Xinyan Chen

“As Cathy swam back and forth in the creek, I grieved, not for my girlhood or the swim team or the failed races, but for losing her, for losing the chances I could have had with her, and for my memories forever tainted—such was the price of transcendence beyond human.”
― Jade Song

“My wife and I are that other kind of rich: the misers among you, in our quaint three-bedroom house in the suburbs, unrenovated since the 1990s, one modest hatchback car between us, our big-box store generic clothes, our outdated phones and computers. Lucky in our birthright privileges, in our inheritance, in our jobs, in the stock market, hoarding cash for reasons that stopped being clear to us long ago, that make less and less sense the older we get. We have no children. Our parents are dead. We keep working, we clean our own toilets, rake our own yard. We use our vacations to go camping in-state. We’ll give it all away upon our deaths, and there will be one of those shocked news stories about people like us and our secret millions, the sudden windfall upon our pet causes and distant nieces and nephews. Why don’t we help anyone while we’re alive? Our once-reasonable anxieties grown distorted, outsized, habitual. There will never be enough money to make us feel safe.”
― Kim Fu, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

“Tell the truth, I was fed up with the house, fed up with the licks. Fed up with Leo and him blaming me for everything. But you ever find yourself down in a canal? It hard to climb out by yourself.”
― Lisa Allen-Agostini, The Bread the Devil Knead

“And what is love? I human, I have feelings. I with the man. Of course I love him. Yet, the way he love me does make me hate myself.”
― Lisa Allen-Agostini, The Bread the Devil Knead