Following is an excerpt:
My Meditation
MY MEDITATION ON OPIUM is drawn from close personal experience. A beloved cousin died of a heroin overdose. A revered granduncle, brother of my maternal grandmother, became an addict who died penniless, wasted, and sick. During my father’s last days, he staved off the pain of cancer by swallowing opium pellets purchased illegally from the streets. Growing up in Malacca, Malaysia, one was surrounded by opium all around—in next door neighbors’ waftings from their evening pipe, in shady dens and opium houses visible at marketplaces and alleyways, and in crime scenes attributed to purveyors and desperate addicts of dadah (the Malay word for heroin) in the nation’s capital. Moving to Vermont, I see that opium has followed me here too, with addiction and crime reaching alarming proportions, so much so as to prompt the governor to announce it publicly at his recent State of the State address.

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Driving in the night heat and humidity of Houston,
We passed a secluded mansion,
Spiked and wired walls around,
Mysteriously quiet.
My eyes caught the PRC emblem
In a flash of street light.
My country?
Weird, like in a wet dream.
“It must be the heat.” I dabbed the sweat on my forehead.
I had rolled down the windows,
Turned off the air-con,
Figured it would cool down with the night breeze.

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Rahul Mehra was born in New Delhi and educated in Zambia, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. Art has been his passion since his early years. He is influenced by the vibrancy of the Indian subcontinent’s colors and pigments—reds and vermilions juxtaposed between the ochre and the yellow with the blue. Moreover, his works are deeply connected to themes found in Indian mythology and the social milieu of the subcontinent.

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Toward the end of May 2014, I was driving on the Taconic highway and listening to a report from India on NPR. A reporter was at a bus station in Gujarat, asking the youth selling tea there if they thought they could become Prime Minister. This was because the right-wing leader, Narendra Modi, had just led his party to a massive win in the Parliamentary elections. As a teenager, Modi had sold tea at a bus station in Vadnagar. Each one of the youth being interviewed said yes.

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Following is an excerpt:
You Did Not Give America to Me
You did not give America to me.
I went looking for it and found it
twisting from branches of jacaranda trees.
You did not discover America for me.
I found it in your hunger

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Towards Trans-Pacific Indigeneity
Using Syaman Rapongan’s works as anchor texts, this essay focuses on transpacific flows and indigenous formations which traverse international boundaries. His work offers an oceanic perspective to balance continental ways of thinking, and supplements and challenges transnational approaches to imperialism, indigeneity, and globalization.

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Yuri Kochiyama: Rites of Passage
One of the unspoken rites of paSsage for a third generation Japanese American (Sansei) from the 1970s Los Angeles Asian Movement was to visit the Kochiyama Family in New York City. For many a Sansei getting their feet wet in the Asian Movement, the Kochiyama’s embraced us as family and introduced us into a whirlwind of all kinds of people. The Kochiyama’s apartment might well have been described as “Movement Central.”

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Momotaro/Peach Boy is a portfolio of nine prints based on the popular Japanese folk tale about a baby boy who emerges from a giant peach and grows up to become a hero. The prints in this series form the pages of a fictional narrative, inspired by family memories of the forced internment of Japanese Americans and the experiences of Japanese American GIs in World War II. Each of the prints incorporate photographs of my father, grandfather and son, as well as cartoon characters, material from the National Archives, traditional Japanese motifs and illustrations appropriated from magazines and children’s books.

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Boat—a tool for my journey on the sea and also my second oceanic ancestor. I never imagined that I would ever travel alone on the sea. In the beginning I just wanted to rebel against my parents because they stopped me from studying in Taiwan. Further, it had always been my childhood dream, inspired by my youngest great-uncle, to travel alone on the waters. Rebellion was not something easy on our island within the tribe I belonged, despite my being the only son of my father. However . . . .

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Thinking “With the Same Mind”
Wait, what, Chinese? What’s happening? What was “China” or “Chinese” for René Descartes, “the father of modern philosophy”? Why is he stitching those “Chinese or savages” into his semi-autobiography, Discourse on Method? There, you might say, he is just making some ‘multi-culty’ comparative point on how come ‘we are the world,’ how we are just all of “the same mind (son même esprit),” “charactological” differences or divergences notwithstanding. Sure, simple enough. Then what kind of or which cliché is being recruited in this “characterization” of those Chinese or savages or French or German — and to what end? Where and when did that caricatured passage click into a position on this map of thinking drawn, hypothetically, together with all others at work or play? Where does the “or” of “the Chinese or savage” come from? When and where, at what point, does such exclusionary or optional thinking begin to matter at all? Indeed, you might still ask, what’s the matter?

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