Navigating identity and belonging as Chinese adoptees in the West. Eight days after Maggie Yu Mattackal was born, someone found her at the gates of Yiyang, a city in Hunan province, China. It was in early March 2001. Someone had affixed a note with a birthdate on it: February 23. Of the circumstances surrounding her […]

A Showcase for Original Works of Narrative Nonfiction by Students at the Columbia Journalism School

A post-Tiananmen Square generation fights for Chinese democracy from abroad – only to face dissent from their young successors On the night of Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, Zhou Fengsuo stood in Times Square, doing what he did in Tiananmen Square 34 years ago: trying to make his message heard. Back then, he had the backing […]

Ninety-one years ago, a group of McGill students created a satirical magazine to stoke controversy on campus. Their words would consume them whole.  On a cold early March night, Ernie Crown was waiting by his window when he saw the car of Gerald Halpenny arrive. He noticed that three men were in the car, but […]

“Sometimes, you get beat for a machine…” 7:15 a.m. on a Wednesday morning on the Upper West Side, licensed manual therapist Peter C. Green stared with intensity at his darks as they swished around and around in sudsy water, clockwise and anti-clockwise, anti-clockwise and clockwise. The surrounding washing machines buzzed monotonously as they no doubt […]

This is what a fifteen-foot wall of water does to the city A fifteen-foot wall of water starts like this: a hurricane of larger-than-average size spirals up the Atlantic Coast. As it passes New Jersey, a low-pressure system drives the storm eastward into New York Harbor. Due to the size of the storm, an extensive […]

This bar, where a dozen or so of the most zealous bacchanals had congregated, was nobody’s first choice. By Adlai Fitzgerald Coleman Halloween fell on a Tuesday, meaning that most casual revelers celebrated the holiday on the friday or saturday before. Thus, by midnight on the actual day, only the truly dedicated remained. Most of […]

By Liz Foster I met the New York Aquarium’s sand tiger sharks on a temperate day in October. They stuck out in contrast to their peers. Unlike the small frys roaming around other enclosures, the lumbering sand tigers possessed a menacing aura. Their tank lacked their neighbors’ vibrance, only further emphasizing their massive presence.  The […]

When Pauline phoned her eldest sister, Merry, to say she was leaving behind her entire family and moving to California, Merry felt it was probably for the best. The rest of the family agreed.

There’s an enduring duality to life after loss. “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything,” C.S. Lewis observed of his own grief.. For Jami, 15 years after Joe’s death, the happiness captured in that wedding photograph is present still, in the memory. But it is equally met with the sting of his absence.  

By the time of his death many of the people closest to my father had given up on him. He drank and took pills and it was often left to me to pick him up and put him to bed at the end of the night. He would cry and apologize and promise me he would get it right. On the day he died I found him in the living room. He had fallen face first over the back of the couch. 

The first time I felt the need to understand the woman who had become my mother, I was watching her sob quietly through a sliver of a slightly opened door.