“In 100 Words, Tran and Potter enter into a pact of vulnerability. Tran approaches Potter, an acquaintance in a café, with a proposition: share this burden. The burden of consciousness, pain, desire, survival. Tran, a gay man from Vietnam whose family fled the war when he was a child, asks Potter, a straight white man born a decade after the war, to collaborate in a call-and-response project. Tran sends Potter a list of 100 words—shame, home, family, weight—and the two trade off responding to the words in short passages. Each writer searches himself and the other to enact what Tran calls a ‘transference of consciousness,’ about race, privilege, othering, belonging, being. What began for Tran as an effort to ‘see this weight on someone else’ becomes a form of shared subjectivity. As Tran remarks in an afterword, ‘This is a shared endeavor, a lived experience between two very different lives trying to understand what it means to be, to see the other.’”