Quotes About Culture

Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom is just one of countless contemporary films, works of literature, pieces of music, and lifestyle choices where wishing for innocent times means fetishizing an era when the nation was violently hostile to anyone different.

The therapist had an enormous face. I wondered if this was a problem for her, since Korean women are so self-conscious about the size of their faces that they will go under the knife to shave their jawlines down (a common Korean compliment: "Your face is so small it's the size of a fist!").

Cathy Park Hong

acquired power, you are exposed, and your model minority

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.

You have an Asian mother," she said. "She has to be interesting.

Anderson's fastidious Etsy auteurship is to be admired, but Anderson is a collector, and a collector's taste is notable for what he leaves out. Sometimes nonwhite characters, mostly quiet Indian actors decked out in the elaborate livery of the help, have appeared in Anderson's other films. But in the safe insulated palette of Moonrise Kingdom, there is no hint of the Other. The characters are all mid-century white, the scrubbed white of Life magazine ads.

As the poet Prageeta Sharma said, Americans have an expiration date on race the way they do for grief.

The soul of innovation thrives on cross-cultural inspiration. If we are restricted to our lanes, culture will die.

It was made clear to me that the subject of Asian identity itself was insufficient and inadequate unless it was paired with a meatier subject, like capitalism.

Early on, my father learned that in America, one must be emotionally demonstrative to succeed, so he has a habit of saying "I love you" indiscriminately, to his daughters, to his employees, to his customers, and to airline personnel

The Korean girls I knew were so moody they made Sylvia Plath seem as dull as C-SPAN.

English is our ever-expanding neoliberal lingua franca, the consumer language of brand recognition and outsourced labor.

Myung Mi Kim was the first poet who said I didn't need to sound like a white poet nor did I have to "translate" my experiences so that they sounded accessible to a white audience. No other mentor afterwards was as emphatic about this idea as her.

Overhaul the tired ethnic narratives that have automated our identities; that have made our lives palatable to a white audience but removed them from our own lived realities—and stop spelling ourselves out in the alphabet given to us.

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.

You know, I don't think she ever lost her shit around her white friends." "Yeah, well," Erin said ruefully, "we were family.

It sounds like 'twee', but it's spelled T-H-U-Y.

John Waters. He said we need to make books cool again. So if you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck them.

The words of the Greeks are born on their lips, but those of the Romans in their hearts.

It is a hard matter to save a city in which a fish sells for more than an ox.

Often the women are burned, so that the death can be passed off as an accident. The killer usually becomes a local hero: a man who has done what was necessary to clear his family name.

I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it.

It galls me, when I catch a stray remark from the master, or between the older English pupils, to the effect that the Indians are uncommonly fortunate to be here.