Ling Ma > Quotes

“A boy, at best, can adore his mother, but a girl can understand her. When the doctor told me it was a girl, I thought, Now I will be understood.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“When other people are happy, I don't have to worry about them. There is room for my happiness.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“To live is to exist within time. To remember is to negate time.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“Just because you're adequately good at something doesn't mean that's what you should do.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“A day off meant we could do things we’d always meant to do. Like go to the Botanical Garden, the Frick Collection, or something. Read some fiction. Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. Like learn to be a better photographer. And even if we didn’t get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“I didn’t want the same things that they wanted, and they should know this. They should know my difference, they should sense my unfathomable fucking depths.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“It doesn't take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone's gaze.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“The internet is the flattening of time. It is the place where the past and the present exist on one single plane. But proportionally, because the present calcifies into the past, even now, even as we speak, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the internet almost wholly consists of the past. It is the place we go to commune with the past.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“Humans are animals too, are they not? When an animal is sick, it goes alone by itself to find a quiet place in the woods and rests, for days, for weeks. Sometimes it cannot overcome its illness, but many times it can. The resting, the quiet, and being alone is enough. This is the way of nature. Nature corrects itself.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“New York has a way of forgetting you.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“I was like everyone else. We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much. We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn’t go to brunch instead.

Brunch? he echoed skeptically.

Okay, maybe not brunch, I conceded. If not brunch, then something else.

A day off meant we could do things we’d always meant to do. Like go to the Botanical Garden, the Frick Collection, or something. Read some fiction. Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. Like learn to be a better photographer. And even if we didn’t get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“We spoke until our voices grew hoarse, deepening and breaking and fissuring. It lasted early into morning. Our bodies curled inward, away from each other, dry leaves at the end of summer.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality. It is what enabled me to live there for so long, loving the idea of something more than the thing itself.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“Maybe you don't know that you're wounded until you receive the salve. The salve that makes everything come back.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“if you are an individual employed by a corporation or an institution, he said, then the odds are leveraged against you. The larger party always wins. It can't see you, but it can crush you. And if that's the working world, then I don't want to be a part of it.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“It is the thing I have been most afraid of happening, my strictness toward myself calcifying into a lifestyle, my traits ingrown so deeply that my oddness surfaces, apparent to all. What I was afraid of in myself, I liked in Y.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“What I didn't say was: I know you too well. You live your life idealistically. You think it's possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs-- I called it integrity-- but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“No matter where you go, you can't escape the realities of this world.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“So, I said, searching. Tell me about what you do. I regretted it as soon as I asked. It was the question everyone asked everyone else in New York, so careerist, so boring.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“His work ethic was like that of many other immigrants, eager to prove their usefulness to the country that had deigned to adopt them. He didn't get t to enjoy his life nearly enough.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“Everyone wanted to be an Art Girl. I wanted to be an Art Girl.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“When I moved to the U.S. at six, I was unrecognizable to my mother. I was angry, chronically dissatisfied, bratty. On my second day in America, she ran out of the room in tears after I angrily demanded that she buy me a pack of colored pencils. You're not you! she sputtered between sobs, which brought me to a standstill. She couldn't recognize me. That's what she told me later, that this was not the daughter she had last seen. Being too young, I didn't know enough to ask: But what did you expect? Who am I supposed to be to you?

But if I was unrecognizable to her, she was also unrecognizable to me. In this new country, she was disciplinarian, restrictive, prone to angry outbursts, easily frustrated, so fascist with arbitrary rules that struck me, even as a six-year-old, as unreasonable. For most of my childhood and adolescence, my mother was my antagonist.

Whenever she'd get mad, she'd take her index finger and poke me in the forehead. You you you you you, she'd say, as if accusing me of being me. She was quick to blame me for the slightest infractions, a spilled glass, a way of sitting while eating, my future ambitions (farmer or teacher), the way I dressed, what I ate, even the way I practiced English words in the car..She was the one to deny me: the extra dollar added to my allowance; an extra hour to my curfew; the money to buy my friends' birthday presents, so that I was forced to gift them, no matter what the season, leftover Halloween candy. In those early days, we lived so frugally that we even washed, alongside the dishes in the sink, used sheets of cling wrap for reuse.

She was the one to punish me, sending me to kneel in the bathtub of the darkened bathroom, carrying my father's Casio watch with an alarm setting to account for when time was up. Yet it was I who would kneel for even longer, going further and further, taking more punishment just to spite her, just to show that it meant nothing. I could take more. The sun moved across the bathroom floor, from the window to the door.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“And I remembered, in a sudden jolt of recall, that my mother had traveled to Hong Kong alone, one winter, when I was a teenager. The city was renowned among the Chinese-American communities for expert, cheap cosmetic procedures, and she was there to get the moles and beauty marks removed from her face. Her sisters used to call her a spotted leopard. When she returned, however, there were white spots on her face where the moles had been. She was still marked in the places she desired to be unmarked.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“We walk the streets of Fuzhou at night, in the one summer when I come back. Streetlights send our elongated shadows tumbling ahead of us, across the neon-tinged storefronts and buzzing lamps. Everyone comes out, the old men in wife-beaters and plastic sandals, the teenagers in fake American Eagle. Senior citizen ladies roll out before bedtime in pajama pants printed with SpongeBob or fake Chanel logos. There is a Mickey D's and a KFC, street dumpling stands, bootleg shops, karaoke bars. Everything is open late, midnight or even later. There are places to get a full-body massage, an eight ball, a happy ending. If you stay on these streets long enough, it's possible you could get everything you want, have ever wanted. Because I disremember everything, because I watch a lot of China travel shows when I am alone at night in New York, because TV mixes with my dreams mixes with my memories, we walk along the concourse that runs alongside the river even though there is no river, we turn down boulevards punctuated by palm-tree clusters even though those belong in Singapore, we smoke cigarettes openly even though it's unseemly for women, especially in my family, to smoke in public. But the feeling, the feeling of being in Fuzhou at night, remains the same.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“At work, they knew me to be capable but fragile. Quiet, clouded up with daydreams. Usually diligent, though sometimes inconsistent, moody. But also something else, something implacable: I was unsavvy in some fundamental, uncomfortable way. The sound of my loud, nervous laugh, like gargling gravel, was a social liability. I skipped too many office parties. They kept me on because my output was prolific and they could task me with more and more production assignments. When I focused a trait I exhibited at the beginning of my time there, I could be detail-oriented to the point of obsession.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. Like learn to be a better photographer. And even if we didn't get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“When I was a kid, I named this feeling Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling. It is not a cohesive thing, this feeling, it reaches out and bludgeons everything. It is excitement tinged by despair. It is despair heightened by glee. It is partly sexual in nature, though it precedes sexual knowledge.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“Adam and Aaron. Aaron because I was in love, Adam because he beat me. I met Adam first, then Aaron. The wound, then the salve. Maybe you don't know that you're wounded until you receive the salve. The salve that makes everything come back. After you get beaten, you don't go out. Your face swells into a snout. You don't buy Tylenol or groceries, because you'd look like an animal loosened onto the streets. Animal control would mistake you for something else. Instead, I stayed indoors. I washed the blood off the walls and the sheets. The splattered pillow I kept as evidence, not for anyone else, just for myself. I listened to music. Cat Power, The Covers Record. I caught up on my reading. From Primer to Abuse: Practiced abusers don't hit a woman in the face. The novice abuser is pushed to it only by extreme, uncontrollable conditions. I read it again. Not 'conditions'; 'emotions.' I brushed up on philosophy: To live is to exist within time. To remember is to negate time.”
― Ling Ma