atlantis

“For a brief spell, my father toyed with anglicizing his name and asked to be called Eric, though he soon realized that assimilation of that order didn’t suit him. You were free to name your children after U.S. presidents. Or you might name them something unpronounceable, since they would never be president anyway.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Ken noticed that I never really went out. More important, he noticed that I hoped to be noticed for this. I’d never touched alcohol, but it was mostly because I was a snob, not a straight-edge ideologue. I couldn’t imagine letting down my inhibitions around people I’d been silently judging the whole time.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“What the camera allows you to do is to invent, to create. That's really what photographs are. Not records of moments, but rather imaginative acts.”
― Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

“What was it like for them to leave home and cross the Pacific, with only the haziest plans for return? In the absence of available connections, they held onto an imaginary Taiwan, more an abstraction—a beacon, a phantom limb—than an actual island. The available technology delivered them there only on special occasions. So, they searched for traces of home in the faces of their classmates; they heard it wafting above the din when they shopped for groceries.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True