My Life Quotes

“Do not make yourself small just to appease others when you can fill up the sky.”
― SuChin Pak, My Life: Growing Up Asian in America

“I am twenty-seven years old. I'm sitting in the living room, surrounded by Black people. The news is playing. On the television, Biden is signing a bill, surrounded by smiling Asian people. But the people in this living room aren't smiling. They're saying, They got it so fast. They're saying, We can't even get an anti-lynching bill.

The underlying sentiment: they'll never do that for us.

I feel so much at once. I know about Vincent Chin. I know about the Chinese massacres in the late 1800s. I know about my cousin who was attacked on the street in New York last year in the wave of anti-Asian hate crimes during COVID.

I know all this and yet—

They got it so fast.

I also know fast is relative. Because everything is slow for us. Because it's been four hundred years, and we are still waiting, always waiting—for a country that will never protect us.

I look at the Asian people on the TV, smiling and cheering. But sitting here in this room full of Black people, in the body that I live in, I don't feel like part of it. I feel guilty, both for not feeling fully able to join in the celebration of this moment that should be my right as an Asian American—and for getting something that everyone else in this room has yet to have.

Because I'm also feeling what everyone else in this room is feeling. The pain of being forgotten, the betrayal of always being last, the knowledge that America will never pass a hate crime law for us. Because America itself is committing the hate crimes; America itself is killing us.”
― SuChin Pak, My Life: Growing Up Asian in America

“Every time my seven-year-old daughter puts on a pair of shorts, I remember the way we used to be. I think of my Hmong grandmother who came to this country in the autumn of her life, too old to shift with its seasons. My Hmong American mother who came to this country young enough to compromise pieces and parts of herself so that she could work and care for her children through the harshest of seasons. And I think of myself, a girl wanting desperately to celebrate spring and summer, to be strong for her mother and her grandmother, and who tried unsuccessfully in many ways to fit in. Now that Grandma is gone, my mother is an old woman, and I am a working mother myself, it is only in my memories that we get to be together the way we were then. My Asian American girl loves shorts and T-shirts, her thin legs often darkened by bruises from her runs around me, beside me, and often ahead of me.

From the distance of nearly twenty years, I wish I could have told that young girl yearning to let her legs breathe free that all of our lives in America were just beginning, that where we were was only one part of our story. I wish I could have told her that her family was as good as they knew how to be to each other, and that in their own ways they were trying to help each other, not hurt. I want to tell the girl I used to be that these first years of life in America would teach her how to love across space and time, to one day stand strong in her family’s discomforts, and give her the power and the ability to declare them all: new Americans.”
― SuChin Pak, My Life: Growing Up Asian in America

“I don’t want to write work that is a must-read in May. I don’t want to write work that is a must-read when an auntie is beaten. I don’t want to write work that is a must-read when an auntie is dead.

I want to write what white girls write. I want to write about me. I want to write like I’m not just the center of my universe, but the center of yours too: golden and narcissistic and unconcerned. I want to be the center of the universe because I cried; I want these satellites to acknowledge my gravity. I don’t want to tell stories about my people, I want to tell stories about me.”
― SuChin Pak, My Life: Growing Up Asian in America