The Literature of Uprootedness: An Interview with Reinaldo Arenas (The New Yorker)
Though I was nervous about meeting the great man, one of Cuba's most admired writers, Arenas immediately put me at ease. "Encantado," he said, smiling and taking my hand. Forty years old at the time, he had thick, curly black hair and enormous, sad eyes; his face was lined and leathery.
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.
Fata Morgana: Reinaldo Arenas, Writers in Exile, and a Visit to the Havana of 1987 (The Paris Review)
Late on a warm night in 1987, I left Miami for Havana to report on contemporary Cuban writing and see Arenas's environment firsthand. I'd met Arenas in 1983, when I interviewed him for my comparative literature thesis one fall afternoon at Princeton. The thesis included my translations of some of his work, one of which, a novella entitled “Old Rosa,” was later published in Old Rosa: A Novel in Two Stories.
Tibetan Butter Tea & Pink Gin (Kyoto Journal)
On November 30, 2004, the Himalayan moon setting over Darjeeling town and the snowy peaks of the Kanchenjunga range, my Tibetan grandmother died. According to the Western calendar, she was four months short of her 100th birthday but in the Tibetan way of calculating you’re one year old at birth, so she made it to 100. At home in Tokyo, I’d dreamed about her all night and was devastated but not surprised when my relatives called early in the morning to tell me she was gone.
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?