[I bought my copy at a bookstore in Culver City with my mom. The stories in the book resonated a lot with me. I have so much rage at the world.]
"I decided to see a therapist to treat my depression. I wanted a Korean American therapist because I wouldn't have to explain myself as much. She'd look at me and just know where I was coming from."
"This screening process, by the way, is how the whole model minority quackery began: the U.S. government only allowed the most educated and highly trained Asians in and then took all the credit for their success. See! Anyone can live the American Dream! they'd say about a doctor who came into the country already a doctor."
"There was a transparency in comedy that I wasn't finding in poetry. Comedians can't pretend they don't have identities. They're up there, onstage, with their bodies against a brick wall like they're facing a firing squad. There's nowhere to hide, so they have no choice but to acknowledge their identities ("So you might have noticed I'm black") before they move on or drill down."
"As the poet Prageeta Sharma said, Americans have an expiration date on race the way they do for grief. At some point, they expect you to get over it."
"The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain? I don't think, therefore I am - I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it's 2, maybe it's not worth telling my story. If it's 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller."
"Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, "Things are much better," while you think, Things are the same."
"In my search for an honest way to write about race, I wanted to comfort the afflicted, but more than that, I wanted to afflict the comfortable; I wanted to make them squirm in shame, probably because I too identify with the comfortable. But I had nothing to show for this search but a trail of failed forms."
"More than 30 percent of those who died from the riots were Latinx and more than 40 percent of the destroyed businesses were Latinx-owned, yet they are the least mentioned group because they don't fit the tidy dynamic of the 'good' Korean merchants versus the 'bad' black community."
"When they immigrated here, they didn't simply travel spatially but through time, traveling three generations into the future."
"White boys will always be boys but black boys are ten times more likely to be tried as adults and sentenced to life without parole."
"One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. Watching a parent being debased like a child is the deepest shame. I cannot count the number of times I have seen my parents condescended to or mocked by white adults... To grow up Asian in America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you."
"Their delusion is also tacit in the commonly heard defensive retort to Black Lives Matter that "all lives matter." Rather than being inclusive, "all" is a walled-off pronoun, a defensive measure to "not make it about race" so that the invisible hegemony of whiteness can continue unchallenged."
"I have to address whiteness because Asian Americans have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy of this country. We are so far from reckoning with it that some Asians think that race has no bearing on their lives, that it doesn't 'come up,' which is as misguided as white people saying the same thing about themselves, not only because of discrimination we have faced but because of the entitlements we've been granted due to our racial identity."
"I was raised by a kind of love that was so inextricable from pain that I fear that once I air that love, it will oxidize to betrayal, as if I'm turning English against my family."
"I can't speak for the Latinx experience, but I can write about my bad English nearby Toscano's bad English while providing gaps between passages for the reader to stitch a thread between us."
"The greatest gift my parents granted me was making it possible for me to choose my education and career, which I can't say for the kids I knew in Koreatown who felt bound to lift their parents out of debt and grueling seven-day workweeks."
"The poet is a net that catches the stutters, the hesitations, rather than the perfectly formed phrase. Attention to silence is itself an interrogation."
"But I grew up in a culture where to speak of pain would not only retraumatize me but retraumatize everyone I love, as if words are not a cure but a poison that will infect others. How many Asian women would then feel bold enough to report sexual assault in their cultures of secrecy and shame? Denial is always the salve, though it is merely topical, since the indicant mushrooms back in dreams and other deadlier chronic forms."
"Writing is a family trade like anything else: you are more entitled to the profession if your ancestors have already set up shop."
"I sometimes avoid reading a news story when the victim is Asian because I don't want to pay attention to the fact that no one else is paying attention. I don't want to care that no one else cares because I don't want to be left stranded in my rage."
"The whole takeaway from the crowd-pleasing opening scene in the novel and film Crazy Rich Asians is the following: if you discriminate against us, we'll make more money than you and buy your fancy hotel that wouldn't let us in. Capitalism as retribution for racism. But isn't that how whiteness recruits us? Whether it's through retribution or indebtedness, who are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?"
"Blade Runner 2049 is an example of science fiction as magical thinking: whites fear that all the sins they committed against black and brown people will come back to them tenfold, so they fantasize their own fall as preventive measure to ensure that the white race will never fail."
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