Lan Samantha Chang > Quotes

“Inadequate love is love. Unrequited love is love.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost

“The people who matter the most to us in the end, who teach us the most, are the people who make their worst mistakes with us.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost

“If I could change a single thing about my life,' she said gently, 'I would not have been so unhappy when I was young.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost

“Haven't we all, as time continues, found that we must be kind to ourselves and listen to our thoughts, because fewer and fewer of those remain who know what is most real to us?”
― Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger

“It's because of the way you are. It's why you're happy reading novels. You're only comfortable with a piece of the world that you can hold in your hand.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger

“She'll be an excellent novelist: a monster of self-absorption.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost

“What do you mean by yuanfen?"
She thought for a minute and replied, "It means: that apportionment of love which is destined for you in this world.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger

“The inner Min starved; she woke in the middle of the night, then lay for hours wondering what was wrong.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger

“For each of us, he understood, is born into our own time and eventually the things we held as the center of our world, dearly, unforgivingly, must fade.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost

“This story is blowing up because of the racism of the white American community. Look to your own families, people, and don’t throw stones.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“Anyway, I gave her the ring. We were serious at the time. Words were spoken, promises made, unborn children were imagined and named! We were twenty-two years old. We get engaged, everything is fine, and then—well, a decade goes by.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“We all hated him. We were all his bitches. Our motives lie in the past. It’s a dark room with the flayed corpses of animals in it. Nobody in their right mind wants to go there.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“For it is through humility, he knew, that holiness--and poetry--find entrance to the human soul.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost

“Like ginseng roots, our buried pasts have different shapes.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger

“Because self-hatred is as galvanizing as ambition.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“We want to travel back in time, but we can’t, and so we want to go to a new place instead. Place is what we have instead of time. No. Not true. Money is what we have now, instead of place or time.” He exhales. “Time is money. Place is money. Love, love is money. And power is money. You’ll see.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“It’s true on a technicality. I’m being held unlawfully. I didn’t commit the crime for which I’ve been convicted. But if you look at it another way, I deserve to be here. I did a lot of other shitty things, for which I wasn’t punished.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“The blood of the thief, the pioneer and the marauder, the yearner and the usurper. She looks out at the desert and its dream of tranquility.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“After emotions are felt, expressed, where do they go? Is there a place where spent passion collects? Surely it can't simply vaporize, disappear like smoke. There must be a secret hiding place. For every old love affair, a locked room.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“You were rational. I used to think you the most reasonable of the brothers. You were rational until you had a glimpse of the truth—very simple, but distorting your assumptions, blowing them up from the inside.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“Who would one rather be? The one who desires, or the object of desire? One's answer to this question might determine if he is meant to be a poet or something else entirely.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost

“She’s as bad as the most racially deprived white person fetishizing Asian culture. Her interest in Dagou, in the Chao family, is entirely due to her sense of deprivation after having been raised as racially Chinese in a well-meaning but white American family. Can’t she get over it?”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“The project is so Dagou, talking into the reeds: indiscreet, self-absorbed, self-destructive, and a waste of personal resources. Not to mention under the table; Ming is sure the equipment is contraband.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“You think I'm a loser!" Dagou yells. "Am I a loser for keeping us alive when all the decent places are moving to the strip? I keep your business going. You pay me almost nothing. My salary is a joke. I want an equal share of the profits."
"Big man," sneers Leo.
Ming knows Dagou will turn to Winnie a second before he does it. He always runs to their mother.
"He grown up now," Winnie says. "Let him have his share."
"You stay out of this! You gave up the business when you left it for this menstruation hut!"
The table erupts. "Lay off it." "Don't talk to her like that!" "This is a Spiritual House."
Leo pushes back his chair.
Standing, he has the look of a beast on its hind legs: hairy, primitive, his long arms hanging almost to his knees. It isn't just the dark, unshaven hair sprouting in patches on his cheeks. There is something hungry yet remote in his close-set eyes. Everyone can see it. Some of them shrink back and turn away. Ming knows this eerie quality well. It has been there in his father for as long as he can remember. Long ago, he learned to escape its worst, to allow other members of the family to confront it. Now he climbs up into a place of refuge in his mind. A kind of hunting blind, where he can watch and wait.
From above, Ming watches his brother. Dagou has the blank expression of someone who is only just becoming aware of what he's done.
"'Don't talk to her like that,'" their father jeers. "Mama's boy! And you..."
He grins wickedly at Winnie. Despite her vow of tranquility, she appears ready to bolt from her chair. The nuns seated on either side hold on to her arms.
"You think he's still your diaper-filling lamb. You haven no idea what a dog he is. Ask him why he needs money now. Ask him. Ask him."
Dagou looks around the table. "It's true I've fallen in love," he announces. "My whole life is changing." He pauses importantly. People stare at their plates.
"Christ," says their father. "All this fuss over a decent fuck."
The nuns gasp. Now Dagou's chair creaks, and he also rises to his feet. He is enormous and he swells with rage. His shoulders tense. He points at his father and his finger is shaking. It could be that he has decided, once and for all, to take down Big Chao. As the Sons of Liberty rose against King George. As the sons turned on Chronos, as he himself turned upon Uranus. So it will be in the family Chao.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“So, dinner for thirty-five, forty people. Dagou flips through his notebook. All of his earlier plans now are meager and uninteresting, except for the fresh ducks brining in the refrigerator. Brenda has never eaten Peking duck. He imagines her biting into the finest, most crackling chestnut skin. Enjoying, in addition, a few banquet plates to keep it company. Cold chicken, and the hollow-hearted greens. Plus the stew he promised Winnie. And chicken. He's already reserved the chicken, but his mother believes in combining flavors, she believes in many meats. He has promised her seafood---he can go to the seafood truck. For shrimp to accompany. There must be a shrimp dish---shrimp with mounds of diced ginger and scallions, or salted shrimp in the shell---or both, perhaps. Also, a second seafood dish. To serve only shrimp would be petty and small. Shrimp themselves, so very small. What else? Fish, of course---he's been planning to have fish all along. Soft-shell crab? He imagines how Brenda will glow when he serves platter after platter of soft-shell crab. Of course, she's never tasted it---he knows this because every bit of Chinese food she's ever eaten came from his own hands. He imagines her crunching through the crisp shell.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“Following the darkened, hushed corridor toward his mother's room, Dagou imagines a future menu for the night nurses. Winnie always said, "A little food never hurts." These nurses might like the basics: chicken and broccoli, shrimp with pea pods, garlic eggplant, and house special lo mein. (But for his mother he will concoct a special bone soup with a beaten egg white, seaweed for iron, and black wood ears for lowering the blood pressure.)”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“I, Leo Chao, would rather be dead than stop eating pig. I will be ash and bone chunks in a little urn before I don’t eat juicy pig.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“Ming is the only person besides Brenda who sees Katherine for what she is—a vengeful martyr in a Kabuki mask of dedication. Ming is also the only person besides Brenda who knows how infrequently Dagou actually talks to Katherine—knows”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“am also thinking about the woman with the ponytail who slammed the door in my face. This dog-eating story is a lightning rod. It has nothing to do with the Chao”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“wet cap and lets it drip on the table. “Bag of cash!” he scoffs. “She’s still buying into Strycker’s case. Strycker’s all about appealing to clichés: The bag of cash. The American Dream. The inhuman laborer. The ambitious and ungrateful son who can’t appreciate what’s been done for him.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao