amanda*ೃ༄

“There comes a moment for the immigrant's child when you realize you and your parents are assimilating at the same time. Later, I understood that we were both sifting, store to store, for some possible future -- that we were both mystified by the same fashions, trends, and bits of language. That my late night trips to the record store with my dad had been about discovery, not mastery. Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that wasn't fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never be quite perfect. It was a set of compromises sold to you as a contract. Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“In many ways, food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she seemed—constantly pushing me to be what she felt was the best version of myself—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.”
― Michelle Zauner