Jenny Zhang Quotes
-
Even when I speak English to my parents, I'll say an English word differently to my Chinese parents and friends than I do to my English-speaking friends - you know, I'll pronounce 'McDonald's' differently, because it feels right, and that's what I'm used to.
-
I seem to be drawn to these smaller forms, and I seem to be drawn to things that can be written and also read in one sitting.
-
I grew up in a Chinese American enclave where the person who lived down the street had literally lived down the street from my mother in Shanghai.
-
I hadn't ever worked with an 'editor' until I was 26 - although that could be partly chalked up to the MFA vs. NYC thing, where I came up through institutions that encouraged writers to write privately for a long, long time and not sully themselves with concerns about audience or the business side of writing.
-
Asian American success is often presented as something of a horror - robotic, unfeeling machines psychotically hellbent on excelling, products of abusive tiger parenting who care only about test scores and perfection, driven to succeed without even knowing why.
-
I still catch myself trying to become the object someone imagines me to be, but then there are other times, when I am free, when I am fluent, when I am unimaginable, that I start to feel like somewhere out there is the decolonized love for me, somewhere out there, there is a love that doesn't let any of us be so lonely.
-
'Alphabet' by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen. It's a book-length abecedarian poem. It's an activist text but also a portal to wonder.
-
My privileged upbringing and education and linguistic fluency gave me such proximity to whiteness that it stung all the more to still find myself outside of it. My mother, on the other hand, not only accepted that she would always be an outsider in this country but also believed it to be a finer fate and home than any other she could have had.
-
Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for 'Rookie'.
-
As a child, I would go days without speaking, and then suddenly I would scream until everyone was looking at me.
-
I'd behave savagely if I had access to Bjoerk's closet.
-
In my mind, scatological writing is a core of the English canon.
-
Once I decided I was happy with something, I'd try to send it off into the world, and either someone would want it exactly as it was, or it would remain in my notebook/laptop, and no one would ever see it. This is probably why I didn't work with an editor until I was 26. The solipsism!
-
When it comes to love, maturity often gets a bad rap - second love is boring; it's practical. It's what our parents feel for each other.
-
I wish I had acted better. I wish I had been the kind of sister who was patient enough to show my brother the proper spelling for 'Power Rangers.'
-
Coming out of the closet doesn't always mean liberation.
-
Michael Derrick Hudson is not the first person to slip into the identity of a person of color to give himself some perceived advantage. He can slip back into his life and not walk around in this world as a person of color who endures racism.
-
When I was an undergrad at Stanford, there was a girl named Jennie Kim who worked for the school newspaper. Sometimes people would come up to me and talk to me about articles she had written. 'That one on getting a Brazilian was hilarious', some guy said, high-fiving me.
-
I know I am not the first woman to ask this, but how can I be both damaged and loveable? How do I become the protagonist of a story?
-
Visibility doesn't always equal freedom.
-
As you get older, you realize you're only the protagonist in your own story and a blip in someone else's life.
-
When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.
-
The 'New York Times' is not reviewing books by non-white people.
-
I really had to develop a core. I had to figure out, at my core as a writer, what did I value? What was I about? And I had to love it and take pleasure in it.