Cameron

“My main problem, it emerged, was a lack of patience, my inability to accept tedium. I’d wander away to look for something to read and forget that I was leaving the risotto to glue itself into a sticky glop, or I’d forget to turn the carrots in their puddle of olive oil and come back to find them seared to the bottom of the pan. (So much of cooking, it seemed, was petting and bathing and monitoring and flipping and turning and soothing: demands I associated with human infancy.) My other problem, I was told, was my insistence on innovating, which is apparently a guarantee of failure in baking. “It’s chemistry, Harold, not philosophy,” he kept saying, with that same half smile. “You can’t cheat the specified amounts and hope it’s going to come out the way it”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“It was,” the man said. “But when I returned from re-education, I discovered that my supply of copper wires was gone. During the Great Leap Forward, people broke down my door and carried away all the metal. You remember the slogan, ‘Struggle to produce 10.7 million tonnes of steel.’ When Chairman Mao instructed the villages to industrialize, my neighbours discovered all my bits and pieces, even my voltage meter, my collection of batteries, pinhole cameras and metal coils, not to mention my cooking pots and metal spoons, and fed them to the smelter that you’ll see if you walk fifty paces to the east of here. They managed to produce a surprising quantity of steel but, sadly, none of it was useable.” He shrugged and one of the electric lights fizzled, dimmed and then gleamed brightly again. “Upon my release, my neighbours all came and said, ‘Isn’t it a shame, Teacher Edison, you weren’t here to help us fulfill our steel quota?’ And then I was glad that I hadn’t been present to hand over all my spatulas and wires, as well as my mother’s wedding ring and the German stein my father brought from Düsseldorf many years ago, as well as my bicycle. Sometimes it is better not to say goodbye.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Five years of hard labour, Sparrow always reminded her, watching people who had done no wrong disappear, could not be wiped away so quickly, yet still Zhuli wanted to shake her mother, drag her mind back from the camps and make her present. What mattered was the here and now and not the life before, what mattered were the changeable things of today and tomorrow and not the ever, infinitely, unbearably unchanging yesterday.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“I worked myself to death to harvest five dàn of grain. Meanwhile you took four dàn in rent,” a man said to Da Ge. “We ate the husks of rice, the husks of wheat, the husks of millet. My children have been hungry from the day they were born. But what are your tenants to you? Nothing but fertilizer!” “I gave you fair terms,” Da Ge began but he was immediately drowned out. “Fair?” The man laughed bitterly. “Pay your debts! Everyone must pay their debts!” “If you don’t settle with them now,” one of the strangers said calmly, “these landowners will wait until we’re gone, and then they will wipe you out one by one. You cannot make half a revolution.” Scorn and contempt were heaped on the landlords. The agitation increased. Another family was brought in and there were more crimes and more denunciations. Together, their stories made a claim that no one could deny. “Aren’t these your countrymen?”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing