Jenny Zhang Quotes
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We're not the best about knowing what's the most interesting about ourselves.
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I think Lena Dunham, the public figure, is - I hate the word 'brand,' but I'm going to use it - it's such a brand that is so tethered to her public persona and to 'Girls', but also this progressive politics that she's been more vocal about.
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I wish it wasn't so natural for me to dwell on the past.
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Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who founded Lenny Books together, also happen to have exquisite reading tastes - from obscure small press poetry chapbook to dishy memoirs to literary novels - and so it's a real honor that they've chosen to announce their imprint with my stories.
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We lived in one of those half-basement apartments, and on our first night of being in America, someone reached through the grate that protects the window and stole our laundry detergent - which wasn't a big deal, but it felt symbolic when I heard about it later as an adult.
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As I got older, I realised that people saw me as other things - sometimes Korean, sometimes Japanese, sometimes just Asian. When my family moved to a more affluent white neighbourhood, I started to see myself as 'other', this amorphous category. I didn't even know what 'not other' was, but I knew I wasn't it; I wasn't what was normal.
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I think it was really important for me before I 'debuted myself' in front of the world to have a private life with my imagination and my writing for several years. That also made it so I didn't feel desperate for someone to find me.
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Shanghai, the city where I was born and spent my first four and a half years. It's not necessarily the most pleasant or most comforting place, but I have blood memory there, my core was formed there, so I need to go back often, or else I become empty, lost, without meaning.
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Our culture is bloodthirsty for stories about women in pain; we hunger for women to expose their traumas and to be rescued by the love of a good man.
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Chinese people of my parents' generation who lived through the Cultural Revolution knew so much of death at such a young age, and the psychic toll those experiences left was immense. I knew the stories of the Cultural Revolution before knowing what the Cultural Revolution was.
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I often wonder if my being a fairly small Asian woman with a high-pitched quietish voice plays a role in how often men feel entitled to come up to me and tell me, 'You have this doll act,' or whatever.
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Whenever I passed by a Chinese restaurant in a car, I'd joke to my friends, 'Oh yeah, my uncle owns that place.'
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I'm drawn to the figure of the ungrateful subaltern as a trope in literature. In real life, it is often dangerous to demand more.
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Sometimes I worry that people who read my fiction think that I am making some kind of thesis statement.
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I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.
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People who have very devastating lives sometimes have the most wild, avant-garde humor. It's like when you've seen it all and been through it all, nothing is off-limits in a way.
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For a decade, Emma-Lee Moss has been steadily making weird, moody, melancholic music under the moniker 'Emmy the Great' that has been referred to as nue-folk, anti-folk, synthpop, and, most of all, literary.
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There's so much of our behavior that kind of curdles and hardens as we get into adulthood, and it becomes so much more difficult to be hopeful and to dream extravagantly.
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Of course I want the things I write to reflect well on me or anyone who might feel represented by me, but also, I'm not writing a guidebook on how to be or how my people should be seen. I'm telling very specific stories.
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Does self-acceptance ultimately require another person, or is there a kind of love that does not dabble in the dream of a perfect twinship?
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While I was growing up in Flushing, Queens, we socialized exclusively with other Chinese immigrants. I was forbidden to make contact with nonapproved, non-Chinese peers outside school. That was fine with me.
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White people have always slipped in and out of the experiences of people of color and been praised extravagantly for it.
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Karaoke was my family's happy secret. In those early years in America, like many immigrants, my parents struggled with poverty and loneliness, but they also built provisional families, and inside our bubble there was joy, understanding, an intimate language I could never translate - and above all there was song.
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Rage can be so common it turns ambient.