One day when I was little, I trespassed the aluminum gate that was next to our little orchard in search of a Frisbee or Nerf ball or some such thing that we had sent flying, accidentally, over the barbed…
Nothing hangs together. There are big holes in the daughter’s memory. She cannot fathom the passage of time. Half a century ago when she was ten, sixty was an old woman. She does not think of herself that way.…
Pac got shot up in ’96, this time on a famous strip in Las Vegas. In three days he’d rise again like Jesus, a Lazarus in the Bible, outside of his hometown claiming victory over Hades. He’d be back…
Poet, translator, memoirist, fiction writer, and visual artist Jesse Lee Kercheval’s recently released graphic memoir French Girl portrays seventeen episodes from throughout Kercheval’s life, rendered in vibrant color by Kercheval herself. It showcases the powerful immediacy of Kercheval’s twenty…
My mother’s been dead since 1982, two thirds of my life. Today, I am perched on a stool at a table in the Comics Room at the University of Wisconsin–Madison trying to remember what she looked like so I…
A stowaway made the long trip to the United States with my mother, father, and me. Unbidden and unticketed, tucked into the pocket of a gray overcoat, chilled by early fall’s ocean breezes, pushed back by hope—grief nevertheless made…
They are tearing down Women’s Hospital, where I gave birth to my youngest two, a girl against the flame-bright maples of November, a boy in June’s fat sweat. For years, the hospital stands silent, as we drive to the…
When the fish is dead, it lies in the shallow of water that never goes away, in the dirt, the remnants of blood from my forefinger where I pricked myself four times over, maybe some from that pike, too.…
I insist I need a corset for under my dress. A wedding. My cousin’s. A purple strapless with a layer of chiffon. My mother is outside the dressing room. She asks if anything fits. I stare down the mirror.…
The Marine said his name was Dusty. She said hers was Laila, which was the name on the fake ID Kareena presented to the bouncer at the Wave Waikiki. If Crystal hadn’t led the way in a tube top…
I wrote the first draft of this story ten years ago. I don’t recall a specific incident that inspired it, but I think it might have been a trip back to Honolulu from New York in the months following 9/11 that got the wheels turning, triggering a memory of an encounter I’d had with a man who was in the army when I was in middle school. I’d gone to a reggae concert with a bunch of friends and he cornered me.
The one aspect of the initial draft of the story that has really stayed the same all these years is the ending. I knew this character was going to wind up where she does. I was always interested in her desire to “belong,” and the way in which these two characters from vastly different places share this longing, and how problematic that is in the context of militarism and settler colonialism in Hawai’i.
During the writing process, I struggled to piece together details from memory since I couldn’t access two of the major locations; nor could I contact the people who had shown or taken me to these places. Taking creative liberties with respect to locations and timelines in a place like Hawai’i was a very uncomfortable experience—but, as a good writing friend advised, I had to lean into the discomfort. The feeling was integral to the story.
Writing a teenager’s perspective was another challenge I wanted to meet. Her loneliness and the roots of it were important to explore, and while the adult writer part of me wanted to arm her with a stronger political consciousness, a sense of self, a friend she could trust, she just didn’t possess them at this point in her life.
SHIVANI MANGHNANI grew up in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been recognized by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, MacDowell, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Instituto Sacatar, VONA, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Boston Review and Hyphen.
