Jay Caspian Kang > Quotes

“Love and cities are always inextricably entwined. There's no restaurant or corner store or run-down dive in any city that doesn't double as a monument for a lost love. I think that's why we always stop and stare whenever we come across a girl crying in public. We sense the imprint of a memory being pressed onto the sidewalk, onto the building contours, onto the names of the streets.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve

“These cultural generalizations, perhaps correctly, reduce the history of immigration to a binary. When immigrants come into this country, whether they join the labor force, like the Irish, Mexicans, and Central Americans, or they become small-time entrepreneurs, oftentimes in Black neighborhoods. Regardless of their choice, their economic asesion will depend on their relationship with Black Americans. If you accept this analysis, Black people are the only race in America. Everyone else is either white or on their way to becoming white. The new Asians, much like the Jews and the Irish before them, will one day be white, and their dream of generic Americanness will be achieved.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“The worst have scraped out the mantle of the best and wear it around as something real. It takes no genius to see that. But I moved to San Francisco because the masquerade of kindly gestures is, at least, kind. And it remains kind. And all the people who would sit back and comment on the garishness of the costumes, the hollowness of the dialogue, the lack of divine conviction, well, all those people are either dead or fifteen years old.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve

“once the bad thoughts are expelled onto the page, life lurches forward again.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“there is no meaningful, political way to deal with the pain and disappointment of being an Asian American, no answer for the exclusion you feel when everyone around you talks about racism and white supremacy and you know—at some visceral level—that you’re not allowed to speak up. You are an ally, not a stakeholder.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“In 1999, he was found guilty of deliberately defying the stop work order at the RKO and was barred from building, buying, or selling apartments in the state. In 2013, nearly forty years after he came to the United States, he was caught selling condo units in Elmhurst and narrowly avoided serving time in jail.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“To find a meaningful place in politics, one that doesn’t require us to lie about “white adjacency” or ignore the pain of everyone who looks like us, upwardly mobile Asian Americans must drop our neuroses about microaggressions and the bamboo ceiling, and fully align ourselves with the forgotten Asian America: the refugees, the undocumented, and the working class. What we do now—the lonely climb up into the white liberal elite, the purchase of Brennan’s old house—might lead to personal comfort, but it will never make us full participants in this country, nor will it ever convince others to join in our fight. Naked self-interest and narcissism do not inspire solidarity.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“where local newspapers started calling him “the Asian Donald Trump.” This wasn’t necessarily meant as flattery: Huang quickly built a reputation for bulldozing through any local resistance from white middle-class families, whom he almost entirely ignored, and erecting shoddy buildings with a litany of code violations.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“I, who had always prided myself on my ability to accept the fallacy of love, with all my commas, parentheses, and qualified statements, felt love grab me violently by the back of the neck and fling me straight into her arms. This blooming helplessness, which flooded me to my teeth, made me feel a lot of things, but mostly, it made me feel like a girl.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve

“Litost. The torment that arises when we unexpectedly encounter our own expansive misery.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve

“I found Bill in the kitchen with the Google guys. Someone was trying to figure out how to open the window. There was a lengthy discussion about windows in office buildings and insurance and the sound a body must make when it hits cement after a fifteen-story fall.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve

“...the kindness you can only hope happens to your children, because while you can teach a person to act kindly, you can't really teach warmth.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve

“How do you actually become white if you've never felt white a day in your life, or, as is the case for millions of Asian Americans who do not participate in the race-making narratives of this country, if you never wanted to be white in the first place?”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“Free love is vibrator slogan.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve

“By 2010, Asians made up 70 percent of Flushing. They have long since expanded out into the surrounding areas. They also have a strong political voice. Jimmy Meng, a successful Flushing lumber salesman and the former president of the highly influential Flushing Chinese Business Association (FCBA), became the first Asian American to serve in the state assembly in 2005. He pleaded guilty in 2012 on charges that he had solicited a cash bribe for $80,000. (The cash had been delivered to Meng’s lumberyard in a fruit basket.) His daughter, Grace, now serves in the U.S. Congress, representing New York’s Sixth District. His son, Andy, was a leader in Pi Delta Psi, the same Asian American fraternity that would be charged with the murder of Michael Deng.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“That all this could happen over the course of thirty years should be seen as a testament to something, perhaps the relatively unfettered access Asian immigrants had to financial capital, which, in turn, might prompt a critical analysis of the “model minority” myth and how Asians act in concert with white supremacy. Or, if you’re of a different political persuasion, Huang’s empire might just convince you that race doesn’t matter as long as you work hard and make the most of your opportunities.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“It can be quite lonely at the bottom of a rabbit hole.”
― Jay Caspian Kang

“But just as it's reductive to say the Kwons might as well be white because they've been able to prosper in America-they've likely never felt white a day in their lives-it's also wrong to place them within a broader category of 'minorities' or 'people of color' and suggest they share in the same struggle.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“Up top, we saw a party on the verge of a breakout. The three respectful men were, in fact, security guards. On the far edge of the plot, four scraggly dudes were fiddling around with a PA. A guitar and a drum set lay in the grass behind them. A stand-up bass had been propped up against a gravestone. Surrounding a folding table stocked with handles of Costco booze were six or seven men with fuck-you-Dad piercings—septa, cheeks, foreheads—and tribal facial tattoos. I counted seven, maybe fifteen dogs running around, yapping at one another, and at least twenty or so old hippies, each one dressed in his or her referential, Harold and Maude best, smiling and drinking out of red plastic cups.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve

“We cannot win this war without convincing our colored allies”—referring to other Asian countries who had joined in the fight against Japan—“that we are not fighting for ourselves as continuing superior over colored peoples.” Later, Buck would write that as long as the United States continued to discriminate against Chinese people, “we are fighting on the wrong side in this war. We belong with Hitler.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“Or, more simply: you can attain the whiteness that matters without feeling particularly white.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“I don't think I'll ever forget it. Me, standing there, humiliated, worried vaguely about how the unflattering fabric of my bathing suit was clinging to my shrinking, stereotyped penis, Chad making friends, and this kid brings me a fucking quesadilla in a plastic bag.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve

“none of us really ever fall out of love with the first woman who agrees to return us the favor—he could not recognize the totality of that younger self who had sat entranced by all that had provided kindling for that little blaze.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve

“The question, I came to realize, is not so much “Will the Asians become white?” but rather “Will the Asians become Jews?” On the surface, the overlaps are obvious and quite pronounced: these were relatively small, self-contained immigrant groups who excelled academically and economically, and whose second generation intermarried into the white population and moved into the white suburbs at rates that far exceeded any other immigrant group, spawning a crisis of identity that was litigated by scholars, writers, and artists. Culturally, the connections mostly revolved around overbearing mothers and a proximity to full whiteness, accompanied by an understanding that you might not completely make it.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“America would never accept them as white. These questions of identify that would plague their children meant nothing to them. They weren't Asian Americans or Korean Americans or 'not Black' but Korean people in America.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“As part of Manilatown in the 1920s to 1950s, the hotel was well-known in the Philippines as a Manilatown landmark where immigrants could find friends and advice on how to live in America.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

“Finch asked, "Are they Christians or something?"
Hofspaur chortled and shook his head. "No. They're not Christians. I don't even know what the fuck to call them. They're like communist Buddhist vegan assholes. Who all happen to be ex-hackers.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve

“One day when we feel less embarrassed about it all, the next generation's great poet will write an elegy for the despair you feel when you, without even the hint of a password, look over the list of wireless networks and see nothing but padlocks.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve