More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Is this a joke? he said. I’m an easygoing guy, and I came willing to hear you out on this project, but I can take my capital elsewhere. I promised that your investments would lead to miracles, my employer said. Tonight, we dine on woolly mammoth. An incredulous silence swaddled the room. I am no tyrant. My employer removed his sweaty jacket. You are free to give up your portion of the Siberian mammoth our crews exhumed,
The life we’d been promised was a scam, the world a scam, the whole goddamn play a scam and there seemed nothing to do but burn it down as rioters did in Paris, New York, Nairobi—and then creep back through the embers because what other choice did we have? What other planet? Of course I’d ended up in the middle of another scam.
You believe in a country that does not exist as you imagine it, in a code of morality as fanciful as any creation myth. What do you call that if not blind faith?
It is an advantage that they cannot tell you people apart. It has always been easy to disappear as an Asian woman. You people. The number of times I’ve been mistaken for Japanese or Korean or Lao women decades older or younger, several shades darker or lighter, for my own mother once I hit puberty. You people, said the eyes of the annoyed barista who pushed a coffee I hadn’t ordered into my hand, insisting we’d just spoken, that I’d wanted double espresso, low-fat milk. You people! cried the teens at LAX who insisted on taking my photo, certain they’d snagged a K-pop star in disguise.
Religion is a flimsy construction of rituals infused with arbitrary power. The gestures have always been empty; behind them stand hustlers no different from you. All that is required is a convincing performance. Do. You. Understand?
Under a man’s hands—crush of his body—exigent breath—I remembered how to perform. Yes when I meant no. Lust or satisfaction or pleasure. Gratitude, as required, knowing that, naked beneath a man’s disappointment, there lay this possibility of violence, as pungent and close-fitting as skin. One pound of flesh, paid freely, was preferable to a bloodier extraction. My past roles of sex kitten and hard bitch, blushing penitent, coy exotic, tease: I’d learned, long before this day, that I could play anything to avoid the role of victim.
smoke. It is easy, all these years later, to dismiss that country’s purpose as decadent, gluttonous. Selfish. It was those things. But it was, also, this connoisseurship of loss.
Wouldn’t you choose to go out with a bang and not a whimper?
I asked her, what kind of god kills the bees and leaves rapists alive? Not one I can respect.
What sustains in the end are doomed romances, and nicotine, and crappy peanut butter, damn the additives and cholesterol because life is finite and not all nourishment can be measured.
Fear fueled a country so intent on perfection that they would give up the world.
We all die. We have only the choice, if we are privileged, of whether death comes with a whimper or a bang; of what worlds we taste before we go.
trees, dying, may burst after fruitless years into sudden blossom, a final exuberance of flower and sugar. Toward sun. At the last, even trees ache in their sap for pleasure.