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.
— Jenny Zhang
How do we form a coalition of resistance without obliterating our differences? Not all lives matter, and we are not all the same immigrants.
It's weird for me to say I'm lucky when I can't go into a bookstore and have more than five choices if I want to read something about Asian-American characters.
Visibility doesn't always equal freedom.
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.
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.
I think being a writer is being heavily attuned to the absolute absurdity of things you take for granted, and I think that having actual parents who lived through the Cultural Revolution who are also interested in literature, they're also very attuned to those moments.
The reader who likes my stories, I think they would see the violence on the surface, but I think they would also see a deeper violence - the one that's not as showy or as immediately arresting, but kind of the more unsolvable violence that lurks underneath.
As you get older, you realize you're only the protagonist in your own story and a blip in someone else's life.
It's very Western to idealize a kind of love that does not come with any expectations, that still permits both the giver and recipient to be completely free.
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 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.
I like to keep a book underneath the pillow that I'm not sleeping on so I can reach over and grab it when I wake up. I don't always do that, but I like to. I try to make sure it's a book and not my laptop. I also try not to get too excited about who might've been trying to contact me while I was asleep.
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.
Mothers have always held such symbolic weight in determining a person's worth. Your mother tongue, your motherland, your mother's values - these things can qualify or disqualify you from attaining myriad American dreams: love, fluency, citizenship, legitimacy, acceptance, success, freedom.
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'm drawn to the figure of the ungrateful subaltern as a trope in literature. In real life, it is often dangerous to demand more.
I'm surely not the only one to notice we employ metaphors to make sense of the news. I always like to take note of who hides their origins and who shows them off.
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.
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?
Faced with ostracization at school and confinement at home, I turned to karaoke.
Early in my life, without any supporting evidence, I fretted over what I believed was my fate: accidentally becoming an international pop star. The pages of my diary were filled with hypothetical ethical dilemmas.
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 don't think I can ever write about young kids anymore. I completely shot my wad there.
I wish it wasn't so natural for me to dwell on the past.
Sometimes I worry that people who read my fiction think that I am making some kind of thesis statement.
I just submitted what I had to the 'Octopus Books' contest open reading period, and they said they wanted to publish my poetry book. Then I started to publish more and more poetry because people would ask me to do readings or ask me submit something for their journal.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me - an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American - there were limits.
White people have always slipped in and out of the experiences of people of color and been praised extravagantly for it.
Rage can be so common it turns ambient.
The 'New York Times' is not reviewing books by non-white people.
The historical legacy of 'The Best American Poetry' is they've had very few editors who were not white. They've had very few instances where they've selected poems by non-white poets.
Coming out of the closet doesn't always mean liberation.
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.
In my mind, scatological writing is a core of the English canon.
That's what people expect: They don't want to read a slight novel. People don't want to waste their time on anything less than 'great.'
I'm always interested in what is seen as obscene or profane or unfit.
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.'
With nonfiction, I had to learn how to be a clear communicator, but it was also a relief to be able to articulate some of my political ideas and beliefs. I also try to do that in my fiction, but I'm more interested in asking questions that lead to more questions, mysteries that lead to more mysteries, rather than immediate answers and solutions.
The year my mom worked as a secretary at an apparel company in midtown, she would often come home in tears because she had mistakenly called her boss by another coworker's name. 'You know how it is,' my father said, 'they all look the same. It's not your mom's fault. There's just no telling them apart. Same high nose and deep-set eyes.'
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.
It's like a weird mindset to wake up and want to be wanted. Like, I want to be wanted so much already... and I'm so greedy for other people's desire that I have to really force myself to have some shame about it and some control, neither of which come easily to me.
Whenever I passed by a Chinese restaurant in a car, I'd joke to my friends, 'Oh yeah, my uncle owns that place.'
My mother had two unshakable beliefs that she tried to drill into me. The first was that I had to study and work twice as hard as my white peers if I wanted to survive in America, and the second was that it was delusional and dangerous to believe I possessed the same freedom white people had to pursue my dreams.
One of the founding tenets of racism: a society that will never allow white people to think that because they are white, they won't succeed.
