Quotes from Mary H.K. Choi

People bursting into song in unison and then pointing it at me is maybe the worst thing I can think of, never mind that you have to pay good money to go be yelled/danced at.

Instagram is not a place for tone or irony.

In New York, you collect a thousand encounters a year, a passel of handshakes, a zillion air-kisses, and boatloads of business cards that you pitch into your purse and eventually deposit your chewing gum into. Amid this break-neck montage of glancing contacts, I'm tormented by the constant thrumming fear of being fingered as a flake.

Even the coolest jobs get stultifying with repetition, and the only way to break that cycle is to bring another job into the mix.

Manhattan, after eight years here, still reminds me of Hong Kong. There are parts of Chinatown that are the spit and image of streets in Wan Chai, and I am held in thrall by the Chrysler building as much as I was by I.M. Pei's Bank of China Tower.

I'm definitely an indoor kid who's turned into an inside person.

A fanboy's heart is filled with love, enthusiasm, and insecurity.

'Emergency Contact' is about the anxiousness that is inherent in meat space interactions.

There's a really generous readership with YA.

Jockeying for a popularity position has been a valorized teen tradition since the notion of a discrete teen stage of life was invented.

Do you know why we pay trainers and nutritionists? Because having to muster interest in the minor successes of someone else's journey toward pedestrian-ass healthiness is taxing and should be compensated.

If you're holding your iPhone, and it's the newest iteration of it, you're like, 'Oh, famous people have my phone. Captains of industry have my phone.' And that can be an intoxicating experience for someone who is going off to college for the first time.

Part of me just wants 'Jane' magazine back, and 'Sassy,' too.

Yes, Justin Bieber is a contrivance. Yes, Justin Bieber's lyrics are insipid - worse still, disingenuous. Yes, his tattoos stink. Yes, he's lousy at skateboarding. But what does any of this actually matter? In case you missed it, Bieber won.

In order to be a good emergency contact, you need a lot of friend-patience and empathy. Often, this comes from personal experience with anxiety, trauma, and depression.

When I was small, I thought I was just cooler than my mom because of how foreign she is. She's really foreign. You'd think it would kill her to get store-bought snacks, she's that foreign.

I was born in Korea and left before my first birthday.

If you are someone's emergency contact - you are their person, and they are your person - there is work involved.

My mom is an excellent mom. She knows I am irascible, prickly, and antisocial. She knows that most human interaction makes me tired and that I either scare people away with precise invectives or trot out the fakest, nicest skinjob of myself because it requires zero effort.

By the time you're in your 30s, unless somebody makes the god-awful decision to gift you with a cooking class or salsa lessons, it may have been a while since you learnt something new.

The second single from 'Purpose,' Justin Bieber's fourth studio album, 'Sorry' is an infectious confection - a Dorito for your ears.

LaCroix sparkling water is absolutely delicious.

I do not care for musicals. In fact, I hate them.

Everyone is such a mystery, yet we chug along so much of the time presuming we're all on the same page.