Asian American Quotes

“One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. Watching a parent being debased like a child is the deepest shame. I cannot count the number of times I have seen my parents condescended to or mocked by white adults. This was so customary that when my mother had any encounter with a white adult, I was always hypervigilant, ready to mediate or pull her away. To grow up Asian in America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“When I hear the phrase “Asians are next in line to be white,” I replace the word “white” with “disappear.” Asians are next in line to disappear. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. This country insists that our racial identity is beside the point, that it has nothing to do with being bullied, or passed over for promotion, or cut off every time we talk. Our race has nothing to do with this country, even, which is why we’re often listed as “Other” in polls and why we’re hard to find in racial breakdowns on reported rape or workplace discrimination or domestic abuse. It’s like being ghosted, I suppose, where, deprived of all social cues, I have no relational gauge for my own behavior. I ransack my mind for what I could have done, could have said. I stop trusting what I see, what I hear. My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“You’re here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“I was certain t find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea.”
― Monique Truong, The Book of Salt

“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. And possibly right, Mr. Richardson thought uneasily.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“Alcohol, I had learned, was an eloquent if somewhat inaccurate interpreter. I had placed my trust that December night in glass after glass of it, eager not for drink but for a bit of talk. ”
― Monique Truong, The Book of Salt

“I am forced to admit that I am, to them, nothing but a series of destinations with no meaningful expanses in between. ”
― Monique Truong, The Book of Salt

“All my favorite establishments were either overly crowded or pathetically empty. People either sipped fine vintages in celebration or gulped intoxicants of who cares what kind, drowning themselves in a lack of moderation, raising a glass to lower inhibitions, imbibing spirits to raise their own. ”
― Monique Truong, The Book of Salt

“Xuan and I had decided to take a trip together in honor of our one-thousand-day anniversary. We ate Korean barbecue, shared a decadent cake, and then drove three and a half hours to Yosemite. I’d never heard of such an occasion. But in Seoul, where Ji-Hoon was born and raised, there was almost a monthly holiday devoted to romance. We wore similar out- fits, which Xuan said was common for couples in Asian countries. Three years was a big deal, especially when we didn’t know how many more we’d have.”
― Kayla Cunningham, Fated to Love You

“When we say ‘Asian American’ we are talking about so much more than can be fit in a single stereotype.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“My interest has always been in the place where sex and race are both obscenely conspicuous and yet consciously suppressed, largely because of the liminal place that the Asian man occupies in the midst of it: an “honorary white” person who will always be denied the full perquisites of whiteness; an entitled man who will never quite be regarded or treated as a man; a nominal minority whose claim to be a “person of color” deserving of the special regard reserved for victims is taken seriously by no one. In an age characterised by the politics of resentment, the Asian man knows something of the resentment of the embattled white man besieged on all sides by grievances and demands for reparation, and something of the resentments of the rising social justice warrior, who feels with every fibre of their being that all that stands in the way of the attainment of their thwarted ambitions is nothing so much as a white man. Tasting of the frustrations of both, he is denied the entitlements of either.”
― Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk: Essays

“[…] as the bearer of an Asian face in America, you paid some incremental penalty, never absolute, but always omnipresent, that meant that you were by default unlovable and unloved; that you were presumptively a nobody, a mute and servile figure, distinguishable above all by your total incapacity to threaten anyone; that you were many laudable things that the world might respect and reward, but that you were fundamentally powerless to affect anyone in a way that would make you either loved or feared.

What was the epistemological status of such an extravagant assertion? Could it possibly be true? Could it survive empirical scrutiny? It was a dogmatic statement at once unprovable and unfalsifiable. It was a paranoid statement about the way others regarded you that couldn’t possibly be true in any literal sense. It had no real truth value, except that under certain conditions, one felt it with every fibre of one’s being to be true.”
― Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk: Essays

“We’re children of the diaspora,” Will said. He had grown up in the US, knew that no matter how much he wanted it to be, China would never be home to him. “All we’ve ever known is loss.”
― Grace D. Li, Portrait of a Thief

“Much of any culture can be linked back to eating and food, food and care, eating and language. To eat one's feelings, to eat dust, words, to eat your own heart out, to eat someone else alive, to eat your cake and have it too, things that are adorable (puppies, babies) that are said to be good enough to eat, to have someone else eat out of the palm of your hand, to be chewed out, a dog-eat-dog world. Chinese isn't any different from English in this way. Chī for "eat," and chī sù, to only eat vegetables, but also, colloquially, to be a pushover. Chī cù, to eat vinegar or be jealous. Chī lì, to eat effort, as for a task that is very strenuous. To eat surprise, to be amazed, chī jī ng. To be completely full or chī bǎo fàn, and thus to have nothing better to do. To eat punishment or get the worst of it, chī kuī. And, most important, to eat hardship, suffering, and pain, chī kǔ, a defining Chinese quality, to be able to bear a great deal without showing a crack.”
― Weike Wang, Joan Is Okay

“The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, imprudent ones to feed them. It is true, though, that there are some French words that I have picked up quickly, in fact, words that I cannot remember not knowing. As if I had been born with them in my mouth, as if they were seeds of a sour fruit that someone else ate and then ungraciously stuffed its remains into my mouth. ”
― Monique Truong, The Book of Salt

“Jiang whistled. 'Well, that's not a prison.'
'It's worse,' Rin said. 'That's a church.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“There is no immediate emotional release in the literature of minor feelings. It is cumulative. Change is measured in the internal "waverings of the mind" or in shape-shifting personae.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“In our efforts to belong in America, we act grateful, as if we've been given a second chance at life. But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us but how the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy has enriched itself off the blood of our countries. We cannot forget this.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“Capitalism as retribution for racism? But isn't that how whiteness recruits us? Whether it's through retribution or indebtedness, who are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“A good director, I was learning, could take criticism.”
― Jen Calonita, The Real Z

“Maybe if we all stopped getting so caught up in taking sixty selfies before we post one or reshooting the same video twenty times till it looks flawless, we'd be better off. Life isn't perfect. Why should we pretend that it is online?”
― Jen Calonita, The Real Z

“In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down. We are the carpenter ants of the service industry, the apparatchiks of the corporate world, we are math-crunching middle managers who keep the corporate wheels greased but who never get promoted since we don’t have the right ‘face’ for leadership. We have a content problem. They think we have no inner resources. But while I may look impassive, I'm frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.

There's a ton of literature on the self-hating Jew and the self-hating African American, but not enough has been said about the self-hating Asian. Racial self hatred is seeing yourself whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy. Your only defense is to be hard on yourself, which becomes compulsive, and therefore a comfort: to peck yourself to death. You don't like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head. Instead of solidarity, you feel that you are less than> around other Asians, the boundaries of yourself no longer distinct but congealed into a horde.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“It's as if readers relish white male writers behaving badly but they demand that minority writers must always be good.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported. We have been cowed by the lie that we have it good. We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will reward us with our dignity, but our diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“In her satiric play Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, the playwright Young Jean Lee said: "The reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we are easier to get and have lower self-esteem. It's like going with an inferior brand so that you can afford more luxury features. Also, Asian women will date white guys who no white women would touch.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“Asians are always mistaken for other Asians, but the least we can do to honor the dead is to ensure they're never mistaken for anyone else again.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“When Kochiyama found a waitressing job in New York, her black coworkers were the first to educate her about America's racist history. Finally, Kochiyama had a vocabulary, a historical context. What had happened to her wasn't a nightmarish aberration but the norm.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“Our respective racial containment isolates us from each other, enforcing our thoughts that our struggles are too specialized, unrelatable to anyone else except others in our group, which is why making myself, and by proxy other Asian Americans, more human is not enough for me. I want to destroy the universal. I want to rip it down. It is not whiteness, but our contained condition that is universal, because we are the global majority, by we, I mean nonwhites, the formally colonized. Survivors such as Native Americans, whose ancestors have already lived through endgames. Migrants and refugees living through endtimes currently, fleeing the floods and droughts and gang violence, reaped by climate changed that's been brought on by western empire. In Hollywood, whites have churned out dystopian fantasies by imagining themselves as slaves and refugees in the future.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning