Sophia

“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

“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

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

“The whole world was dancing and so were we. We exchanged another smile and I marvelled how, in all the stories of the gold-paved Mei Guo and the dangerous Mei Guo, no one in China knew about the lights of America, about how they were so delightful that they could stop us in the middle of the street, in the middle of our lives and our worries, in the middle of strangers living stranger lives, all just to fill us with music and hope.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country