IRENE PUJADAS
“You need to take responsibility for your life,” F states. She finds it embarrassing to waste a Saturday morning on this nonsense. She then adds: “Do us all a favor and put an end to this circus—or, at the very least, sit in the middle.” You stay where you are.

MERCÈ IBARZ
Close, so close he can already taste it. This afternoon he’ll become the owner of a secret. But first he’ll have lunch with his mother, who’s waiting for him at the restaurant in the back of the Boqueria Market, and once he’s got her home safely, he’ll meet up with the current owner of a Picasso engraving and he’ll buy it.

JAMES K. BOYCE
A human hand reached into the burrow and lifted the downy chick into the daylight. A man carefully measured its wingspan to ascertain the Kid’s age: eight to fourteen days, old enough to self-regulate its body temperature but young enough to imprint on a new home.

K-YU LIU
The last thing I saw before I entered the building was her arm, which she held limply in the air as if she wanted to wave but the strength didn’t make it past her wrist, and I thought of the flag in Tiananmen Square when the August air was thick and breezeless, how high above us it hung, still and defeated.

By JIANAN QIAN This piece is part of a special portfolio about youth and contemporary culture in China. Read more from the portfolio here.   Alex dislikes the security check in Shanghai’s subway stations, from both an ideological and personal perspective. Being American, he hates any intrusion on privacy. And today he’s carrying a black

YUN QIN WANG 
June rain draws a cross on the glass.  / Alcohol evaporates.  / If I come back to you,  / I can write. My time in China  / is an unending funeral.  / Nobody cried. The notebook is wet. 

ADRIE KUSSEROW in conversation with LEAH ZANI
Ironically, my other biggest challenge was the way that writing never let me off the hook, into a place of rest, where I felt like I could easily “sum up” a particular culture. I wasn’t prepared for how the act of writing itself would become a kind of archaeology.

KATIE NOAH GIBSON
Lee begins, in “Margins,” with the koi pond her mother constructed in suburban Canada, her mother’s longing for her Taiwanese homeland made manifest in building a backyard habitat for fish too fragile for Ontario winters. “She planted paper reeds and irises, floated water lettuce in between,” Lee writes.

SVEN BIRKERTS
Why do we keep hold of certain things, and nothing of others? Now I can remember, with almost cinematic granularity, an afternoon when a veterinarian came to our fifth-grade class to dissect a white rat for our science unit. I feel the heat of the room.

ANNELL LÓPEZ
Last year, when she joined the dojo on Niagara Street, an older kid referred to her as Blackie Chan. Our mother refused to explain to her what it meant and instead allowed Junie to believe Blackie Chan was not only real, but so strong he could karate-chop cinder blocks in half.