Pandora's Ink Digital Magazine

Written by Shinbi Lee from Orange County School of the Arts in California, YS It always rains when we visit the columbarium of our grandparents’ ashes. The structure is a walk down from a clean-paved road surrounded by evergreen forest; our car looks like it shouldn’t be parked in the middle of this empty road. But I guess it doesn’t really matter because no one is here but us and the ashes, ashes, ashes. We’ve only been here twice, once when we were much younger, when no

Written by Sarah Guo from Plainview Old Bethpage John F Kennedy High School, New York, USA Suddenly, on a random Thursday afternoon, my worth became equated to the handful of cynical remarks I could make about someone else. But I didn’t care. Rather, I loved it. That day, as I tossed my legs over the edge of the cafeteria table, I said things my previous 9-year-old self would’ve never thought. Even as I jabbed a finger at Abigail's bouncing steps, I felt no shame. After all,

Written by Nina Behl from North Shore Country Day, Chicago, USA I. The Question I take a deep breath. Incense mixes with the smell of frying spices as Nani, my grandmother, sets a plate before me. It is heaped with piping hot dahl and steaming naan. Heat bites my fingertips as I grab the bread. The first bite hits the back of my throat, and my face goes red. Nani grins as I pant. She watches me desperately push my own breath onto the offending naan. Her gold bangles chime ag

Written by Miranda Le from Tarbut V'torah Community Day School, Vermont, USA Letter I Dear Mother Nature, Though you may never receive this, I think I should introduce myself. I’m a human. I wonder: do you know how much beauty you’ve created? Many take your gifts for granted; I used to be one of them. I will send you a series of letters. Perhaps through them, you can see how some of us are starting to understand your sorrow. I promise there are possibilities, even if you

Written by Eric Wu from Washington, USA “Looks like Zhuxiong got dragged over by TSA again.” I sighed. His tiny legs fluttered as they dragged him helplessly into the treacherous inspection chamber. His cylindrical body meant his face had to be squished to fit into the container. This had happened once in New York, once in Beijing, and twice in Seattle. Clearly, the TSA had found high schoolers bringing stuffed animals through security suspicious. In the past, I had throw

Written by Eric Li from College Station High School, Texas, USA Today is the final day of spring break, 2025. I should be at the beach, toes buried in warm sand, listening to waves crash against the shore. Instead, I'm standing in a funeral home, staring at my grandfather's faded baseball cap. This is my first funeral. My parents have no relatives in the U.S. I've never been to anything like this.' Laughter drifts from the service next door: warm, fond laughter. I hear them s

Written by Claire Qiu from Emma Willard School, New York, USA The world had shrunk to the sound of footsteps. Theirs—sharp and relentless on the mall's polished floor. Ours—frantic and breathless. "Just talk to us!" Amelia shrieked, her voice slicing through the Saturday crowd. We dove into a clothing store, a blur of bright colors and blank-faced mannequins greeting us. I prayed the crowd would swallow us. But they were right behind us, their voices erupting into shrill, fur

Written by Amy Xia from Holton-Arms School, Maryland, USA The only thing separating us from complete darkness was a candle, not much larger than the size of a bottle cap. Its light flickered as we trudged through the narrow entrance of a cave where forebearers had left their marks hundreds of years earlier. The glimmer cast the shaky shadows of an eighth-grade class across the damp, uneven cave walls. Mud clung stubbornly to every surface of my worn-out sneakers and found amp

Written by Angela Zhou from Lakeview, Louisiana, USA It's hard not to take something pretty with you, things like those tiny, saturated flowers on the sidewalks. A forgotten spring tucked away in the pockets of my jeans. Or the stars, glittering across the sky, things I cannot touch. Things I cannot take. Things that I wished to place in the midnight sky, methodically and devotedly, but didn't. Those splendid pieces of fragmented time, I wanted to melt inside. Remember to c

Written By Amy Hou from Concord Academy, MA, USA To the United States, I am an immigrant to America, though the word “immigrant” feels too easy, too administrative, as if crossing an ocean were a form to be stamped rather than a body split into before and after. I arrived carrying another geography under my skin. Another grammar of belonging. Classrooms here orbit around race. Everything bends toward it, returns to it, asks the body to position itself in relation to it. Read.

Written by Yixuan (Eason) Liu from Shanghai Starriver Bilingual School, Shanghai, China Where I live, autumn typically arrives through storms. This year’s autumn, as if making up for its sudden entrance, has been unusually, uncharacteristically gentle. The murderous summer sun that hung above Shanghai is now overthrown, and the world lets out a long sigh of relief in the cool breeze. Summer wind is not really wind, but a ripple of heat, like air around an open oven. Autumn’

Written by Alvin Su from Louisiana, USA I Remembrance - 缅怀 Monday, June 26th, 2023, Taipei Accompanied by my father, we landed in Taiwan under a soft, grey sky. The air, thick with the smell of rain, clung to our clothes as if it too remembered things better left forgotten. The old days are woven in like a piece of brocade with faded patches here and there, certain memories now unclear and worn out. As I stood, the wind whispered through the willow trees like a gentle l

Written by Eric Li from Texas, USA The first time Grandma disabled Mom’s petunia sprinkler system, I thought it was a betrayal of American values. Those pink flowers were Dad’s Mother's Day gift that had survived three Texas droughts. I watched from my bedroom window as Grandma’s shadow fell across the flowerbed. Her rough hands, still cracked from cold Heilongjiang (the most northern province in China) winters even after five years in Texas, twisted the water valve shut with

Written by Lauren Zheng from Canada “Stop talking, young lady, or you’ll be out in the hall.” That’s my first memory of you, terror of the second-graders. I was sitting on a lint-covered blue carpet with the others. (Except the carpet wasn’t quite blue, and I wasn’t quite with them.) You were watching us make paper stars. (My paper wouldn’t fold the right way, my star deflating and crooked.) I was terrified of you. (I was terrified of being less than them.) But my mom forced

Written by Iris Zhu from California, USA One blazing summer after the school year ended, I left America and returned to my mother's hometown in Changsha, China. Along the Xiang River and capital of the Hunan Province, Changsha comes from a Mandarin word meaning “a long sandy place,” and it is average-sized. In China, this means around 10 million inhabitants. The city is known for its local, spicy cuisine and small, meandering alleyways teaming with bustling stores and restaur

Written by Eric Wu from Washington, USA My father’s hands shook, struggling to hold the bouquet of impeccably red roses in full bloom. He hoped that the sharp, thorny flowers could act as a needle and stitch up the hole in his heart. I followed closely behind, holding a transparent turquoise ring neatly tucked into its velvet cushion, ready to initiate the handoff just as we had meticulously perfected the day before. My heart pounded as the plan of my own orchestration had