Dream Pop Origami is a beautiful, ambitious, interactive, and engrossing lyrical memoir about mixed-race identity, love, travel, AAPI masculinities, and personal metamorphosis. This experimental work of creative nonfiction examines, celebrates, and complicates what it means to be Asian & white, Nisei & hapa, Midwestern & Californian, Buddhist & American at the same time. In this stunning collection of choose-your-own-essays and autobiographical lists, multiracial identity is a counterpoint of memory, language, reflection, and imagination intersecting and interweaving into a coherent tapestry of text, emotion, and voice. A stylized, modern retelling of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book!

One of the most revolutionary aspects of Dream Pop Origami is the way it gives listeners the agency, the freedom, and the responsibility to choose what the next chapter is but also what the memoir becomes based on the decisions they make and the chapters they listened to. In a literal sense, listeners direct this memoir. They decide the level of heartache, nostalgia, joy, infatuation, and melancholy it contains. They decide when to follow the rules of autobiographical storytelling and when to transgress them, when to harness the narrative technology of the personal essay and when to embrace the simplicity of the autobiographical list, just as Dream Pop Origami does as a work of creative nonfiction.

At its heart, this memoir is a powerful, vulnerable, audacious, and cyclical process of becoming for both reader and author. With each reading, the listener connects the fragmented authorial strands of memory, daydream, story, imagination, emotion, longing, and nostalgia into a whole textual entity. At the same time, through their choices, each listener will listen to a different version of Dream Pop Origami, granting author, narrator, and listener their own complex subjectivity, contradiction, and irreconcilability. Each new reading of this memoir is simultaneously an affirmation of the inherent contradiction of the self: there can be no singular, static narrative subject or singular, static narrative object. There can also be no singular, static reader. Author and listener, narrator and interpreter are all part of an important dance for the construction of meaning and identity. As listeners listen, they ignite a two-way process of coalescence, development, and evolution for the author and the listener at the same time.