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Centuries of illustrious ancestors, scholars and statesmen and gentlemen farmers all, had bred him for fragrant teas unfurling in fresh springwater, for calligraphy brushes of white wolf hair dipped in black deer-glue ink, for lighthearted games of chance played among true friends.
😂😄
Nothing, nothing in his long lineage had prepared him for the Western worship of the Dalai Lama and pop stars wearing jade prayer beads and everyone drinking goddamn boba chai.
He shouldn’t be here at all. Never should have set a single unbound foot on the New World.
“Italians don’t have nothing on gangster Jews!” he’d say, stroking the mezuzah that he’d left up on the doorway. “No hell in the Old Testament!”
had gone from quietly presiding over acres of fertile Chinese farmland to operating a piss plant on the island of Taiwan—well, it was an indignity so large that no one could ever mention it.
Sun Yat Sen’s legacy,
Sweet almond oil, sodium stearate, simmondsia chinensis, hydrolyzed wheat proteins, and then he saw it: UREA.
Hydroxyethyl urea, right between shea butter and sodium cocoyl isethionate.
Urea! Urea on a pretty little Amer...
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eight factories in Los Angeles, factories that he’d gone from supplying with urea to owning outright—each one turning out a glossy rainbow-scented sea of creams and powders and lipsticks and mascaras.
America was honest enough with him to include chemical piss in a list of pretty ingredients;
America saw that the beautiful was made up of the grotesque.
Makeup was American, and Charles unde...
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It was artifice, and it w...
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Artifice, thought Charles, was the real honesty.
Confessing your desire to change, being willing to strive, those were things that made sense.
He should have stayed leagues away from any country that could perpetrate such an injustice, that could spread this glottal miscegenation of a language, with its sloppy vowels and insidious Rs, across the globe.
Never Taiwan.
😂
Most chops underlined their authority with excess,
but this one, once his grandfather’s, had a single character slashed into its bottom. 王
His grandfather had used the chop in lieu of a signature on any documents he’d needed to approve,
Usually she read the New York Times—made herself read it, a reminder of the life she could be, maybe should be, living—but
but that paper would never carry anything as frivolous and as useful as horoscopes.
From the time Saina was very young, she worried that she would always be the lover and never the loved.
No one thinks to make the goddess a cup of tea;
romantic as a boyfriend who would notice that the lightbulb in her hallway had blown out and change it without even bothering to mention the favor.
you come to realize that you’re not so much a woman as you are a statue.
gorgeous, heartbreaking, stupid, human rights disaster of a ring.
