Quotes from Jan Wong

Living in China has made me appreciate my own country, with its tiny, ethnically diverse population of unassuming donut-eaters.

depressive realism. Depression is not the near death experience described by so many, [Kayla Dunn] suggests, but a rebirth in which the new psyche has removed self-delusion. Compared with so-called healthy individuals, depressives are more realistic in their worldview.

As the past disappears, I keep getting lost.

Keedwell cites a study of depression in the Netherlands that found that most people coped better with adversity after experiencing depression.

During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese lived and died by their class backgrounds. They boasted about ancestors who had starved to death. But if a banker or landowner lurked in their background, they dropped their voices low and disclosed the shameful fact as if they came from a long line of pedophiles.

In Chinese the word for crisis is weiji composed of the character wei which means danger and ji which means opportunity.