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

“The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“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

“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

“The next generation would acquire a skill on their behalf - one that we could also use against them. Commanding the language seemed like our only way of surpassing them. Home life took on a kind of casual litigiousness. The calm and composed children, a jaunty bounce to our sentences, laying traps with our line of questioning. The parents, tired and irritated, defaulting to the native tongue.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“The immigrant's resourcefulness requires an exhaustion of possibilities. You may master tenses and forms, grammatical rules, what passes for style. And yet, consequently, you may struggle to hold a conversation with your grandparents. It's possible they secretly wanted this to happen - a measure of generational progress. The child has learned to speak for himself, but to talk back as well. You write well, not good. The devoted student also internalizes a relationship to the language itself, one in which you remain conscious of your distance from the source, from who draws on this language to mine their authentic self, because you've been led to believe such a thing matters. A simple pronoun of "I" or "we," a first-person perspective, all of it seemed mysterious. We could never write in a way that assumed anyone knew where we were coming from. There was nothing interesting about our context. Neither Black nor white, just boring to everyone on the outside. Where do you even begin explaining yourself?”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“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

“There's a telos of self-improvement baked into the immigrant experience. As a teenager, I busied myself with the school newspaper or debate club because, unlike with math or science, I thought I could actually get better at these things.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“There comes a moment for the immigrant's child when you realize that you and your parents are assimilating at the same time.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“I told them about all the protests and rallies at Berkeley, the late-night hours I was spending on the Asian American newspaper on campus. I thought they'd be proud. But they didn't understand why these were distinctions worth fighting for. I was sympathetic, reflecting on their struggles back when they arrived - my mother's isolation, my dad getting mugged on his first day in New York. I was grateful they had made these sacrifices for me. "For you?" my dad said with a laugh. "We came for ourselves. There was nothing in Taiwan when we left.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“We're minorities within minorities, I'd often repeat to my friend, in an attempt to subdue his frustration with the compounding obstacles of his life.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Songs on Endless Repeat: Essays and Outtakes

“But—please, hear me out—don't you think difference breathes in the expanses that lie amid your monotonous thoughts? Even as you see in the future only suicide, your mind fosters so many novel meanings that are essential, rabbit holes leading to unknown hours and possibilities, and maybe if you wait, for just a bit longer, these meanings will bleed into your being, restructuring the reserves of your spirit, and maybe then, after a serious exploration of all that is true, you, my dear friend, will feel something akin to new.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Songs on Endless Repeat: Essays and Outtakes

“You can only keep up the precarious act of sustaining this fantasy of a better world for so long when not much has actually changed in our favor. But as long as there's something new in our queue, after binging on a season or two, we can move on, forestalling a confrontation with the shallow, messy world we ultimately inhabit.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Songs on Endless Repeat: Essays and Outtakes

“Why are Americans always asking kids to go out and play? In China, kids almost never played....every minute after school was packed with homework, drilling, revision, and dictation. When I went to first grade in China, I got only two minutes a day to play. That's literally what it said on a schedule I made for myself: 5:00 - 5:02: Play”
― Kelly Yang, Front Desk

“There were aspects of their lives that felt familiar. Their parents were busy working as many jobs as they could, and whatever connection they maintained to the past had more to do with household tradition than politics. Words like 'genocide' and 'trauma' were forbidden.

...To me, Asian American was a messy, arbitrary category, but one that was produced by a collective struggle. It was a category capacious enough for all of our hopes and energies. There were similarities that cut across nationality and. class: the uncommunicative parents, the cultural significance of food, the fact that we all took our shoes off at home.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True