Chinese - Actress | June 22, 1987 -
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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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When I first moved from Shanghai when I was five, I just thought of myself as Chinese.
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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.
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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.
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'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.
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I'd behave savagely if I had access to Bjoerk's closet.
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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.
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