AT THE STOA

It's good to get away from the heat during this here summer, although it is only during summer that the light can be like this.  It reminds me of golden melting things, if only because I am drenched with sweat while walking through everywhere. Even strange subjects take on a particularly bright, sinister, or otherwise surreal light - making an uncertain smile play along the corner of my lips, which later on evaporates from my face as the temperature gets the best of me.  Neither the smile nor the slight irritation takes much. We go up to Baguio for the second year in a row, feeling a bit of respite from the heat and blinding light, to see sights and places lit up differently, though no less brightly. I could go on and on about the difference, and the sameness, but at the end of the day, it's always good to be back home. Home always has a different light -  We played games, and celebrated friends.  It was a happy...

As you see, the past three posts before this one have been sketches.  Well, I call them "sketches," but they're really papers for my graduate courses.  I post them for two reasons: one, to help those who are cramming for their own papers, and two, this is the nearest I can get to a vanity publication. Because I have been in Baguio for a week, I will resort to writing and posting pictures of what happened to Pasco and me there; but since it is dawn I will do that tomorrow.

Shawn Hsu Wong is a second-generation Chinese American, born in Oakland, California in 1949. He obtained his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 and his Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the San Francisco State University in 1974. After teaching in several colleges and universities, he is presently a Professor specializing in Creative Writing and Asian American Studies, at the University of Washington, where he is also the director of the University Honors Program. His multi-awarded works include Homebase , first published in 1979, as well as edited and coedited works Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974) and The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese America and Japanese America in Literature (1991), among four other anthologies. Wong has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Italy, and has won several awards including first pr...