Shanghai Noir

Category: Language

  • Mouthfeel

    Everywhere I turn, the word mouthfeel pops up. I see it in my Twitter feed. I hear it bandied about by my foodie friends. It shows up in my reading. Like in “Biter”, a short story by Kristen Roupenian in her debut collection You Know You Want This. Ellie is a biter. She is an…

  • Female Language

    The bookshop is small but well-stocked. It occupies a narrow windowless space like most places in this part of Amsterdam. At the far end of the shop sits Sheila Heti, waiting to talk about her latest novel, Motherhood. We join the crowd. We are four women in a sea of female faces. Three of us…

  • Mother Tongues

    English is my mother tongue. That’s as much an accident of birth as the result of my parents’ concerted efforts to turn my brothers and me into real Americans. It worked. Neither of my brothers speak any language other than English. And if I hadn’t fallen in love with a Dutchman, I would have suffered…

  • Migrant Writing

    migrant ˈmʌɪɡr(ə)nt/ noun a person who moves from one place to another in order to find work or better living conditions I am a migrant. I moved from the United States to the Netherlands because my husband got the job of his dreams in Amsterdam. My parents are migrants, too, leaving China for America for…