Lynda Lin Grigsby

The diaphanous dress with the soft pink flower motif and ruffled shoulder straps on a thrift store rack called out to Kayla Marie. “Put me on,” the dress seemed to say to the 27-year-old video editor. Paired with a brown shoulder bag and some ruffle ankle socks, the item of clothing could make her feel as confident as Jenna Rink, the teen character magically transformed into an adult portrayed by Jennifer Garner in the 2004 romantic comedy 13 Going on 30, Marie thought.
“I knew it would make ...

February 19, 1942 changed everything for Japanese Americans.
The curves and flourishes of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signature that day on Executive Order 9066 precipitated the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese...

A dance floor has equalizing power. When the music starts, differences fall away. On the dance floor, it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor. No one judges where you came from or what language you speak. What m...

​​Martin Yan is always in motion. ​
In the kitchen of his Bay Area home, he flits behind an island table filled with his latest creations: meatballs, rice pudding and lotus sandwiches artfully presented with a tableau of red envelopes and golden oranges. ​
The chef, who started cooking on TV for an American audience in 1982, just finished livestreaming a free monthly cooking demonstration in partnership with On Lok, a nonprofit center that provides services to older adults in the Bay Area. Th...

You could be forgiven if January 22 passes without you noticing anything special about the day. Despite its global significance, most markers of civic society in the US — banks, schools, businesses, and governmen...

When Michelle Delabrer moved into her house, she filled the space with all the things she loved: a framed photo of the Weasley family from the Harry Potter films, an array of Japanese rice ball tchotchkes, and manatees. Lots and lots of manatee trinkets. “They’re all reminders,” says the graphic designer, “of happy things.”

During the bleak early days of the pandemic, surr...

Picture this: A young woman pregnant with her first child is prescribed vitamins by her doctor. She faithfully swallows the round white pills to nourish herself and the li...

When bedroom doors fly open on Christmas morning, my kids drink in a vision of a picture-perfect Christmas — an explosion of bright colors and shiny coils of ribbons in meticulously wrapped presents. Family members amble through the front door with more gifts, so the kids form a gift-opening assembly line that starts from youngest to oldest. For hours, there is a fervent tearing of paper, a hoisting of new objects in the air, shouts of glee and the creation of piles and piles of stuff.

It’s t...

Think you should get rid of all the stuff in your home? The trending aesthetic of cluttercore says parents can celebrate the chaos instead.
In Roxy Strickland's living room, the décor is stratified: home accessories that tickle the grown-ups' fancy live up top, and kids' stuff is lower to the ground. Adult visitors can lock eyes uneasily with a Westworld character who, in a framed poster, has flesh falling away from its robotic skeleton. Pinhead, the prickly-faced character from the Hellraise...

When my husband and I learned that we’d unwittingly passed on the genetic condition to our son, we realized that it would be up to us to cover the costs of fixing it.
We learned something was wrong from a routine X-ray image. There were my son’s baby teeth and gums. And then, below, there should have been a row of “tooth buds,” the dentist explained. The term made me think of plant sprouts, but tooth buds look like, well, teeth. Or at least they’re supposed to.
For my son, th...

A living memorial to the past and present honoring all who were incarcerated in the U.S. during WWII is now at L.A.’s Japanese American National Museum
For Bill Fujioka, a first-of-its-kind book that lists every person of Japanese ancestry incarcerated during World War II reads like a personal family history book.
Among the 125,284 names listed in the unassuming-looking book are those of his father, Willie Fujioka, a U.S. veteran, his grandfather Fred Fujioka, and other family members. With o...

As anti-Asian hate rages across the nation, moms are taking a stand. But the fight isn't new.
Lily Chin relived the trauma of her son's gruesome death on national television for a reason. Wearing a dark blazer and a pink and white ruffled blouse, she was the epitome of maternal grief on The Phil Donahue Show. Through sobs, she said the two white men who beat her son with a baseball bat killed him "like an animal." In 1983, Vincent Chin's mother didn't have the internet or social media to crow...

Maskot, Westend61/Getty Images
In a store check-out line, friendship can blossom quickly. Accompanied by the rhythmic beeping of the scanners, my son's eyes lock on his new best buddy: the kid standing behind us in line. They talk in hushed tones, huddled together like the world around them doesn’t exist.
Because I live in a suburban Los Angeles neighborhood where the number of new moms per capita is low, I recognize the hunger for connection. It starts with a stranger’s delighted sizing up o...

Mom 2.0
“We are not the same people,” said Laura Mayes to a ballroom full of moms last month. She was addressing an audience who’d pivoted again and again through a pandemic and up to the moment we find ourselves in now: a limbo between almost-but-not normalcy and a still ongoing pandemic. Mayes, an Emmy-winning writer and co-founder of Mom 2.0, was welcoming the crowd to the start of the organization’s 3-day summit in Los Angeles. For the first time since 2019, the Mom 2.0 community had come...

FeaturesHomepage FeatureIn-Depth
Vincent Chin has been with author Paula Yoo for over half of her life. (Photo: Jarod Lew)
Stories are the shape of our existence. On the 40th Anniversary of his death, three AAPI artists and storytellers carry on Chin’s legacy.
By Lynda Lin Grigsby, Contributor
A love letter is a blank canvas on which emotions are painted. For his latest commissioned piece, a portrait to commemorate the legacy of Vincent Chin, the artist Anthony Lee received little direction.
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