Melissa Hung

2020 was not an easy year, so each one of these pieces of writing is a little victory.

I started the year off thinking I had cleverly tricked myself into writing on a regular schedule because I convinced Catapult to give me a column. It’s called Pain in the Brain and it’s about my chronic headache.

For the first column installment, I wrote about the meaning of keeping a headache diary. In the second, I wrote about my uneasy relationship with a body in constant pain and learning a meditation called the body scan. In the third, I wrote about weathering chronic pain in the pandemic without the one thing that consistently helps me, swimming. It’s also about how chronic pain has given me a kind of resilience.

For the San Francisco Chronicle, I wrote about a place I love, San Francisco Chinatown, and how the community is faring in the pandemic.

I also contributed to Resy’s Chinatown USA series with an essay about my love of honey walnut shrimp.

Lastly, my flash nonfiction piece about aunties at the YMCA found a home at Jellyfish Review. I think about the aunties often. I hope they’re doing OK.

Artwork by Jeannie Phan for Resy

It has been a goal of mine to be published in Longreads, and it happened this year! I wrote a personal essay about my relationship to Cantonese, my mother, and Chinatown.

For the San Francisco Chronicle, I wrote about the myth of authentic cuisines and how Tex-Mex is my comfort food.

For Pacific Standard (RIP), I wrote about how the People’s Kitchen Collective preserves cultural memory and carries on the legacy of the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast program through free community meals.

It was also my pleasure to interview two authors: Tayari Jones and Esmé Weijun Wang.

Artwork by Olivia Waller for Longreads