Little Fires Everywhere

by Celeste Ng

BOMBING FOR PEACE IS LIKE FUCKING FOR VIRGINITY.

To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.

In the future we’ll all be able to look past race.”

I really hope this happens. While it is better now than it used to be, too many people still can’t see past the color of someone’s skin

This makes me feel icky reading. I don’t think their intentionally trying to come across as racist or insensitive, but that’s how it comes out.

Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed; if you didn’t, you might burn the world to the ground.

While I don’t completely agree, it’s an interesting way to look at things

Asian man didn’t fit the public’s expectations, and was therefore unnerving. Asian men could be socially inept and incompetent and ridiculous, like a Long Duk Dong, or at best unthreatening and slightly buffoonish, like a Jackie Chan. They were not allowed to be angry and articulate and powerful.

I know this book is written by a Chinese American, but I still don’t agree with things like this being in a book without anyone in the book challenging it.

But the problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time there were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on.

If a soul could leave a body, she thought, this is the sound it would make: like the screech of a nail being pulled from old wood.

Sometimes, just when you think everything’s gone, you find a way.”

“Like after a prairie fire. I saw one, years ago, when we were in Nebraska. It seems like the end of the world. The earth is all scorched and black and everything green is gone. But after the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow.”