Ploi Pirapokin was born in Thailand and raised in Hong Kong. Her work is forthcoming and featured in Apogee Journal, Tor.com, the Bellingham Review, Fiction International, the Griffith Review and more. She has received fellowships from the Radgale Foundation, the Anderson Center, the Brush Creek Foundation, Willapa Bay AIR, Kundiman and others. She holds an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University and has taught there in the creative writing department and at the Emerging Writers Institute at Brown University.

(Q1) In your nonfiction piece, “An Equation To Tell Your Mother Your Boyfriend Is Black,” the list begins and ends somewhat elliptically. Did the equation for telling result in the correct solution? What was the mother’s response? Or will this response come in a different story?
Initially, this excerpt began as a way for me to respond to my mother and to seek answers to her racism. I blamed the media for portraying stereotypes on black men as influencing her way of thinking and criticized her experiences for raising me the way she did, only to discover that I hadn’t excavated all that I could about the subject. I return to the page to figure out why her opinion matters so much to me, and it’s painful to admit that I’ve always felt like I’ve had to earn my mother’s love. Yet this playful method has led me to explore the constraints that have been placed on me as an Asian woman from Asia in America as well as a daughter who is choosing to immigrate to a country where the culture is completely different to the one she was raised in.