The Ellis Review

Things are gorgeous if they’re yours, dull if they aren’t. Home isn’t the boxes in it, nor even the people. It’s the place that grew with you, that formed before you formed it. — Christina Qiu, Home The first time I visited New York’s Chinatown, it was because I had seen a cheap dumpling place on Yelp. My family and I had been in New York for a week, and meals had consisted of burgers and gourmet cuisine and afternoon tea at the Plaza — American things, but not Chinese thing

I never really understood where I was, or where I was going. I was that dot, the you are here. I was that arrow on Maps. I bobbed every step I took. I was my town in Silicon Valley, bright and shining and aggressive. I was several thousand miles away from that town in Michigan. I wrote a lot there. Sometimes I’d be in Paris, or London, or Tokyo. Other times I’d be Google Earth, in several different places at once. I watched Lion (starring Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman, & Rooney Ma

Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life. — Hope Jahren, Lab Girl The first time I ever truly understood plants, about stems and leaves and the flow of nutrients, was when I was younger. I came to know plants just as I knew myself; I charted the growth methodically. I made close observations on how sometimes leaves would shrivel and wither, but then

While America surely transformed some of these impoverished emigres into wealthy returnees, it turned many more into something else—hyphenated Americans, Americans who would always remember their homelands as a treasured past but find in America their future. — Iris Chang, The Chinese in America It is more than one-hundred and thirty-five years after the Chinese Exclusion Act, and I am just a ferry away from freedom on an island named after angels. My mother speaks to me of