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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“Maybe we would grow apart, he would develop a personality that I would know nothing about, we would start our families, have children of our own, and there would come a point when in thinking about 'family' we would think of the ones we made, not the ones we were from.”

“Visibility doesn't always equal freedom.”

“Rage can be so common it turns ambient.”

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

“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.”

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

“Whenever I passed by a Chinese restaurant in a car, I'd joke to my friends, 'Oh yeah, my uncle owns that place.'”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“We're not the best about knowing what's the most interesting about ourselves.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”