sansian

“The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain? I don’t think, therefore I am—I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it’s 2, maybe it’s not worth telling my story. If it’s 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“There's nothing holy about suffering. The stories of the martyrs illustrate their faith because in spite of what they endured they did not suffer. A saint always dies smiling.”
― Julia Gfrörer, Laid Waste

“Martyrdoms would rarely lead to conversions because they were themselves relatively rare.

The vast majority of pagans—including the millions who eventually converted—never saw a martyrdom, as recent scholarship has shown.

As the most prolific and one of the best-traveled authors of the first three Christian centuries, Origen of Alexandria, stated in no uncertain terms: “Only a small number of people, easily counted, have died for the Christian religion.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World

“Being indebted is to be cautious, inhibited, and to never speak out of turn. It is to lead a life constrained by choices that are never your own. The man or woman who feels comfortable holding court at a dinner party will speak in long sentences, with heightened dramatic pauses, assured that no one will interject while they’re mid-thought, whereas I, who am grateful to be invited, speak quickly in clipped compressed bursts, so that I can get a word in before I’m interrupted.

If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning