Larissa Lai > Quotes

“How easily we abandon those who have suffered the same persecutions as we have. How quickly we grow impatient with their inability to transcend the conditions of our lives. ”
― Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl

“This is what it's like to drown: You take a last look at the sky, a last breath, slowly. Air goes into your lungs and then you are under water. You let the air out molecule by molecule, realizing for the first time how precious it is, this thing that feels so much like nothing, neither liquid nor solid. Your eyes are open wide. The world goes cool and green and you keep falling. There are shapes in the darkness, fronds of river weed waving, dark indescribable things that float and then sink with you. You never knew you were so heavy. The density of your flesh has never been of such prime importance. The air leaks out of you in spite of your mightiest attempts to hold it. You need more but there is none. Leafy things flail. The water's coolness is no longer soothing. You gasp. Water rushes into your lungs and floods them. Your eyes stare wider. You thrash. You want more than anything to live, to be able to rise again, but you keep falling. The river is bottomless. It pushes you along in the direction of its current like an impatient auntie, but it won't let you to the surface. Your eyes are wide open, but slowly everything goes black. You begin to float beneath the surface. You are conscious of the coolness again, of how green everything is. You move with the water and through it. You have left your body far behind. The river has become a part of you.”
― Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl

“One must take human form to engage in human affairs. It was difficult.”
― Larissa Lai, When Fox is a Thousand

“This story is about stink, after all, a story about rot, about how life grows out of the most fetid-smelling places. I leaned into the wall of the coiled cabin, snail, the body curled in upon itself, spine coiled, a snake lying in wait.”
― Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl

“When you own nothing, it’s hard to believe you have anything to lose.”
― Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl

“We all know that joy and sorrow are entirely matters of fate and have nothing whatsoever to do with planning.”
― Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl

“That night the Salt Fish Girl came back looking exhausted and dishevelled. A Malaysian girl who worked at her factory had been stricken with hysteria, had gone to the toilet and begun screaming and tearing at her hair. She had been working at the factory for nearly three years and was half blind and bored out of her wits with the tedious repetitiveness of the work. Her hysteria had provoked others, until half the women in the factory were screaming and howling and throwing themselves against the walls in sheer frustration with the dreariness of their toil and the damage it was exacting from their once young bodies and once bright faces.”
― Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl

“The library was a great sprawling complex with rolls and rolls of paper tucked into many shelves. Between the reading rooms were courtyards with living fountains and singing birds and butterflies that would transform into handsome young women to guide or entertain anyone who stayed there any length of time. I saw one among the stacks, explaining an older style of calligraphy to the newly appointed Heavenly Marine Official of the South China Sea. In another wing, a librarian stepped from her chrysalis for the first time, reciting T’ang Dynasty poetry to the flowers. That’s how I knew I was in the right section.”
― Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl

“I did not understand the fierce love that drove [my father] any more than I understood his fears of a rapidly changing world. I was a sheltered child, living out of my parents' utopian dream as though it were reality. They did not show me the cracks. And out of loyalty and love for them, when I sensed the cracks, I refused to see them. But of course this unspoken pact could not last.”
― Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl

“I want to be firm that the idea of the traditional itself is highly constructed and highly ideological. This version is one among many. There is no original, only endless multiple trails that point into the past. We can never grasp that past. These stories are always about the present.”
― Larissa Lai, When Fox is a Thousand

“It was then that stories of the dreaming disease began to circulate more widely. We heard from our customers of a girl who smelled of cooking oil, who remembered all the wars ever fought. She could recall and recount every death, every rape, every wound, every moment of suffering that had ever been inflicted by a member of her ancestral lineage. The only place she could find relief from this barrage of collective memory was in water.”
― Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl

“They find the past unbearable, so they drive as hard as they can into the future without understanding how their ignorance of yesterday creates a miserable tomorrow”
― Larissa Lai, The Lost Century

“Don’t you have family that looks out for you?”
“I have a family that looks after itself. It looks after me only insofar as I’m part of it. You know what I mean?”
“Not exactly.”
“As long as I am what they expect me to be, they take care of me. Step outside of that and forget it. It’s not that they refuse me anything. It’s just that they don’t understand the other half of my world.”
― Larissa Lai, When Fox is a Thousand

“We didn’t speak of the events, just as many Chinese women did not, all driven by the powerful and intractable value of saving face”
― Larissa Lai, The Lost Century

“Yes, I know doctors like me are supposed to believe in reason. I believe in reason! That doesn’t mean I have to believe in it to the exclusion of everything else! Lots of Chinese people believe in more than one thing. I’m no different from the rest of my people”
― Larissa Lai, The Lost Century

“Men and white women,” said Claude. “Two things not to be forgiven.”
― Larissa Lai, When Fox is a Thousand

“She understood that beauty was a kind of currency better than money, at least for women of our generation”
― Larissa Lai, The Lost Century

“Artemis, the virgin huntress. It’s Greek. Think of her out on a moon yellow night, arrow notched taut in a bowstring and the taste of blood in her mouth. How seriously her parents considered the effect on destiny in the act of her naming, I don’t know. They had their pick of the pantheon. They could have called her Syrinx and had her running in terror from musically inclined men with hairy legs. She might have been more docile, vegetative even. But she would have had a tune to hum to herself then, high and reedy, remembering river banks. If they had called her Persephone they could have kept her, for half the year anyway, tending a fruitful garden. Though it is true that every fall her memory of them would drown in the icy River of Forgetfulness as she went into the underworld to live with her dreary husband, six bleeding pomegranate seeds glistening in his open palm. It might have been easier, for as it is she remembers nothing of them at all since they were forced to give her up for adoption when she was six months old. The name, which her adoptive parents decided to keep, thinking”
― Larissa Lai, When Fox is a Thousand

“You need the truth to move on. Whereas my generation thought it was healthier to forget.”
― Larissa Lai, The Lost Century

“What is the value of human life? We are made up of so much water.”
― Larissa Lai, When Fox is a Thousand

“This story is about stink, after all, a story about rot, about how life grows out of the most fetid-smelling places.”
― Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl