May 29 - Halved, I am neither here nor there

by Kate Chin Park | edited by Alisya

Kate Chin Park is an associate puzzles and games editor for The New Yorker. She lives in Oakland and is incredibly honored to be a part of this project. She recommends reading her puzzle blurb before solving, apologizes for the extreme earnestness, and thanks Alisya, Terry, and anyone who solves it for the chance to do something different!

A note from Kate: Four years before 2026's curséd Wasian discourse, Andrea Long Chu, a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the most brilliant critics writing today, wrote the essay cited in the 7-Across and 3-Down clues in this puzzle. "The looming fact of racial admixture," she wrote, "may be said to form the grit in the pearl of Asian American consciousness today." Chu, who is mixed herself, addresses the topic through the lens of fiction, in particular novels by full Asian authors with mixed-race protagonists. An early example of this is Ruth Ozeki's "My Year of Meats," and a line from that book, quoted by Chu, provides this puzzle's title. In full, it reads, "Halved, I am neither here nor there, and my understanding of the relativity inherent in the world is built into my genes." Being mixed can sometimes feel like being two halves that don't add up to a whole, or at least not to one that's readily legible; that feeling was the inspiration for this experimental puzzle.