Cynthia Zhang > Quotes

“But it’s not fair. You shouldn’t be the only one —” “Fair?” Kai asks, raising one eyebrow. “Of course it’s not fair. We’re in one of the richest cities in the world, and there are people starving in the streets, businessmen spending thousands of yuan to cheat on their wives and feeling generous for giving a few coins to a beggar. You think anyone cares about fair?” “You do,” Eli points out. “I do.” “Oh, good,” Kai says, “two people in a city of millions. Truly encouraging, I look forward to seeing how we single-handedly turn years of corruption and systemic injustice around.”
― Cynthia Zhang, After the Dragons

“On a broad level, speculative fiction is about encounters with the unknown, whether that takes the form of aliens or werewolf or eldritch creatures beyond mortal ken. Similarly, much of the diaspora experience is tied to uncertainty. You journey to a strange land you’ve only heard about in stories, one where the language is unfamiliar and the customs perplexing. You have a few things with you—a sword, a bow, a bag full of spells and paperwork for a Green Card application—but it’s still a terrifying experience. While part of that terror is necessarily tied to survival, another element is the fear of change—the literal change in environment and the ways you change in response. For both SFF protagonists and new immigrants, there’s the major question of how much you choose to fight against or welcome those change while maintaining vestiges of your previous self.”
― Cynthia Zhang

“At the temple, the monks had told stories of the first emperor, how Heaven saw his noble deeds and so turned him into a dragon on his death. For centuries, it was said the people of his nation were the children of dragons, the dragons themselves the reincarnations of wise men and children yet to be born.

And now here they were. A nation ready to skin and sell its children for money.”
― Cynthia Zhang, After the Dragons

“Five thousand years of history and this is what we have to show for it. All our ancestral animals hunted near extinction or bred into pets.”
― Cynthia Zhang, After the Dragons

“That's the way with anything worth doing, isn't it? You work and work, and there's always a risk of whether it's enough or not, of whether any of this is going to make a difference or if it's just months sunk into another hopeless case. But you do the work. Because it's what you can do. Because you may never know if it means anything, but on the chance that it does, you can't live with yourself if you don't try, can you?”
― Cynthia Zhang, After the Dragons

“Back when the Europeans came to convert people, they saw our traditional cures, the ginseng and qi charts, and they couldn't understand it, thought it was just superstition and old wives' tales - and yes, a lot of it was that, but look at them now! Studying the antioxidant properties of cinnamon and putting goji berries in every other thing they eat ....
Curiosity can lead in fascinating directions, and it is occasionally useful to walk off the path of standard procedure.”
― Cynthia Zhang, After the Dragons