohsiung, Taiwan I was originally hired to teach in Taiwan in 2020, during Covid-19. I had been living in Thailand at the time, living through the shut-down. In order to satisfy the Taiwanese Ministry of Education’s requirement to pass a medical exam at a government hospital only, I flew from Chiang Mai
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Coughing Flower
Part 1 She sits a folded flower in her chair, coughing into her iPad. Pulling a tissue, she spits floral spittle into it, tosses it to the ground, wadded and soiled. Her stigma is swollen. It’s constantly dripping. She declares her diagnosis: “I have too much nose.” Coughing Flower swipes her iPad and wipes her
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Tenderloin of Taiwan
This photo of the bathroom omitted from this Airbnb’s property…I wonder why. Just as I reached the gate to the apartment building, I saw an old man with his penis out pissing on the bushes in front. I wasn’t in the Tenderloin in San Francisco but in a suburban neighborhood in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. It wasn’t