Two short pieces
Flash essays
Today’s guest posts are two short pieces, also known as “flash” personal essays, from two different guest authors.
Here is more about these two writers:
Elizabeth Su is the author and creator of forthcoming The Everyday Millennial Oracle (AMU/Simon & Schuster, 2026) and The Adventure Tarot (AMU/Simon & Schuster, 2024). She earned her master’s in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University where she researched burnout and perfectionism. She’s spoken at The Washington Post, has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, POPSUGAR, and Bustle, and has essays published in anthologies such as Nonwhite and Woman (Woodhall Press, 2022) and forthcoming Both/And (Beacon Press, 2026). www.elizabethsu.com
Jennifer Maloney writes poetry, fiction, and many other genres. Her work has appeared in Flash Boulevard, Synkroniciti Magazine, and many other publications and is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Summer 2025 Web Edition. She’s the author of two books of poetry and prose.
How to Identify White Supremacy in Your Own Household
First, think about which set of grandparents you know better. Who did you spend all of your holidays with? To whose bedside did you race to be there when they passed? Who did you visit for a week by yourself every summer since you were six years old?
Next, consider the family history you know. The binders full of genealogy and photos and newspaper clippings and family trees dating all the way back to the Mayflower. These binders and stories and artifacts and old jewelry and family heirlooms, piles of them, stacked up against one CD with sixteen five-minute tracks of oral history that you listened to for the first time thirteen years after your Chinese grandma passed. You spend hours searching for information about your Chinese grandpa’s family. He didn’t live long enough to get his own CD. He wasn’t rich like your grandmother, whose family compound was converted to a museum and was the set of a famous Chinese film. No, his legacy lives on through fragments. Laughs that you can still hear, a smell that whooshes you right back into his arms, and a conference room named after him at the University of Rochester where he was a Chemistry professor. You’ve read the bio they include in your grandpa’s professorship a hundred times, holding onto every word like a treasure. You still don’t know how to pronounce his name but someday you will take a Chinese class—Mandarin for Beginners—and your teacher will be able to help you, surely. Not even your husband’s family knows how to say his name; they speak Cantonese, not Mandarin. And you stopped asking your Chinese father a long time ago because he never learned his name either. “Grandpa” to him was just “Dad.”
Notice how your Chinese dad defers to your white mom on everything, stays silent and accommodating and selfless until one day he explodes and slams the door on all of you because he can’t find his keys. See how money is handled between your two parents. You used to think it was awesome that your mom was the breadwinner compared to your father, the doctor. But now you wonder if the real difference was your father was discriminated against so his salary (and position in the household) never stood a chance.
It’s ironic, really, that your father doesn’t speak to you anymore because you stood up to your mom. He doesn’t realize that your anger is his anger. He doesn’t realize that what you were trying to say all along was: we deserve better.
- Elizabeth Su
In Which I Text My Daughter
and she does not reply. Did I really think she would?
I forgo pleasantries. I simply ask directions.
I say Your note doesn’t specify and I can’t follow this map.
All the while, the sun boomerangs around the earth, days winging past like bats, like baseballs. I ask for clarification. The silence of the ceasefire is a good beginning, but when do negotiations start?
I think in linear. In single strands when I ought to see design. I live in the box. Seeing outside it is a luxury and a necessity and an impossibility. When we were kids, we’d cut a window. We used a box cutter. Who gave it to us? We took it.
My daughter says nothing. Does not respond because do not disturb. I don’t ask what I need to know, only what I want, my hand out for the free brochure; hope, zero interest for one year. Low payments deferred.
Have hope! Have hope. At Costco you can get a free sample, a sliver of hope served in a muffin cup with a tiny plastic spoon.
Would you like some?
I’m so hungry. Yes, thank you. I’ll take it.
- Jennifer Maloney