Quotes from Jenny Zhang

As you get older, you realize you're only the protagonist in your own story and a blip in someone else's life.

I lived so completely in my mind - a place of unchecked delusion and complete fantasy!

Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for 'Rookie'.

My privileged upbringing and education and linguistic fluency gave me such proximity to whiteness that it stung all the more to still find myself outside of it. My mother, on the other hand, not only accepted that she would always be an outsider in this country but also believed it to be a finer fate and home than any other she could have had.

People who have very devastating lives sometimes have the most wild, avant-garde humor. It's like when you've seen it all and been through it all, nothing is off-limits in a way.

One of the founding tenets of racism: a society that will never allow white people to think that because they are white, they won't succeed.

We lived in one of those half-basement apartments, and on our first night of being in America, someone reached through the grate that protects the window and stole our laundry detergent - which wasn't a big deal, but it felt symbolic when I heard about it later as an adult.

'Alphabet' by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen. It's a book-length abecedarian poem. It's an activist text but also a portal to wonder.

While I was growing up in Flushing, Queens, we socialized exclusively with other Chinese immigrants. I was forbidden to make contact with nonapproved, non-Chinese peers outside school. That was fine with me.

If you were to make a quick judgment call on my intelligence and articulation when I first moved to the U.S. based on my speaking skills, it would be very low.

Sometimes I worry that people who read my fiction think that I am making some kind of thesis statement.

As I got older, I realised that people saw me as other things - sometimes Korean, sometimes Japanese, sometimes just Asian. When my family moved to a more affluent white neighbourhood, I started to see myself as 'other', this amorphous category. I didn't even know what 'not other' was, but I knew I wasn't it; I wasn't what was normal.

I often wonder if my being a fairly small Asian woman with a high-pitched quietish voice plays a role in how often men feel entitled to come up to me and tell me, 'You have this doll act,' or whatever.

Asian American success is often presented as something of a horror - robotic, unfeeling machines psychotically hellbent on excelling, products of abusive tiger parenting who care only about test scores and perfection, driven to succeed without even knowing why.

It's very Western to idealize a kind of love that does not come with any expectations, that still permits both the giver and recipient to be completely free.

When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.

When it comes to love, maturity often gets a bad rap - second love is boring; it's practical. It's what our parents feel for each other.

There's so much of our behavior that kind of curdles and hardens as we get into adulthood, and it becomes so much more difficult to be hopeful and to dream extravagantly.

Our culture is bloodthirsty for stories about women in pain; we hunger for women to expose their traumas and to be rescued by the love of a good man.

Mothers have always held such symbolic weight in determining a person's worth. Your mother tongue, your motherland, your mother's values - these things can qualify or disqualify you from attaining myriad American dreams: love, fluency, citizenship, legitimacy, acceptance, success, freedom.

How do we form a coalition of resistance without obliterating our differences? Not all lives matter, and we are not all the same immigrants.

I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.

Does self-acceptance ultimately require another person, or is there a kind of love that does not dabble in the dream of a perfect twinship?

Karaoke was my family's happy secret. In those early years in America, like many immigrants, my parents struggled with poverty and loneliness, but they also built provisional families, and inside our bubble there was joy, understanding, an intimate language I could never translate - and above all there was song.