emily

“Names are indelible markers of our histories. When we are asked to change our names, we are being asked to erase our histories. But names are more than this, too - they move across our relations. The difficulties in pronouncing our names can create intimate moments, can move casual encounters to sudden struggles to listen and understand each other. our names are offerings for these intimacies. When a stranger finds our names too difficult or unintelligible to even try to pronounce, we have learned all we need to know about them.”
― Y-Dang Troeung, Landbridge: life in fragments

“Because this land they live in is a land of missing things. A land stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians, its tiger, its jackals, its birds and its green and its living. To move through this land and believe Ba's tales is to see each hill as a burial mound with its own crown of bones. Who could believe that and survive? Who could believe that and keep from looking, as Ba and Sam do, always toward the past? Letting it drag behind them. Letting it make them into fools.

And so Lucy fears that unwritten history. Easier to dismiss all Ba's tales as tall ones - because believe, and where does it end? If she believes that tigers live, then does she believe that Indians are hunted and dying? If she believes in fish the size of men, does she believe in men who string up others like linefuls of catch? Easier to avoid that history, unwritten as it is except in the soughing of dry grass, in the marks of lost trails, in the rumors from the mouths of bored men and mean girls, in the cracked patterns of buffalo bone. Easier by far to read the history that Teacher Leigh teaches, those names and dates orderly as bricks, stacked to build a civilization.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“When the future is without hope, the present tastes appallingly bitter.”
― Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin

“Know that there is no demand, no pressure, to speak or not to speak. To not speak does not mean you have some kind of debilitating silence, or that you are shattered within. It is possible to speak through silence, to use the pieces of our fragmented past to make new worlds.”
― Y-Dang Troeung, Landbridge: life in fragments