I have a monthly cycle

Since I was 12, I have experienced regular dizzy spells where I hallucinate, lose my balance, and sometimes pass out. It's not as bad as it sounds, I promise. However, despite almost 15 years of testing for this condition, which has included two EEGs, an MRI, extensive bloodwork, and a test that involved injecting dye into my arteries, doctors still do not have a definitive diagnosis. None of their theories, such as syncope, epilepsy, migraines, and inner ear-related disorders, have managed to account for my odd set of symptoms. For instance, my dizzy spells aren't linked to any specific trigger, like stress, physical exertion, or simply standing up too fast. Doctors also can't account for the hallucinations that accompany the spells, which are like a hazy déjà vu, almost like I'm remembering a dream. The most bizarre symptom of all, though, is the fact that my dizzy spells occur with an eerily perfect rhythm. They happen every four weeks, almost to the day. Like clockwork. Once a month. A monthly cycle. Upon hearing this fact, doctors usually just raise an eyebrow, cock their head, and ask, "…seriously?" The only individual who has even attempted an explanation was a college English professor who suggested I look into the lunar cycle, which could be affecting my bloodflow. Or something. At least he took a stab at it. Thankfully, the condition isn't too obtrusive, but it does freak me out on the occasions when I find out that I've 'synced' with female friends or coworkers. Weird, right? And now you get to have that lovely thought, too.

Chairman Mao brought my family together

My mother was born in December 1950 to American missionary parents in Huili, a mountain village in Southern Sichuan, China. This was a tumultuous time in China, as Chairman Mao had already come to power and was expelling foreigners from the country. Even Huili, as isolated as it was, was inundated with anti-American propaganda, and my family realized they had to get out. Soon after my mother was born, my grandfather requested exit visas. Before they were granted, the Red Army took control of Huili and confiscated all of my family’s possessions. As they waited for permission from the government to leave, they only survived thanks to food provided to them in secret by Chinese friends. After what must have been bureaucratic delay, my grandfather was ordered to leave Huili within three days. Their destination was Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, but the rainy season made roads and streams impassible by vehicle. They made the 400-mile journey on foot and by horse over rugged terrain and mountain passes. After three weeks of travel, my grandmother, Hannah Cole, died suddenly from an unknown illness – within 24 hours of her first seemingly benign symptom. She was buried in Fu Lin, only four days travel from Chengdu. My grandfather and his four surviving children, all under the age of 7, left China unharmed but motherless after several legs of plane and train travel to Hong Kong. Five years prior in another part of China, my father’s father boarded a boat in Beijing and sailed to California to study at Berkeley. As the Cultural Revolution spilled into the remote corners of China, he soon realized that his future as an artist and an educator was not possible in his homeland. He met and married my grandmother, had my father in 1948, and went on to teach art history, Chinese, and traditional brush painting at Yale University and Connecticut College until his death in 2008. And here I am. My mother said that even though she was six months old, she never got over the death of her mother, a sentiment I didn’t fully understand until she, herself, died five years ago of cancer. In 2012, I took her ashes to the mountain town where she was born, and traveled by train the footpaths over which she was carried as an infant. I don’t think very often about the social and political forces that pushed both my mother and father’s family out of China, but it’s how I got here. People argue that Chairman Mao did good things for China, such as standardizing the written language and building the country into a world power. He also committed horrifying atrocities. If it is possible to express the following statement without making any assessment of the man that Chairman Mao was, please let me declare that I am grateful to have known my mom and dad, and that might not have happened without him.

I collect stuffed animals.

“Washington’s Other Monuments” For the past fifteen years, I have been intensively documenting the numerous homemade shrines to victims of murder and violence that appear throughout the Washington DC area. I am deeply compelled by their heartbreaking vibrancy, their sadness, and their all-too-common presence on the city’s streets. Often they are the only visible manifestation left to mark the life of a loved one. I have photographed many hundreds of shrines over the years. Most are in the District’s risky impoverished neighborhoods, but I have found them at numerous sites in Virginia and Maryland also. They all share a basic characteristic: someone who we care about died here, and we are showing our respect and our pain by creating this public sculpture in their, and our, honor. They are tears and prayers made visible. I first became aware and interested in street shrines when the young formerly-homeless photographer I mentored, Dion Johnson, lost four of his relatives to murder in the space of one year. I saw the toll it took on him, the anguish it caused. I learned to see the markers that were erected in the city’s neighborhoods as representing the powerful emotions of people – real people, distraught and grieving – who lost a son, brother, father, aunt, neighbor, lover, or friend to violence. The shrines; cascades of plush toys, balloons, handwritten prayers and reminiscences, flowers, T-shirts, liquor bottles, photographs, food, candles, and other paraphernalia – seemed to me to manifest the secret, but highly visible representation of the wounded heart of our community. As a nation, we rightly mourn for those who have been killed overseas defending our communities. It is also sad though, that we have become numb to the ongoing slaughter in our own area, indifferent to the many thousands who lose their lives to violence right here at home, and the untold thousands more who suffer in the wake of each death. We are so used to it that we rarely notice anymore - murder doesn’t even always make the back pages of the newspapers nowadays. The shrines call to me, to us, to notice, to remember, to be aware – and hopefully, to act. I have taken to engaging a visual approach that heightens the emotional and structural aspects of the shrines. I strive to bring forth the often electric colors, and balance the chaotic arrangements of objects, the admixture of the deeply personal with mass culture references, the holy laced with ‘gangsta’ iconography, and to relate the physical relationships of the shrines to their environment. I have taken this strategy for each individual image, applying it also to the entire body of work. As a photographer, I find them endlessly fascinating, a rich but troubling lode to examine and share. The shrines are an unsettling array of folk sculpture, ranging from the pathetic to the sacred, a sculptural collage expressing pain, loss, and hope. The camera helps give these spontaneous ephemeral creations some permanence, and some unity of purpose. This work has been my ongoing process of paying attention to what really matters; my action of pointing to our community’s wounds, and hopefully, towards healing.

I dance for dollars.

¡Buenas tardes damas y caballeros, un fuerte aplauso, porfavor, eso es…JUJU, checen eso…ella es de Washington….! Heart pumping music bumping, huge grin on my face, I hit the smooth marble floor in Pericoapa, a shopping center in the south of Mexico City. The crowd gathers tightly around as I drop to the ground, dazzling the onlookers with fancy footwork, freezes and spins, coming to my feet smoothly without missing a beat, I brush my shoulders off with ease as another dancer spins into the crowd to take their turn. My friend circles the crowd, holding out a cap, “gracias por su apoyo!” The jingle of monies clink as the hat fills up, 20 pesos here, 5 American dollars there. I’m dancing for dollars — breaking dancing that is — on the streets of Mexico City. I started breaking at the end of my teenage years, older than most when I began, and fell in love with the culture and the dance even before I really knew what it was.

Nelson Mandela was not unique.

At least that’s what my job has taught me. I work with women from war zones around the world who have contributed to building peace in their home countries. These are women like Visaka Dharmadasa, whose son was killed by the Tamil rebels of Sri Lanka. Instead of choosing revenge or hatred, Visaka formed a peace group with her “enemies,” the Tamil mothers who had lost their sons at the hands of the Sri Lankan military. There are others whose stories mirror Madiba’s; women like Stella Sabiiti, who was tortured and imprisoned while pregnant by the armed forces of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Stella not only forgave her torturers, she has devoted her life to understanding and reaching out to perpetrators of violence across the entire African continent. She has since negotiated directly with armed groups in the Horn of Africa, the Great Lakes region, Uganda, Sudan, and South Sudan. It is her belief that true peace is not possible without engaging the so-called enemy. Every time I meet one of these women, I think to myself “Nelson Mandela was not unique.” Forgiveness, reconciliation, peace, and the ability to see the humanity in your enemies did not die with him. It is my job to shine the spotlight on these women, so that they are recognized for their efforts towards peace, and one day elevated to Mandela status.

The #revolution will not be televised.

In 2009, Iran was the number one topic on twitter, as images of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s para-military forces suppressed any citizen who dared voice dissent against an election widely seen as fraudulent. I was not part of the post-election protests nor am I Iranian, but I work for an Iranian human rights organization. This organization, which must remain nameless and is of no fixed address, seeks to bring justice to the thousands of victims of human rights violations in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Because the repression of dissidents and ordinary people who stand up for human rights is so violently propagated in Iran, I must guard my anonymity. In fact, the veil which I am seen wearing is precisely the kind of individual liberties that this organization fights for - including freedom of religion, freedom of association, and freedom of the press. Ultimately, this organization works to bring truth to light in hopes of stemming the violent cycle of human rights abominations.

Uncle Phil, an only child

About 15 years ago it was revealed that I have an older half brother. I'd never known about the new born baby my mother had put up for adoption when she was just a young teenager. Mom answered the phone as we sat at the table for lunch and then quickly broke down into tears. Her parents had called: he'd written them to ask about making contact with her. That afternoon she was finally able to tell me the truth. We met Tad soon after. Later on we attended his wedding. He even drove cross-country with me, back from a job out west. And, something I'd previously thought impossible, I am the proud uncle of two nephews (ages 10 and 7) and a 2-year-old niece. Each visit with them is a reminder of the new reality I've known to be true for half of my life.

I have much happier since my mother died.

When my mother got the diagnosis, I imagine she knew what she was about to go through. I mean, nobody can ever predict the details of their own dying -- the nights of pain, the doctors, the tests, the restlessness of certain death -- but her own mother's battle with breast cancer likely left her with a good idea of the road ahead. Her mother's illness, made doubly painful to her family because of the dramatic flair she brought to suffering, was very instructive. My mother vowed that her fight would not be marked by the same hysterics. In fact, she swore to never involve my sister and I in her struggle at all. So then it was my turn to learn from her slow death, a lesson that took half of my young life. I learned that there were some things you didn't burden people with. I learned that sympathy was an indulgence, a luxury garnered at other people's expense. I learned that being in pain was a part of life, but showing pain was a choice, and a selfish one. I never knew when her chemo appointments were. I never knew exactly where the cancer was in her body, only generally. I didn't even really know when it was there and when it was "gone," I could only reckon the years of her illness against the years of remission by how long her hair grew. I could have known. I could have payed close attention to her schedule and deduced when her appointments were. I could have simply asked about how she was doing, but without ever once bringing it up I already knew what her answer would be. "I'm fine, but I'm dying." I never wanted to hear it, she is gone now and I still don't think I could ask. She very likely did me some of these details, but they clashed with my understanding of her vibrant, living body so violently that the words burned away like meteors in the air between us. I don't think they ever actually reached me. This numbness became an almost spiritual practice in my life. It reached its hands deep inside of me and begun shutting doors. The last one closed on April 16th, 2009, in the late evening when she finally gave up her fear of death. ..... The nine years since her death have been, to me, like moving into a new house. I had all of these things in boxes, but I could not unpack them because I didn't have the room. I could not enjoy compassion, I could not let myself dip into the warmth of sympathy from other people. I could not let them into my life all the way, because I thought there were parts of myself that other people were not supposed to know. All around me were loving friends and family, stuck outside with no way of getting in. Now, I'm down to my last few boxes, and I don't even recognize myself anymore. Opening myself up to the vivid experience of life has been a euphoria that I can't even begin to describe. After years of painstaking work, it's like I'm living through things for the first time -- like I'm completely new to the joy of eating a meal with loved ones, the simple pleasure of reading outside, the ecstasy of singing in harmony with other people. I've done these things my whole life, but knowing the way they make me feel now, some days I wonder if I actually lived any of it before. It feels so good that I don't even mind that I sound like a testimonial for a self-help seminar. I don't blame her at all. She had an impossible choice to make, and I think she picked the only option that was truly hers to choose. And I'm sure I would have come into these beautiful experiences on my own, maybe ushered by her loving guidance instead of by her painful absence. She was so beautiful -- not just before the illness, but all throughout it. She lost her hair from the treatments and made it seem like she did it on purpose. She was a titan. She knew she was going to die and she lived like she was unkillable. She hosted, she drank, she sang, she painted, she worked, she cooked and cleaned and traveled and cared and mothered as if she would live forever. So my half-truth is only half true because I sincerely, deeply wish that she had. But now that she's gone, the only solace I can take is that she set me on this winding path to the brilliant world I walk through now. Thank you, mom!

I have lived here my whole life but I still struggle with my second language

I don't always know where I belong. I don't ever seem to hang out with people that look like me, I went to Howard, I love reggae, but so many people had misconceptions about who I was during those years and I still see people trying to fill in the blanks on who I am today, in their minds, I am always from somewhere else. My parents are Chinese and Mexican immigrants respectively, with no common native language between them, we grew up speaking English and I still struggle with my second language(s). *NOTE: If you can read the Chinese text, please excuse the poor translation, it was done through a computer program and a native speaker chuckled when she read it and said it doesn’t mean what it was meant to mean.

I am fighting the 100 year war.

“The history of malaria in war might almost be taken to be the history of war itself…” -C. H. Melville, 1910 For over a century, the United States Army has been on the front lines in the war against malaria. Motivated by the need to protect the warfighter and to preserve battle readiness when deployed in malaria endemic regions, the Army’s advances in vector control and drug development for malaria treatment and prophylaxis have benefited hundreds of millions of people. Despite these efforts, the malaria parasites remain among the military’s most persistent and indomitable adversaries. Emerging drug resistance, poor compliance practices, and geopolitical unrest all play a role in the failure of worldwide efforts at elimination and eradication. Alone and in collaboration with outside research groups and NGOs like the Gates Foundation and the Medicines for Malaria Venture, the US Army continues to employ government civilian and contract scientists, like myself, to augment the efforts of military scientists and physicians, confident that one day we’ll win the 100 Year War.

I Date Resumes

For some, their bedroom's a revolving door For me, I've always had to be sure Let no one inside Unless your references provide Lifetime feats of notable grandeur

I took advantage of men to achieve my dreams

I moved to the DC area from Cairo, Egypt right after graduating from college. At one point I had no place to stay and was on the street with my suitcase looking for this place I found on craigslist. I was completely lost. A guy noticed my distress and offered me a ride. During the drive he offered to take me to his friend’s house where he rents out rooms. I accepted the offer and ended up living there for two months. I also had no sense of scale of the city. I was living in Silver Spring and had a job in Potomac, Maryland. I kept getting lost and confusing the bus schedules but somehow a guy in a car always came to the rescue! Looking back, I don’t know how I trusted all these men with my life. Over the course of a week, I transitioned from a sheltered girl from Egypt, to living with 4 men in a group house.