Author's Note: 4 photos, 4 vignettes! I've typed the scenes out just the way they entered my head when these images first came alive, each with their own stories. The title draws inspiration from Prof Homi K. Bhabha's concept of the third space — disjunctive, hybrid, in-between spaces beyond borders that make ambivalent structures we … Continue reading [Story] Third Space
Tag: Short Story
[Story] Dog Days Are Over
Author's Note: Found this buried in my drafts from 2018. Just a random little story on the impressionistic, surreal flicker of a college encounter between a girl and a boy (and dogs). She met him in the dorm room with a slanted ceiling. It was a mixer of about fifty people, with a makeshift bar … Continue reading [Story] Dog Days Are Over
[Valentine’s Day Short Story] April, I Arrive on The Shores of Your Love
Author's Note: Here's the first short story I wrote in college. It's from 2017. I workshopped it in the first creative writing workshop I took at Harvard — thank you to Claire Messud and everyone else who gave me their precious feedback. The writing might be kitschy at parts and the style is also rather … Continue reading [Valentine’s Day Short Story] April, I Arrive on The Shores of Your Love
[Story] The Plato Act
Author's Note: Hello loves, I'm currently in the midst of my final papers (two down, one more to go!) — here's the creative, futuristic piece that I submitted as my final paper yesterday for my History & Literature seminar on Speculative Fictions. The central conceit might seem speculative to some of you, might be eerily familiar to others. … Continue reading [Story] The Plato Act
[Story] The Writer
Author's Note: This short story was submitted as the final paper for a class last semester. The protagonist of this story is the act of writing itself. I am fascinated by the idea of the separation of the writer and the person into two selves, of the tension existing within the diasporic writer. Set in … Continue reading [Story] The Writer
[Story] 7-Eleven: A Summertime Romance?
When she trudges home that night, it’s forty minutes later, after two transits and twelve stations. She is about to turn left, head down the bridge, cross the crossing under a flickering street lamp and follow that path she has walked for twenty-one days when she notices the 7-Eleven store. Undimmed, the fluorescent white from … Continue reading [Story] 7-Eleven: A Summertime Romance?
[Story] Why Believe in Fortune Cookies
She works in a dingy pseudo-Chinese restaurant that dons several hats: a bar, a lounge, and a dance hall harkening back to the eighties. The interior is soaked in shades of reddish-brown timber. An earthy scent weighs on the entire ambiance—the glimmer from the gilded Buddhas and the gaudy frescoes gives it the air of a … Continue reading [Story] Why Believe in Fortune Cookies
[Story] Macau: Casino Lights Dancing
It felt like the universe had conspired in magnanimity to lay out before me all the stars it had in its pouch. There's a boy seated next to me at the roulette. It's a round-table congregation of tense, weeping or energetic men (some slightly crazy-eyed); this boy who seems unperturbed by it all; and then there's me, … Continue reading [Story] Macau: Casino Lights Dancing
Selina Xu 