Jade Chang > Quotes

“The people of the world could be divided into two groups: those who used all of their chances, and those who stood still through opportunity after opportunity, waiting for a moment that would never be perfect.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“And what is any artist, really, but someone who doesn't mind being an asshole?”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“No one thinks to make the goddess a cup of tea; they just ply her with useless perfumed oils and impotent carved fetishes.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“The world destroys itself and we rebuild it. The destroying is as important as the rebuilding. There can be as much joy in the destruction as the rebirth.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“Inside the house, where money could reliably fix most problems, things were nearly perfect, but outside, butch nature trampled all over wimpy nurture.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“So, the thing is, my dad, the immigrant, is really, really disappointed that I have an allergy. A peanut allergy. Because immigrants do not believe in allergies. I swear to God, ask any brown person with an accent that you see and they’ll tell you that allergies are some New World shit.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“She had headed towards town aimlessly, looking for the kind of escape that could be found only in a solitary walk through a crowd.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“The things we agree to call art are the shamanic tokens of our time. We value them beyond all reason because we can't really understand them. They can mean everything or nothing, depending on what the people who look at them decide. Everything or nothing.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“America usually felt like iPhones and pizza and swimming pools to Andrew. L.A. was America. New sneakers. Sunshine. Pot and blue balls. Phoenix was America. Sprinklers and blow jobs and riding shotgun. Vegas was America, all of it. But if there were monsters and magic anywhere in this country, they would be here in New Orleans. New Orleans was an ancient doppelgänger city that grew in some other America that never really existed.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“America was a great deceptor. Land of Opportunity. Golden Mountain. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. But inside those pretty words, between the pretty coasts, was this: Miles and miles of narrow-minded know-nothings who wanted no more out of life than an excuse to cock their AK-47s and take arms against a sea of troubles.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“In the intervening weeks, as they slowly began to poke their heads out of their own private failures, each would come to find that the curse was, in fact, not theirs alone. Instead, it was spread across the country: a club, a collective, a movement, a great populist uprising of failure in the face of years of shared national success.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“Communists had it all wrong. It wasn't the rich who were imprisoned by their possessions, it was the poor.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“Throughout history we have believed that markets determine worth and that bubbles are eternal, despite ample evidence to the contrary. In the midst of each bubble, we believe that this time it will last forever. We have all been complicit in our own deluding.” The professor paused. “It’s all bullcrap. There is no market. The market is people, and people are dolts. Even the smartest people are moronic.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“Giant canvases that glorified her naked breasts and half smile, songs rhyming Saina and wanna, unfinished novels about an unknowable girl of dreams – none of that (and she’d had all of it) was as romantic as a boyfriend who would notice that the lightbulb in her hallway had blown out and change it without even bothering to mention the favour.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“As many Chinas as there were, there were that many Charleses as well. Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“I’m not going to be part of this,” said Leo. He opened his hand and dropped the flowers. Fragrant, obedient, they beheaded themselves on Saina’s salvaged-wood floors.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“A satellite, after all, can still look like a star.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“How good it made them feel, these well-meaning Upper West Side transplants, buying organic produce they didn't even have to wash from a handsome black man who would greet them with an exotic fist bump! An attractive, articulate chap, not unlike the young senator from Illinois they had just congratulated themselves for nominating, who would show the world that slavery was behind us and that we could appreciate Hip Hop. Yes! So many pretty boxes to check all at once!”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“Our first big mistake—we believed that money was rational.   Andrew”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“How many times did people have to prove that anything could be art before we could finally admit that very little was actually art? Theoretically,”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“He did it for that bubbling, champagne-in-the-veins high, that desire to be part of someone else’s new life, someone else’s realised potential.
Vampires must feel like that.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“Our second big mistake—we thought that risk could be quantified. Our third big mistake—Alan Greenspan.   The”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“All I wanted," Saina thought, "was to make someone feel something." Money can't do that. Just looking at a dollar bill did nothing to your emotions — you have to make money or lose money for it to make you feel anything. You can earn it, win it, lose it, save it, spend it, find it, but you can't sell it because you never really own it. On the other hand, you didn't have to possess a song or a sculpture for it to make you feel something — you only had to experience it. So why did collectors want to collect? What feeling were they pursuing?”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“In the end, all we had were the people to whom we were beholden.”
― Jade Chang

“And what people want to own, of course, is real estate. So a dental hygienist with bad credit making forty thousand dollars a year felt that she deserved to park her ass in a million-dollar home. With a little creative financing, and as long as housing prices continued to rise, she believed that she could afford a million-dollar home. And as long as the dental hygienist continued to pay interest on the mortgage for the million-dollar home, as long as housing prices continued to rise, as long as more loan officers approved more loans for more dental hygienists with bad credit who could continue to pay the interest on their overblown mortgages, housing prices would indeed stay stratospheric, and banks could print money based on that certainty. And, like your nursery rhyme, that was the house that Jack built.” Kalchefsky”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“Women, she realized, were scared to be assholes. And what is any artist, really, but someone who doesn't mind being an asshole? That was when she birthed her plan: Be an Asshole.”
― Jade Chang

“They see too much,” her father had said once, when she was doing a report for history class and asked him whether his own parents had ever talked about the war. “They see too much so they have to close their hearts tight. Can’t get them open again.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“Love saves you, as long as there’s a you to be saved.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“THREE BIG MISTAKES. But, of course, it’s never that simple. Before we even got to the third one, we were down and done. As much as our willingness to believe in the constant rise felled us, as much as our eagerness to conquer risk opened us up to more risk, as much as Greenspan stood by as Wall Street turned itself into Las Vegas, there was also Greece, and Iceland, and Nick Leeson, who took down Barings, and Brian Hunter, who tanked Amaranth, and Jérôme Kerviel and every other rogue trader who thought he—and it was always a he—could reverse his gut-churning, self-induced free fall with one swift, lucky strike; it was rising oil prices, global inflation, easy credit, the cowardice of Moody’s, the growing chasm of income inequality, the dot com boom and bust, the Fed’s rejection of regulation, the acceptance of “too big to fail,” the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the feast of subprime debt; it was Clinton and Bush the second and senators vacationing with banking industry lobbyists, the Kobe earthquake, an infatuation with financial innovation, the forgettable Hank Paulson, the delicious hubris of ten, twenty, thirty times leverage, and, at the bottom of it, our own vicious, lingering self-doubt. Or was it our own willful, unbridled self-delusion? Doubt vs. delusion. The flip sides of our last lucky coin. We toss it in the fountain and pray.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World