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This is the writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treasman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Han Ong read his story,

My Balenciaga, from the March 23rd, 2026 issue of the magazine.

The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Berlin Prize,

Ong is the author of more than a dozen plays

and two novels,

Fixer Chow and the Disinherited.

Now here's Han Ong.

My Balenciaga My mother and I were living on the Upper West Side in New York with my aunt Feli, who was at work.

She was the chief thoracic surgeon at Mount Sinai when When I heard that the film star Nora Onore had passed,

I knew that my mother had brushed elbows with Nora at a few movie premieres in Manila in the

70s, so I delayed telling her the bad news.

When I finally did, she went completely silent. She was already seated, but her

ribcage sank into her hips. We forwent social media. We knew that the sites would be overflowing

with tributes and condolences from various Filipino expat communities.

Ours was only a small sorrow, because it had been decades since we'd seen one of Nora's films,

and we were grieving more for ourselves, our individual vanished youths, during each of which

Nora had been a big, big light, than for the deceased

...