Travelers (Tricycle, Gulf Coast)
She stands and listens to the rain, her mind traveling back to the funeral high up in the Himalayas. Again she’s sitting in the altar room listening to the lamas chanting from The Tibetan Book of the Dead guide her grandmother through the journey between death and rebirth…
The Open World (Shenandoah)
The long summer twilight filters through the leaves of the birch trees in the front yard, throws lacy patterns on the yellow walls of the bedroom. In a jar next to my bed, the fireflies my brother and I caught earlier in the evening crawl up and down the glass, their light gradually fading. The dormer window, an eye onto the open world, frames swallows winging past. Through the wall, I hear my mother crying, my father’s low tones…
Aftershocks (Scholastic SCOPE)
An earthquake ripped apart her country. Now it’s ripping apart her family.
Flowers Would Fall from the Sky Like Rain (Asia Literary Review)
The sun burns through the mist, vultures circling and then settling in the dead trees. The golden roofs of a monastery rise like a mirage against the snow-flocked Dharamsala mountains. Beyond, the Tibetan plateau stretches into eternity. Different things surface in his mind and make him unbearably sad: his sisters’ high-pitched voices as they chant skipping rhymes on a summer afternoon; the smell of his freshly-washed sheets as he lies waiting for sleep, his parents and grandmother talking downstairs; the blue light of winter as he glides on the skating pond, stars and planets glittering in the bare trees, his grandmother watching.
There’s No Reason to Get Romantic (American Dragons, HarperCollins)
My grandmother crossed the mountains, my mother the ocean—I want to know where my journey is. If I leave behind climbing the Golden Gate Bridge at night and camping on the beach and weekly trips to Berkeley to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where will I go? But then why should I go, why is it that my mother and grandmother are always wanting me to be something I am not?