The Board Exam

The Board Exam is a creative nonfiction piece that was published in Issue 68 of The Kudzu Review. It is inspired by my mother’s immigration story as an aspiring nurse from the Philippines. My piece appears on page 18.

A Sinking House

Houses is a creative nonfiction piece that was published in Issue 06 of Vellichor Literary. It is a personal essay on the homes in which I grew up in the Philippines and their connection to the struggle of Overseas Filipino Workers and environmental injustice in the Philippines.

Can We Really Kill the Author?

This is an article I wrote for The Kudzu Review blog exploring the modern implications of Roland Barthes’s influential critical essay The Death of the Author in today’s digital age.

Quiet Luxury and Loud Branding

This is an article I wrote for Strike Magazine exploring the dichotomy of “quiet luxury” and “loud branding.” It investigates the irony of fashion as signifiers of socioeconomic status and wealth. 

The Three-Body Problem and the Paradox of China

This is my undergraduate Honors in the Major Thesis on Sinofuturism and global power dynamics between the US and China. Chinese speculative fiction, or Sinofuturism, exists paradoxically as a genre that both subverts the Western colonialist structures of traditional science fiction and is confined by it due to China’s own paradoxical relationship to the West in the geopolitical realm. China holds a very precarious position on the world stage as the world’s second largest hegemon imbued with an inherent anti-Westness and relies on the manipulation of soft power for the continuation of such a status. China’s state-led capitalism and authoritarian governance contrast with Western liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. Yet, conformity to the West is key for China to survive in the liberal world order. This irony and difficulty of China’s current standing on the world stage is marvelously exhibited in The Three-Body Problem. I aim to situate the echoes of colonialism reflected in science fiction as a genre within the current global order and geopolitics, focusing on Sinofuturism and why China specifically has difficulty fitting within it as exhibited in the novel, The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.

Available upon request. 

The Kudzu Review: Issue 73

Issue 73 of The Kudzu Review was published under my term as Editor-in-Chief of the magazine.

The Kudzu Review: Issue 74

Issue 74 of The Kudzu Review was published under my term as Editor-in-Chief of the magazine.