bonnie tsui

In photographs displayed at my grandfather’s funeral last month, the plant is there: a splendid, eight-foot dracaena, holding court from the corner of the living room. Bent before it in one image is my fastidious, flannel-jacketed grandfather, just shy of 102, fussing with the lowest tier in the dracaena’s lush skirt of fronds.

We call it the mother plant, and, like my gung gung, it’s always been there.

Read the essay here, published in The New York Times on February 9, 2024 and in print in Sunday Opinion.

At my community pool, the locker room is a tableau on aging.

Throughout the day, you’ll find bodies and bottoms of every type on display, ranging from squishy baby to saggy lady. But this is not the kind of place where short-lived resolutions to lose 15 pounds get made or broken. Here, the arc of fitness is long, and it bends toward seniors.

Read the essay here, published inThe New York Times on April 1, 2023 and in print in Sunday Opinion.

“I found myself mulling the nature of time, and how spending that time with friends you have known for many years, over many stages of your life, can make it seem to fold over on itself. Amplifying this feeling was the setting, where, as in the book, a lighthouse shines a steady light over its charges: a visible hand, sweeping around and around as if on a clock face. But what these clock markings signify is not hours, minutes, or seconds, but something else entirely.” What staying at a light station on the California coast can teach us about time.

Read the story here, published in The New York Times on March 27, 2023.

I wrote about Sachi Cunningham, often the only photographer swimming in the water at Mavericks, and her work to document big-wave women in their fight for ​​equity on the professional surf tour.

Read the story in The New York Times Sports section, published on February 17, 2023. here.

Several months ago, I spent time with some of the most visible, vocal champions working in Chinatown today, and it restored in me a kind of faith I didn't know I needed.

Read the essay, the September/October 2022 cover story for Afar magazine, here.

The place that is water is a place that travels. As much as the water is an actual place to enter with your body, it also lives in the mind.

Read the essay, published in the monthly “You Are Here” column in Alta Magazine, September 2, 2022.

“What do you think about when you think about swimming?” I asked this recently of a classroom of high school students, and though their answers ranged widely—“fun,” “a little bit of fear,” “family,” “summer”—one answer led the pack: “freedom.” I love that our human relationship with water spurs conversations about so much more.

Read my review of two new picture books and a graphic novel, which treat swimming as an expansive state of being, slippery with promise, published here in The New York Times Book Review on July 31, 2022.

One With the Ocean is the world’s largest open-water swim group, with conservation-minded swimmers who share knowledge, meet newcomers where they are, and teach us all how to care for one another.

Read about the beautiful community Bryan Mineo built in the Spring 2022 issue of AFAR magazine, here.

The underwater photographer Ron Elliott describes what he’s learned from his encounters with sharks around the Farallon Islands.

Read the story and watch the video here, published in The New York Times on September 29, 2021.

On reading Charlotte’s Web with my son — plus rage, love, fear, and all that stuff.

Read the essay here, published in The New York Times Parenting newsletter on June 30, 2021.

As we move through the spring of The Great Vaccination, many of us are feeling cautious optimism, and also its flip side: creeping dread.

Read this story, published in The New York Times Well section on April 8, 2021, here.

In this year of sorrow, I wrote about the honor and privilege of being the witness in water for my friend Lessly as she faced down cancer. In this stripped-down state, we allow ourselves to see each other for who we really are.

Read the essay here, published in The New York Times Science Times section on March 16, 2021.

This is a survival tale about sharks and my friend Ron Elliott, but really it's a story about us weird humans and resilience in these uncertain times. What does it mean to move through fear and trauma, especially in the middle of a global pandemic?

Read the story here, published March 5, 2021 and available exclusively on Scribd.

I wrote about surfing and civil twilight—a luminous, liminal space between night and day, beginning and end, togetherness and aloneness—and how existing here has helped me stay tethered to this strange world.

Read the essay, published in Outside on February 6, 2021, here.

To inhabit a body in the world is to notice when you are different. I wrote about race, swimming, and belonging, and how water has the power to be the great equalizer.

Read the essay here, at Patagonia’s The Cleanest Line.

The marine biologist has become a leading voice in the movement by deftly communicating what few people understand: that cleaning up the planet requires a commitment to social justice.

Read the story, in the September/October 2020 issue of Outside, here.

As the weather gets colder in many places, mom-and-pop establishments are under even more strain. You can take some simple steps to help them survive.

Read the story, published in The New York Times At Home section on Sunday October 11, 2020, here.

How one public pool in California reopened its doors to the community during a pandemic summer.

Read the feature, published in The New York Times Sunday Styles section on August 9, 2020, here.

In this time of isolation, I have found community in the lovely stream of letters from readers, who describe their new embrace of wild swimming, and the process of their own seeking.

Read the essay, published on the UK launch day of Why We Swim in the Books section of The Guardian, August 6, 2020, here.

To be a swimmer is to always be aware of danger. It is to be acquainted with fear, but not to give in to it.

Read the essay, part of a series on resilience in troubled times — what we can learn about it from history and personal experiences — here, in The New York Times, June 23, 2020.

As surfing takes its place in the Olympic line-up, science and technology help carve its future.

Read the feature, part of Popular Science’s Summer 2020 “Play” issue—an exclusive digital edition in the pandemic—here.

To live deliberately as a swimmer means that you are a seeker: a chaser of the ocean’s blue corduroy, a follower of river veins.

Read the essay—an adapted excerpt from Why We Swim—here, in the The New York Times Sunday Review, April 12, 2020.

I realize that it’s not just the coronavirus that’s contagious. It’s our fears and feelings about everyone and everything else, piggybacking on this news, spreading further and planting itself deeper into our psyches than any virus ever could.

Read the essay here, on the cover of the The San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Insight section, March 15, 2020.

On the athlete mothers behind this year's powerful #DreamMaternity movement: Allyson Felix, Kara Goucher, Alysia Montaño, and more. These athletes are often portrayed as exceptional, but with increased institutional support and more women making decisions at the top echelons of sports, the continued success and longevity of female athletes will become the norm

Read the feature, part of the December 9, 2019 Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year issue honoring Megan Rapinoe, here.

The modern American bathing suit was born in Portland, Oregon, and a swim in the Willamette River offers a dip into history. It’s a story of American pluck, entrepreneurship, and cultural migration—all collapsed into one little red logo, worthy of being blown up into a giant fiberglass store-top mannequin.

Read the story, one of the most-read in The New York Times the weekend of September 8, 2019, here.

I spent a few months with the incredible pilots of Cal Fire to learn about what they’re facing in the age of the megafire. Longer fire seasons, bigger blazes, and urban encroachment into the wilderness pose new challenges for those charged with fighting flames from the sky.

Read the feature here, in the July/August 2019 issue of The Journal of Alta California.

Deep-sea corals off the coast of California live for hundreds of years—and they record a ring for every year of their growth, just like a redwood. What their growth rings tell us about past ocean conditions can also illuminate our planet’s future.

Read the essay in Sierra magazine, August 7, 2019.

What—and who—does it take to raise a family? We asked six families—as well as their nannies, day-care providers, extended family members, and “mother’s helpers”—to explain how they’re caring for their children and how much they’re paying to do it.

Read the story here, photographed by Audrey Trinnaman, in the August 2019 issue of California Sunday magazine.

Fallow time is necessary to grow everything from actual crops to figurative ones, like books and children. To do the work, we need to rest, to read, to reconnect. It is the invisible labor that makes creative life possible.

Read the essay, one of the most shared stories in The New York Times the weekend of June 21, 2019, here.

There is a moment when the kitchen reliably fails women, and particularly women of color—when the kitchen becomes a place of business.

Read the essay here, part of the Antiracism & America series for The Guardian, April 11, 2019.

My father was missing. How could I put him back in the picture?

Read the essay about my dad, love, art, and near death here in Catapult Magazine, February 6, 2019.

“It’s as if the N.F.L. postgame practice met your honeymoon and they had a baby.” What happens in a week at the Surf Simply coaching resort in Nosara, Costa Rica.

Read the cover story here, in The New York Times, February 3, 2019.

As more cities restrict single-use plastic bags for environmental reasons, designers offer durable alternatives to a familiar icon.

Read the story here, in National Geographic, January 7, 2019

America’s national parks are increasingly bearing the burden of climate change, as rising temperatures and new weather patterns create mega blazes. A report from the burn zone.

Read the cover story here, in The New York Times, November 5, 2018.

Female big-wave surfers prepare to compete on Mavericks’s 50-foot waves for the first time.

Read the cover story here, in the August/September 2018 issue of California Sunday magazine.

I don’t actually bake. But lately I’ve fallen into the habit of watching baking shows, as an end-of-day balm for the caustic world at large.

Read the essay here, in The San Francisco Chronicle special MATRIARCHY issue, October 26, 2018.

“There are signs around town that say, Thank you for saving us,” one victim said. “But what happens when you weren’t saved?” Five fire refugees describe their lives in limbo.

Read the story here, in the February/March 2018 issue of California Sunday magazine.

Tess Elliott didn’t set out to run a newspaper. At the legendary Point Reyes Light she’s learned a lot about conflict, transparency, and endurance.

Read the profile here, in Spring 2017 issue of The Columbia Journalism Review.

I found myself face to face once again with the curious modern-day ubiquity of the Asian salad.

Read the essay here, in The New York Times Sunday Review, April 27, 2017.

It was a breezy afternoon in Hong Kong’s central business district, and the view from the roof of the Bank of America Tower, thirty-nine floors up, was especially fine.

Read the story here, in The New Yorker, March 13, 2017.

What happens when Michelin recognizes street food?

Read the story here, in the February/March 2017 issue of California Sunday magazine.

I live at the place where these circles meet: I am the Venn diagram of drinking as habitual and easy entertainment.

Read the essay here, in The New York Times Sunday Review, June 18, 2016.

How an ecologist of tidal communities became a global diplomat for the ocean.

Read the profile in the May/June 2016 Water Issue of Pacific Standard magazine.

Most of the boat is asleep when we pass through Ballard Locks in Seattle shortly before midnight.

Read the cover story on small ships here, in The New York Times, March 15, 2016.

When an artist of optimism is cruelly taken away, what remains of her message?

Read the story of Susan O’Malley here, in the January 2016 issue of San Francisco magazine.

I never realized how little I understood race until I tried to explain it to my 5-year-old son.

Read the essay here, in The New York Times Magazine, December 14, 2015.

I wore a sweater with holes in it. It’s this sweater he refers to, in an email that shows up in my inbox nearly 15 years later.

Read the essay here, in The New York Times Sunday Review, November 12, 2015.

This story was published as part of an entire issue dedicated to “The Chinese City” that was nominated for a National Magazine Award.

Read the essay here, in the April 2015 issue of San Francisco magazine.

Success in China would be an important step toward saving sharks from extinction, but also toward showing how changing mass-consumption behaviors could benefit the environment.

Read the essay here, in The New York Times Sunday Review, June 29, 2013.