Xinyan Chen

“Some mornings we wake, our stomachs empty, our stomachs angry, but never do we look to the ground beneath our feet with longing in our mouths. We chew on our pride. The dirt we do not eat.”
― Roxane Gay, Ayiti

“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the suburbs, unrenovated since the 1990s, one modest hatchback car between us, our big-box store generic clothes, our outdated phones and computers.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

“Is not that I vain. I does think of it as an investment. If you had a nice car, ent you would take care of it? Depreciation is a hell of a thing.”
― Lisa Allen-Agostini, The Bread the Devil Knead

“But people does get on like if you, as a woman who have no man, you not good enough, like you's not a real woman. So if is either stay with a asshole or have no man at all, I rather stay with a asshole.”
― Lisa Allen-Agostini, The Bread the Devil Knead