[quotes] Yolk - Mary H. K. Choi 2021

 

[never read a book recommendation faster than this one.] 

"Depending on where I focus and how much pressure I apply to the back of my throat, I can just about blot him out."

"This place commands total dedication or it will eject you. I really would rather die than go home."

"Part of me is proud that she gets to have all this - knowing that we come from the same place and that she's earned it. Another part of me wonders if she's secretly Republican."

"I imagine the woman on the train, clutching the subway pole because no one will give up their seat for her. I want to fight them all."

"I can't wait to get out of these fucking jeans. All I want to do is peel off this costume, step into the shower, eat the world, and go to bed."

"Turns out Jeremy is an only child. An only child who carries nothing because the kindness of strangers never fails him."

"Design school in Manhattan is Hunger Games for East Asian kids with severe haircuts. I can't tell if I'm the racist one for feeling like we're interchangeable, but all the incentives seem scammy to me."

"I don't respond, seething. Instead I check Tinder. I swipe and swipe and swipe and swipe. It's dazzling how disposable we all are."

"I hang my coat, marveling at the superabundant closet space. A life beyond breaking shitty plastic hangers every time you shove excess clothing inside."

"I want her to tell me the day, the hour, and the exact minute when she'll die. And I want her to go away so I can start preparing for it now with zero new memories because I have enough that I'll miss."

"Even in Texas, where we moved later that year. Enormous, ridiculous Texas. Where everything was so flat you could feel all hundred and eighty degrees of sky at your shoulders."

"Sorting scary, unfathomable variables like infant mortality rates by relating them to economics makes us feel safer. That if we can predict it or draw a little line, we'll be protected from them, at the very least, feeling stupid."

"It's why randomness is unacceptable. Why organized religion is a salve. It's far more palatable to think of a divine order. Why conspiracies are easier to stomach over psychopaths making a rash decision that alters the course of history."

"I'm too scared to talk about it, but sometimes I worry that I don't exist. That I don't count."

"All I could think was how I didn't want a friend who was anything like me. I have enough of me to go around."

"All the sex I've ever had seemed inevitable. It wasn't wrought but ordained. It was like watching someone fall from a height. We all know where it's going."

"Secrets are like wishes. Everyone knows they don't work if you tell. But if you really want them to gain power, you can't acknowledge that they even exist."

"I keep going, putting my mouth where people shit and abasing myself the way I always do, trying to exorcise the hate and anger and never managing to get it all out."

"I'm crying. And watching myself cry only amplifies my sadness. I'm filled with devastating pity for every single mirror version of me, all those times before, the youngest ones making me saddest of all. Watching myself have compassion for me in the absence of anyone else makes me cry harder."

"Humans need to share their darkest parts. Unburdening makes you closer to everyone."

"I thought a polished appearance and stellar behavior would be the passport to belonging. And when I inevitably failed at perfection, I could at least willfully do everything in my power to be kicked out before anyone left me."

[quotes] Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata 2016

 

"Overwhelmed by a sensation of having stumbled into another dimension, I walked quickly through it looking for a metro station."

"And I probably infect others with the way I speak too. Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think."

"When something was strange, everyone thought they had the right to come stomping all over your life to figure out why."

"A convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment where foreign matter is immediately eliminated."

"When you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look them in the face when they do this to me. And as I do so I always think: that's what a human is."

"From where I stood, there were two types of prejudiced people - those who had a deep-rooted urge for prejudice and those who unthinkingly repeated a barrage of slurs they'd heard somewhere. Shiraha appeared to be the latter."

"The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of."

"The manager often says 'someone we can use,' and I wonder whether I'm someone we can use or not. Maybe I'm working because I want to be useful too."

"'I read history books trying to find out when society went so wrong. But however far back I went, a hundred years, two hundred years, a thousand years, it was always wrong.'"

"Maybe people who thought they were being violated felt a bit better when they attacked other people in the same way."

"You eliminate the parts of your life that others find strange - maybe that's what everyone means when they say they want to 'cure' me."

"You either get married and have kids or go hunting and earn money, and anyone who doesn't contribute to the village in one of these forms is a heretic."

[quotes] The Woman Warrior - Maxine Hong Kingston 1975

 

[found this book randomly at a lending library. so beautiful.] 

"Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?"

"I want her fear to have lasted just as long as rape lasted so that the fear could have been contained. No drawn-out fear. But women at sex hazarded birth and hence lifetimes. The fear did not stop but permeated everywhere. She told the man, 'I think I'm pregnant.' He organized the raid against her."

"I inspired my army, and I fed them. At night I sang to them glorious songs that came out of the sky and into my head. When I opened my mouth, the songs poured out and were loud enough for the whole encampment to hear; my army stretched out for a mile."

"At my great-uncle's funeral I secretly tested out feeling glad that he was dead - the six-foot bearish masculinity of him."

"I went away to college - Berkeley in the sixties - and I studied, and I marched to change the world, but I did not turn into a boy. I would have liked to bring myself back as a boy for my parents to welcome with chickens and pigs. That was for my brother, who returned alive from Vietnam."

"If I took the sword, which my hate must surely have forged out of the air, and gutted him, I would put color and wrinkles into his shirt."

"When I dream that I am wire without flesh, there is a letter on blue airmail paper that floats above the night ocean between here and China. It must arrive safely or else my grandmother and I will lose each other."

"Perhaps human beings just die, and that's the end. I don't think I'd mind that too much. Which would you rather be? A ghost who is constantly wanting to be fed? Or nothing?"

"Nor did she change her name: Brave Orchid. Professional women have the right to use their maiden names if they like. Even when she emigrated, my mother kept Brave Orchid, adding no American name nor holding one in reserve for American emergencies."

"To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which as in Chinese, the language of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-packed with homemade underwear."

"As a child I feared the size of the world. The farther away the sound of howling dogs, the farther away the sound of the trains, the tighter I curled myself under the quilt. The trains sounded deeper and deeper into the night. They had not reached the end of the world before I stopped hearing them, the last long moan diminishing toward China. How large the world must be to make my grandmother only a taste by the time she reaches me."

"'We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.'"

"My throat cut off the word - silence in front of the most understanding teacher. There were secrets never to be said in front of the ghosts, immigration secrets whose telling could get us sent back to China."

"I'd like to go to New Society Village someday and find out exactly how far I can walk before people stop talking like me. I continue to sort out what's just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living."