Essays & Criticism

Desire in the age of Chinamaxxing (China Books Review) (forthcoming)

Big Gym Family (Hobart Pulp) (on the young Chinese dads who taught me how to weightlift) (shortlisted for the 2026 Disquiet Literary Prize)

On David Wojnarowicz’s “Arthur Rimbaud in New York” (Hyperallergic)

The Small Lit Mags That Birthed Surrealism (Hyperallergic)

On Corky Lee’s Asian America (Hyperallergic)

Go Back to China (AAWW’s The Margins) (on the literary trend of stories where characters return to Asia)

Writing the Eastern Western (LitHub) (on the recent proliferation of Asian American Westerns)

Unfolding Beijing (Los Angeles Review of Books) (on my mission to collect English-language literature about Beijing)

Sanmao’s shifting sands (Los Angeles Review of Books) (on Taiwanese author Sanmao’s translated Stories of the Sahara)

What public bathrooms taught me (Catapult)

The secret land of horses (Catapult) (on coming of age on the Internet)

Anything sky means heavenly (AGNI) (on Meng Jin’s Little Gods & the literature of the Tiananmen protests)

In defense of ‘Fight Club’ (VICE)

On ‘Always Be My Maybe’ and radical Asian parents (Bustle)

Where were the girls like me in all the horse books I read as a kid? (Bustle)

Painting tigers (Radii) (on the current moment in Asian American cinema)

Features & Reporting

The drive to ‘beautify’ Beijing’s historic areas is leaving older residents behind (The Guardian)

The uncertain future of a migrant school in Beijing (Bloomberg CityLab, previously published in The Atlantic CityLab)

The Beijing park where the elderly and divorced look for love (Roads & Kingdoms)

Can you really find love in ‘Subtle Asian Dating’? (The South China Morning Post)

A history of bubble tea (Eaten) (print only)

A history of the Supreme Court (TIME Special Edition – Thurgood Marshall: The Visionary) (print only)

Snapchat is stealing your face (PAPER Magazine)

A brief history of voting rights (Princeton Alumni Weekly)

Academic

Towards an Asian American Legal Poetics (presented at the Law, Culture & Humanities Conference 2026 and the LCH Graduate Workshop 2026 at DePaul College of Law)

History That Will Be Your Future: On Trial Reenactments as Metadramatic Forms (presented at the Law, Culture & Humanities Conference 2025 at Georgetown University and the Law & Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop 2026 at the University of Pennsylvania)

We Can’t Talk About Race Unless We Also Talk About Art (Duke Law Journal, volume 72, 2021)