Terry Tsai

“More and more university students lack social skills after growing up in small families and suffering intense competition at school. If people prefer eating alone this may be a sign of psychological problems,” said Kim Hye-sook at Ajou University.”
― Graham Holliday, Eating Korea: Reports on a Culinary Renaissance

“As economist Thomas Sowell has noted, middleman minorities typically arrive in their host countries with education, skills, or a set of propitious attitudes about work, such as business frugality and the willingness to take risks. Some slave away in lowly menial jobs to raise capital, then swiftly become merchants, retailers, labor contractors, and money-lenders. Their descendants usually thrive in the professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, or finance.”
― Iris Chang, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History

“Ronald Takaki, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California at Berkeley, once called the Chinese and other Asian Americans “strangers from a different shore.” I propose to take this a step further. At various times in history, the Chinese Americans have been treated like strangers on both shores—a people regarded by two nations as too Chinese to be American, and too American to be Chinese.”
― Iris Chang, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History

“The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung-ho posture says that once you give the order I’m not going to bother you with any of the details—and your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon