“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“The year my mom worked as a secretary at an apparel company in midtown, she would often come home in tears because she had mistakenly called her boss by another coworker’s name. ‘You know how it is,’ my father said, ‘they all look the same. It’s not your mom’s fault. There’s just no telling them apart. Same high nose and deep-set eyes.’”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“’Sour Heart’ is a collection of seven linked short stories narrated by young Chinese-American girls living in New York City in the ’90s. It’s exceptionally hard to describe what I’ve written without sounding delusional or boring, so I’ll just say they are stories about growing up and the pleasures and agonies of having a family, a body, and a home.”
― 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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Even when I speak English to my parents, I’ll say an English word differently to my Chinese parents and friends than I do to my English-speaking friends – you know, I’ll pronounce ‘McDonald’s’ differently, because it feels right, and that’s what I’m used to.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Coming out of the closet doesn’t always mean liberation.”
― Jenny Zhang
“When I was writing stories about Chinese American characters in my fiction classes, I’d get comments like, ‘You should consider writing more universal stories.’ But anything can happen to a Chinese American girl – just as much of the canon of English literature involves white men or women.”
― Jenny Zhang
“When I first moved from Shanghai when I was five, I just thought of myself as Chinese.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I grew up in a Chinese American enclave where the person who lived down the street had literally lived down the street from my mother in Shanghai.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“’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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I’d behave savagely if I had access to Bjoerk’s closet.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Shanghai, the city where I was born and spent my first four and a half years. It’s not necessarily the most pleasant or most comforting place, but I have blood memory there, my core was formed there, so I need to go back often, or else I become empty, lost, without meaning.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I lived so completely in my mind – a place of unchecked delusion and complete fantasy!”
― Jenny Zhang
“Growing up, I had to cobble together a scarecrow of things I loved from various different writers.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I think Lena Dunham, the public figure, is – I hate the word ‘brand,’ but I’m going to use it – it’s such a brand that is so tethered to her public persona and to ‘Girls’, but also this progressive politics that she’s been more vocal about.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Of course I want the things I write to reflect well on me or anyone who might feel represented by me, but also, I’m not writing a guidebook on how to be or how my people should be seen. I’m telling very specific stories.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I seem to be drawn to these smaller forms, and I seem to be drawn to things that can be written and also read in one sitting.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“From its very inception, Lenny Letter set out to create a supportive, positive, inclusive space on the Internet that does not shy away from complexity and nuance.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who founded Lenny Books together, also happen to have exquisite reading tastes – from obscure small press poetry chapbook to dishy memoirs to literary novels – and so it’s a real honor that they’ve chosen to announce their imprint with my stories.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Growing up, I had a face that people wanted to tell things to, and I grew up with adults who had so much to say. They had lived through decades of unbelievable poverty, starvation, political upheaval, chaos.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Chinese people of my parents’ generation who lived through the Cultural Revolution knew so much of death at such a young age, and the psychic toll those experiences left was immense. I knew the stories of the Cultural Revolution before knowing what the Cultural Revolution was.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“It’s okay if someone is disgusted or offended by my performance. It’s just a performance.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I hadn’t ever worked with an ‘editor’ until I was 26 – although that could be partly chalked up to the MFA vs. NYC thing, where I came up through institutions that encouraged writers to write privately for a long, long time and not sully themselves with concerns about audience or the business side of writing.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Once I decided I was happy with something, I’d try to send it off into the world, and either someone would want it exactly as it was, or it would remain in my notebook/laptop, and no one would ever see it. This is probably why I didn’t work with an editor until I was 26. The solipsism!”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“We’re not the best about knowing what’s the most interesting about ourselves.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I really had to develop a core. I had to figure out, at my core as a writer, what did I value? What was I about? And I had to love it and take pleasure in it.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I think it was really important for me before I ‘debuted myself’ in front of the world to have a private life with my imagination and my writing for several years. That also made it so I didn’t feel desperate for someone to find me.”
― Jenny Zhang
“White people have always slipped in and out of the experiences of people of color and been praised extravagantly for it.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me – an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American – there were limits.”
― Jenny Zhang
“My mother had two unshakable beliefs that she tried to drill into me. The first was that I had to study and work twice as hard as my white peers if I wanted to survive in America, and the second was that it was delusional and dangerous to believe I possessed the same freedom white people had to pursue my dreams.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Whenever I passed by a Chinese restaurant in a car, I’d joke to my friends, ‘Oh yeah, my uncle owns that place.’”
― Jenny Zhang
“For a decade, Emma-Lee Moss has been steadily making weird, moody, melancholic music under the moniker ‘Emmy the Great’ that has been referred to as nue-folk, anti-folk, synthpop, and, most of all, literary.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I like to keep a book underneath the pillow that I’m not sleeping on so I can reach over and grab it when I wake up. I don’t always do that, but I like to. I try to make sure it’s a book and not my laptop. I also try not to get too excited about who might’ve been trying to contact me while I was asleep.”
― Jenny Zhang
“It’s like a weird mindset to wake up and want to be wanted. Like, I want to be wanted so much already… and I’m so greedy for other people’s desire that I have to really force myself to have some shame about it and some control, neither of which come easily to me.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“When I was an undergrad at Stanford, there was a girl named Jennie Kim who worked for the school newspaper. Sometimes people would come up to me and talk to me about articles she had written. ‘That one on getting a Brazilian was hilarious’, some guy said, high-fiving me.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I know I am not the first woman to ask this, but how can I be both damaged and loveable? How do I become the protagonist of a story?”
― Jenny Zhang
“As a child, I would go days without speaking, and then suddenly I would scream until everyone was looking at me.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I just submitted what I had to the ‘Octopus Books’ contest open reading period, and they said they wanted to publish my poetry book. Then I started to publish more and more poetry because people would ask me to do readings or ask me submit something for their journal.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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’.”
― Jenny Zhang
“With nonfiction, I had to learn how to be a clear communicator, but it was also a relief to be able to articulate some of my political ideas and beliefs. I also try to do that in my fiction, but I’m more interested in asking questions that lead to more questions, mysteries that lead to more mysteries, rather than immediate answers and solutions.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Sometimes I worry that people who read my fiction think that I am making some kind of thesis statement.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I wish I had acted better. I wish I had been the kind of sister who was patient enough to show my brother the proper spelling for ‘Power Rangers.’”
― Jenny Zhang
“I wish it wasn’t so natural for me to dwell on the past.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I’m always interested in what is seen as obscene or profane or unfit.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I don’t think I can ever write about young kids anymore. I completely shot my wad there.”
― Jenny Zhang
“The reader who likes my stories, I think they would see the violence on the surface, but I think they would also see a deeper violence – the one that’s not as showy or as immediately arresting, but kind of the more unsolvable violence that lurks underneath.”
― Jenny Zhang
“That’s what people expect: They don’t want to read a slight novel. People don’t want to waste their time on anything less than ‘great.’”
― Jenny Zhang
“I think being a writer is being heavily attuned to the absolute absurdity of things you take for granted, and I think that having actual parents who lived through the Cultural Revolution who are also interested in literature, they’re also very attuned to those moments.”
― Jenny Zhang
“In my mind, scatological writing is a core of the English canon.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Early in my life, without any supporting evidence, I fretted over what I believed was my fate: accidentally becoming an international pop star. The pages of my diary were filled with hypothetical ethical dilemmas.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Faced with ostracization at school and confinement at home, I turned to karaoke.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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.”
― Jenny Zhang
“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?”
― Jenny Zhang
“Visibility doesn’t always equal freedom.”
― Jenny Zhang
“The historical legacy of ‘The Best American Poetry’ is they’ve had very few editors who were not white. They’ve had very few instances where they’ve selected poems by non-white poets.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Michael Derrick Hudson is not the first person to slip into the identity of a person of color to give himself some perceived advantage. He can slip back into his life and not walk around in this world as a person of color who endures racism.”
― Jenny Zhang
“It’s weird for me to say I’m lucky when I can’t go into a bookstore and have more than five choices if I want to read something about Asian-American characters.”
― Jenny Zhang
“The ‘New York Times’ is not reviewing books by non-white people.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I’m surely not the only one to notice we employ metaphors to make sense of the news. I always like to take note of who hides their origins and who shows them off.”
― Jenny Zhang
“How do we form a coalition of resistance without obliterating our differences? Not all lives matter, and we are not all the same immigrants.”
― Jenny Zhang
“Rage can be so common it turns ambient.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I’m drawn to the figure of the ungrateful subaltern as a trope in literature. In real life, it is often dangerous to demand more.”
― Jenny Zhang
“I still catch myself trying to become the object someone imagines me to be, but then there are other times, when I am free, when I am fluent, when I am unimaginable, that I start to feel like somewhere out there is the decolonized love for me, somewhere out there, there is a love that doesn’t let any of us be so lonely.”
― Jenny Zhang
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