Sophia

“And in the silence, I began to think: that's what frustrates me about a particular kind of migrant, the ones who drop their cultural baggage entirely in order to assimilate successfully into their new surroundings (as opposed to the other extreme, who cling desperately to memories of the homeland, and can't wait for the day they can retire and return to the place they have just left). For the problem with the Forgetters is that the need to wipe the slate clean in their adoptive country doesn't just begin and end with their arrival in their new land; it continues thereafter, repeating itself until it finds a convenient historical ground zero that is emotionally and intellectually untroubled, so that a new narrative about themselves is formed, a glowingly positive trajectory that strives for a clean story arc, complete with neatly packaged doses of pain - ultimately overcome, of course - that punctuate the rise to comfort and success and happiness.”
― Tash Aw, Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family

“Their grandchildren will grow up so middle-class and affluent that the idea of deprivation will have no place in their lives, will seem to belong not to their country, but a much poorer neighbour like Cambodia or Bangladesh.”
― Tash Aw, Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family

“I wonder how it would be if I let go and yielded myself to depravity.”
― Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

“Perhaps by depravity he actually meant tenderness.”
― Osamu Dazai