All posts filed under: News

Body Language – Coming July 12, 2022

November 13, 2021
by Melissa Hung
Literary / News
Book cover for Body Language, featuring multicolored shapes of people in the background. Text in white: Body Language, Writers on Identity, Physicality, and Making Space for Ourselves. Edited by Nicole Chung and Matt Ortile

I’m thrilled to be part of Body Language, an anthology coming out on July 12, 2022. My essay about swimming and chronic pain is included. Selected from the archives of Catapult magazine, the essays in Body Language affirm and challenge the personal and political conversations around human bodies from the perspectives of 30 writers diverse in race, age, gender, size, sexuality, health, ability, geography, and class—a brilliant group probing and speaking their own truths about their bodies and identities, […]

What I Wrote in 2020

January 7, 2021
by Melissa Hung
News
Illustration of a plate of honey walnut shrimp, with a few hands on a blue table, one holding a cup of tea. There are yellow chopsticks and a logo that says, "Chinatown USA"

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 […]

What I Wrote in 2019

December 16, 2019
by Melissa Hung
News
Illustration of a woman with long dark hair resting her chin in a hand. Behind here are lanterns and clothes hanging on clotheslines.

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’ […]

What I Wrote in 2018

December 21, 2018
by Melissa Hung
Journalism / News
A cooked fish on a platter with cucumber slices artfully arranged around it. A hand holds a jar of seasoning over the platter. Photo by Michelle Min.

A look back on some of the things I wrote this year: I wrote about my grandparents’ immigration story (and their grocery store that sustained our family) for Southwest the Magazine. Shondaland let me write about various obsessions, such as why I have a soft spot for the Filet-O-Fish, the only fast food my immigrant family would eat. I also wrote about the calming experience that is shopping at Muji and how pajamas help me feel like […]