When looking back at those days, I marvel at how far I have come. Maybe it was luck. Maybe it was desperation. Maybe I will never find out..

I grew up in Pune, India, in a middle-class family. My parents had corporate jobs and worked from early morning to late evening to provide..

The country of my mother tongue, my family, a great deal of my childhood, and my culture actually isn’t where I was born...

Growing up, I spent countless hours playing the game, “Operation,” meticulously navigating the clip to avoid touching the metal...

My childhood was simple, as is most of life in our community. And for many years, it was all I knew, all I needed...

In fact, I was 16th in the rankings, including my father’s children from his two older wives, who each had six children before...

That year, there was a massacre in an eastern village. Nearly 600 were killed with sprays of bullets and machetes...

My parents were both originally from the northern region of Vietnam but fled south to escape communist rule...

My country is destroyed—people have died of hunger, died from a lack of medicine, or simply have been killed. Thanks to a dictatorship...

My parents—my father especially—were very liberal for the society in which we lived. A retired army officer, my father was well-educated...

When my mother was pregnant with me, all the family had been expecting a baby girl. Though when the morning came, they were quite shocked...

At the time, Pablo Escobar, a drug lord and narco-terrorist, was wreaking havoc in Colombia and my parents didn’t feel that living there...

Everything I had touched in my life had so far become a disappointment, and I wanted to end it all. My life flashed before my eyes as I...

“Good life is expensive. There is a cheaper one, but it’s not life,” my parents used to say. It might not sound literally correct, but...

I was the youngest of the three children in a middle-class family. It was a loving and cheerful setting. Adding to the happiness was that...

All my life, I have always wanted to help others. I have seen persecution, racism, and blind hatred for those who are different or deemed...

Is the American Dream dead? It seems such a cliché sometimes to even talk about it. Many have a cynical outlook on it. Maybe it depends...

My family is everything to me. I don’t know how to describe our relationship as anything other than that. My whole life, they have always...

The revolutions started a few years later, leading to the collapse of the Soviet empire and the rise of the Russian Federation. The early...

Everyone has lived a life of his own, a life that you may never know. I have owned and operated a Chinese restaurant in the United States...