Scott Methe

“As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“When we arrived at the home of our childbirth instructor, Brenda, she was arranging candles in an earthen vessel filled with sand. Brenda’s son, who had shown us into the room, cleared his throat to get his mother’s attention, then retreated with the quick step of a middle-school-aged boy in the same room as a gigantic poster of a uterus.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“As we left the birth center, I couldn’t shake the overwhelming feeling that our baby was destined to inherit a half-empty family tree. I wasn’t even a mother yet, and already the best I could offer was far from good enough.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know