- English Literature
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- Nov 07, 2020
Jenny Zhang Quotes
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Just
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- Nov 07, 2020
When I first moved from Shanghai when I was five, I just thought of myself as Chinese.
- Mother
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Family
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Late
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- Nov 07, 2020
'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.
- Behave
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'd behave savagely if I had access to Bjoerk's closet.
- City
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Fantasy
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- Nov 07, 2020
I lived so completely in my mind - a place of unchecked delusion and complete fantasy!
- Loved
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- Nov 07, 2020
Growing up, I had to cobble together a scarecrow of things I loved from various different writers.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Read
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Difficult
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Positive
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- Nov 07, 2020
From its very inception, Lenny Letter set out to create a supportive, positive, inclusive space on the Internet that does not shy away from complexity and nuance.
- Poetry
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Face
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- Nov 07, 2020
Growing up, I had a face that people wanted to tell things to, and I grew up with adults who had so much to say. They had lived through decades of unbelievable poverty, starvation, political upheaval, chaos.
- Death
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Men
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Okay
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- Nov 07, 2020
It's okay if someone is disgusted or offended by my performance. It's just a performance.
- Business Side
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Intelligence
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- Nov 07, 2020
If you were to make a quick judgment call on my intelligence and articulation when I first moved to the U.S. based on my speaking skills, it would be very low.
- Delusional
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- Nov 07, 2020
'Sour Heart' is a collection of seven linked short stories narrated by young Chinese-American girls living in New York City in the '90s. It's exceptionally hard to describe what I've written without sounding delusional or boring, so I'll just say they are stories about growing up and the pleasures and agonies of having a family, a body, and a home.
- Nothing
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Interesting
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- Nov 07, 2020
We're not the best about knowing what's the most interesting about ourselves.
- Love
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Color
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- Nov 07, 2020
White people have always slipped in and out of the experiences of people of color and been praised extravagantly for it.
- Parenting
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Determining
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Dreams
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Fluency
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Love
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Joke
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- Nov 07, 2020
Whenever I passed by a Chinese restaurant in a car, I'd joke to my friends, 'Oh yeah, my uncle owns that place.'
- Moody
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Book
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Night
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Francisco
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- Nov 07, 2020