More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
CHARLES WANG was mad at America. Actually, Charles Wang was mad at history.
He shouldn’t be here at all. Never should have set a single unbound foot on the New World. There was no arguing it. History had started fucking Charles Wang, and America had finished the job.
America was the worst part of it because America, that fickle bitch, used to love Charles Wang.
He never should have fallen for America.
China, where the Wangs truly belonged. Not America. Never Taiwan. If they were in China, his ungrateful children would not be spread out across a continent. If they were in China, his disappointed wife would respond to his every word with nothing but adoration.
she worried that she would always be the lover and never the loved.
the rules of grammar were beneath him, bylaws for a silly club that he had no intention of joining. Why should he spend any energy on English, he’d explained once, when soon the whole world would be speaking Chinese?
The last time Grace had been in this office was two semesters ago when her art teacher had narced on her. The art teacher, who made all the students call her Julie. It was embarrassing when adults tried to act like people.
“Guts of a beggar?” “Shakespeare. ‘A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.’”
Cleaned more than she was ever driven, this car was a lady.
sense. Half
“‘Be happy that Daddy is rich man.’”
he could have turned it all back around because America still needed makeup.
“Not only American Dream! Everybody, every country, have same dream! Al Gore think he invent Internet, America think they invent American Dream!”
She had never really seen the point of the desert. It was a useless landscape, more a failure of evolution than a valid ecosystem. Scorpions and cacti, leftovers from Mother Nature’s rebellious phase; shouldn’t She have gotten past all that by now?
But it was what Barbra said that Grace remembered most. In the midst of the commotion, she’d just shrugged, and said, in an effort to stop Grace’s protesting, “Daddy was only telling the truth. There’s nothing wrong with being ugly if that’s what you are.”
Hot dogs were just as gross as Grace remembered. It was like they were all gathered around the living room eating skinny penises on buns—seriously, hot dogs were basically the same thing.
Men: conquerors of lands, seekers of beauty, upholders of truth. Women: bearers of the children, keepers of the homes, mourners of the slain.
That asshole. Worse than the Communists, with words that confirmed their meaning by denying it.
Almost half of all cosmetics sales were made during the holiday season,
“Lipstick do not just mean lipstick!” shouted Charles. “Lipstick mean all makeup! Anything that make a woman feel good, feel rich, feel like she is taking care of herself but not cost too much, that mean lipstick! We think it going to be nail polish this time around! Everybody get creative! A canvas on your pinky! Small luxuries! Manageable delights!”
Mental note: Stop wasting time worrying about being late.
Academia begets academia.
Condescension. That’s all it was. As if everything mattered more just because he was a few years older.
Professor Kalchefsky started to put his face back in order.
And then Leo’s eyes got soft in that terrible, amazing way that only men who are supposed to be invulnerable can soften. He looked at her, full of hope, and Saina felt herself die a little bit inside.
Women, she realized, were scared to be assholes. And what is any artist, really, but someone who doesn’t mind being an asshole? That was when she birthed her plan: Be an Asshole.
“That’s what America likes to do to its successes, right? Eat them up and spit them out?”
He didn’t feel like a boy anymore. Saina wondered if she should be scared. Would Billy hurt her? “Did your former fiancé tell you that he’s getting married?” No. Billy wouldn’t hurt her. He’d destroy her. Or try to.
The things we agree to call art are the shamanic totems of our time. We value them beyond all reason because we can’t really understand them. They can mean everything or nothing, depending on what the people who look at them decide. Everything or nothing.
Charles shrugged. “You go to party school. They think everything funny funny, everything party party.”
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.’” “What?” “It’s Virginia Woolf.”
Wait. She had almost forgotten what was in the front passenger seat clouding her air with some sort of cloying scent: the interloper, the carpetbagger, the stepmother.
for
Wasn’t money supposed to beget money?
Safe and sure. Bravery was for fools.
This lawyer was always bombarding Charles with pleasantries when he should have been figuring out how to reinstate the Wangs’ lost acres. They continued in Mandarin. “I pay you six hundred dollars an hour. It would cost me too much to tell you about it. Do you have any news?”
The Nazis had to return looted artworks—why shouldn’t the Communist Party return looted birthrights?
That was six months ago. Enough time to fall halfway in love, once. To betray someone, once. To be betrayed, once. And, maybe, to win someone back, once.
THE SOUTH wasn’t how Charles remembered it. Where were all the biscuits and black people?
Food should be like this—elemental, honest, a little cruel. It should make no apologies for what it was, and it shouldn’t allow the eater to lie to himself about what he was doing.
“I can’t believe it—y’all know how to eat crawfish?” Midsuck, Charles grinned at him. He removed the creature from his mouth and waved it in the air, arms flailing, to make his point. “The only thing with legs Chinese people don’t eat is table and chair!”
Sometimes Charles thought that conversation must be the truest art form. In a good back-and-forth, you’re continually creating something new, something that only exists in a single present moment. Whole universes were built and destroyed in the course of a good conversation.
Books are the simplest gateways through which to pass. There are public libraries! Anyone can pick up a book! There are compendiums of the classics that a lazy person can read through in a week!”
Energy brings energy,
“So you think the Taiwanese people had no impact on the Taiwan Miracle? Surely you have to at least admire their lack of violence. Cambodia and Vietnam were in similar circumstances after World War II, and look at what happened there.” “Can’t compare. Cambodia and Vietnam, whole different people. Wild. Not cultured. The Taiwanese people all just Chinese anyways.” “Charles! You can’t just call them Chinese when it’s convenient for you and then denigrate them when it’s not! Barbra, back me up here.”
Love was supposed to be a by-product of a life well lived, not the goal.
Love saves you, as long as there’s a you to be saved.
“What’s your dad going to do?” “Oh god. He has this crazy plan where he thinks that he’s going to roll up to the old village in China and somehow be able to reclaim the land that his father lost.”
What was the point of having children? All they did was leave you. He’d left his parents. May Lee had tossed money at hers and fled. Barbra had slipped away from hers without even telling them that she was going. At the very moment when children might emerge from the uselessness of adolescence and finally take on some of the burden of being alive, that was when they blithely severed themselves at the root with one cruel, unthinking cut. Little assholes.
