The Resisters

by Gish Jen

It is so hard for a new parent to imagine a child any different from the one he or she has—children do so have their own gravity. They are their own normal.

The anxiety about success—how you fought to define it for yourself, even as others blithely defined it for you.

Why don’t we define taking care of children and the elderly as real work, regardless of whether or not it supports a ‘productive’ member of society? And while we’re at it, why can’t we call cleaning up the environment ‘work’ even if it doesn’t result in a product that can be sold? Why do we behave as if producing is still the be-all and end-all, when it’s not?”

isn’t it amazing how interesting we find characters who say no? In life we like people who say yes, but in books we like people who say no, he said.