Soma Mei Sheng Frazier

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier recently relocated from California—where she's served as a San Francisco Library Laureate—to New York, for a professorship at SUNY Oswego. In the colder climes, her writing has transformed as much as her wardrobe. Frazier’s work has earned nods and awards from authors and entities ranging from Nikki Giovanni to Daniel Handler; HBO to Zoetrope: All-Story and The Mississippi Review. She’s nose-to-grindstone on a novel, but you can hunt down more of her shorter work in Glimmer Train and ZYZZYVA. 

Any Old Patient

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier - June 15, 2020
"But fear is worse than being belittled. Fear is — risky."

I shopped at the Asian market, in those early days of the pandemic, because everyone else was afraid to. The cashiers, baggers and customers all wore face masks and gloves — still an eerily surreal sight in the strip-mall-infested hinterland of central New York. Even the parking lot boy wore safety goggles, as though he handled chemicals instead of carts.