Terry Tsai

“Boredom is a luxury good. This simple statement dug its claws into me and didn’t let go. Of course. I’d lost sight of the extraordinary privilege inherent within boredom.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“If you move the needle of history back far enough, aren’t we all invaders, all foreigners, all squatting on what was once someone else’s land? The first ape’s climbing down from the trees was a dick move that condemned hundreds of thousands of other animals to extinction at our hands.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“Because they saw themselves as intellectuals rather than refugees, they were concerned less about preserving their Chinese heritage than with casting their lot with modern America, and eventual American citizenship. It is in connection with these immigrants, not surprisingly, that the term “model minority” first appeared. The term refers to an image of the Chinese as working hard, asking for little, and never complaining. It is a term that many Chinese now have mixed feelings about.”
― Iris Chang, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History

“This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it—talking trade balances here—once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here—once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel—once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity—y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash