Madeline

“From invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom into a fetish object. When she is at last visible—at last desired—she realizes much to her chagrin that this desire for her is treated like a perversion. This is most obvious in porn, where our murky desires are coldly isolated into categories in which white is the default and every other race is a sexual aberration. But the Asian woman is reminded every day that her attractiveness is a perversion, in instances ranging from skin-crawling Tinder messages (“I’d like to try my first Asian woman”) to microaggressions from white friends. I recall a white friend pointing out to me that Jewish men only dated Asian women because they wanted to find women who were the opposite of their pushy mothers. Implied in this tone-deaf complaint was her assumption that Asian women are docile and compliant. Well-meaning friends never failed to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“At any time, I could have found out the address of my birth parents. I could have called them up, or hey, I could have gotten drunk and stood in their yard raving! But I didn't want to know anything about them. Why would I? Everything I did know hurt and I have always avoided pain-which is maybe why I've never married or had children. I don't mind being alone, except for, well...That night, after I'd hung up the phone, I made a cup of tea and busied myself with solving word puzzles. One stumped me. The clue was a double-goer, twelve spaces, and it took me the longest time and a dictionary to come up with the word doppelgänger.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Round House

“I wanna be all the girls I've ever loved.”
― Olivia Gatwood, Life of the Party

“The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity, and the intimacy of our friendship will change forever.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love