Samantha Duncan

“Yellow was how this all started…I couldn’t help but feel that yellow fortune was deeply intertwined with our path.”

“Yellow was how this all started…I couldn’t help but feel that yellow fortune was deeply intertwined with our path.”

“The only reason I managed at Lemon was because it was the kind of place where I could be myself, where I could act the same way I did at home with Kimiko…all I had to do was work with the people I lived with to entertain local regulars. Because that’s what Lemon needed from me.”

“Make no mistake, money is everything, but at the same time, it’s nothing. There’s nothing greater than money - you know that in your bones - but there, in that moment, what you have in your hand, that huge wad of cash, is greater than money itself. And that’s your world.”

“People with money make the rules to help themselves, and poor people get sucked dry. And when you’re all dried up, when you’re nothing but dregs, they make you think it was your fault you failed at life. They make it sound like you had a chance. Well, fuck that. We get wrung out by the system, and all we are, all we can ever be, are dregs.”

“It is an acknowledged truth that to be a girl is to be extracted. Girls, we are taken.”

“It is an acknowledged truth that to be a girl is to be extracted. Girls, we are taken.”

“At the end of the day, we knew that no acknowledgement, no apology, no rewriting of our history could ever change how we felt. We didn’t want a sorry. We wanted it to stop.”

“We had to become pioneers if we were going to kill him. We had to do what was best for us, no matter how it might affect other people. That’s what pioneers do. That’s what colonizers do.”

“Does it bother me that you want to hear the story this way? Yes. Does it make me angry that you need all of these specific details to feel like you’re reading a proper brown-person story? Yes.”

“Microaggressions - even the word makes me tired. But here’s the thing: I call it something else. You want me to perform culture in a certain way. To tell you a story a certain way. To tell you about stinky lunches and how hard it was to be us. When I think it must be hard to be you. Your culture so vague.”

“A good life in spite of. In spite of bad ancestors. In spite of your skin. In spite of colonialism. In spite of capitalism. In spite of nationalism. In spite of the internet. In spite of war. In spite of the patriarchy. In spite of lists of things you want. In spite of a man who came in the dark and did things that he shouldn’t. In spite. In spite.”

“That no one ever either praised or criticised our fireworks…didn’t matter, for these twenty minutes of each year were filled with such intense joy and power that there was never any doubt that the picture painted by the fireworks on the sky above us, of a world beyond the world for a fleeting moment filled with beauty and riches, was not an illusion, but represented something true: our life too could be like that.”

“I don’t think the stuffed animals are a flight from reality, a bulwark against brutality and everything hard, that they represent the world as they wish it were, it is rather that the stuffed animals represent them, that this is what their souls look like, small, soft, good and faithful.”