Sunaina Rao

“I’ve just never met someone like you," as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Advocates of libertarianism and neoliberalism claimed to want more liberty for individuals and a smaller government, but in reality they only wanted less government for the wealthy and the white.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Lifting people out of poverty can have trickle-up economic effects and raise all boats.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap