As a boy, I had an instinctive curiosity about dresses. Time and again, I would sneak into my mother’s dressing room, run my fingers through the hanging fabrics, and, if no one was watching, put one on in front of the mirror — a narrow-shouldered boy looked back at me from his overflowing dress. 

Of course, these explorations were done with utmost vigilance and in absolute secrecy. Even at the age of four, a boy knows he is not supposed to wear dresse...

During every family gathering, I was always the topic of conversation—not because the little cousins wanted to play games on my phone or the older relatives wanted to make snarky remarks about my life, as is tradition in typical Asian households. Instead, it’s because of the school I attend: Philippine Science High School (Pisay), the nation’s most prestigious institution for education in science and technology. It’s like a Filipino version of an Ivy League—a STEM-...

I recently observed gendered ageism from an unlikely source: my 80-year-old feminist grandmother. We were discussing the movie Ticket to Paradise, starring Julia Roberts and George Clooney. There was just something about Roberts, said my grandma, she had “lost her touch.” Roberts’ smile, now wrinkled with age, wasn’t as beautiful as it used to be. But Clooney, six years older than Roberts and sporting a white beard, was “still great!” I couldn’t understand ho...

Although I am an avid reader, I only packed one book for my family vacation to Vienna, Austria — Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s memoir “If This Is A Man.” Bitterly ironic, considering I was about to spend a week in a country where around 65,000 Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with reading an autobiography about a Holocaust survivor. Yet I found myself hiding the book’s cover and never readi...

I come from a household where religious beliefs collide. My mother and her parents are Buddhists, the former perhaps less devout than the latter; my father was raised Catholic but rarely tries to convince me of his beliefs; and I am an agnostic who volunteers at Church every Sunday, and so is coincidentally present at every service and sermon. As I try to figure out whose statue I pray to, and with what gestures—or none at all—I am often ...

In Suzanne Collins’ 2008 novel The Hunger Games, children in the fictional nation of Panem are forced to fight to the death in an annual competition until one last victor remains. Veronica Ruth’s 2011 novel Divergent takes place in a society where people who don’t conform to a specific faction are left homeless or killed for being too different from the rest of humanity. The world of James Dashner’s The Maze Runner includes an organization called ...

A year ago, I strode the school halls in my Yoruba attire: Iro (wrapper tied around the waist) and Buba (top or blouse), with sets of beaded accessories laced around my neck, and a glittery green Gele (head tie) crowned on my head as a representation of my great African culture, when a fellow African passed me and asked, “Isn’t this a bit too…local?”...

I was nine when I spent a month in a Vietnamese Buddhist monastery—not in pursuit of peace, but as an attempt to challenge its ways and test its boundaries. After learning about the Great Compassion Mantra, I thought I had found enlightenment. For the proceeding weeks, I cornered strangers, pressing them about my faith. I recited mantras in courtyards, pleading for them to see the truth as I did. Everyone listened and no one argued. ...

William Shakespeare is not the literary saint we’ve been taught to worship.

For centuries, we’ve been force-fed his plays as the pinnacle of human storytelling, the gold standard of literature, and the untouchable genius of the English language in high schools. It's not incorrect to say so - Bill's plays are absolute classics in literature, as much as one would study Einstein for ...