Now, the bar is in new hands, the food is very good, and the service is incredibly attentive - and Ng was mostly trying to talk as much as she could, while eating as much food as she could from the four plates she ordered for the table, because she didn’t want to offend the chef. Ng was attempting to manage those fries at a bar off Harvard Square in Cambridge late February - a place she used to go, back when she was a student, because the service was terrible, which meant you could sit for hours, nursing a beer or a cup of coffee, and study. Other things that are complicated: the racial makeup of the town where she grew up (Shaker Heights, Ohio), which is actually far less white than most people assume surrogacy law in the state of New Jersey and how it affects queer couples what to do with well-meaning white ladies and figuring out how to eat a plate of “messy fries” while answering interview questions. It’s so complicated! I would totally understand why someone would do that, and I can understand why someone would want that so much.” “I was working jobs that paid $10 an hour,” Ng told me. The same word applies for the ads on the back page of the alt-weekly newspaper she used to read when she was a Harvard college student, offering tens of thousands of dollars for women with specific attributes and SAT scores to serve as egg donors and surrogates. A woman adopting a baby from China because of her own infertility? Complicated. For Celeste Ng, in the spring of 2020, that word is complicated.

From time to time, all of us find ourselves using the same word, over and over again, to describe the world around us.

Little fire everywhere book