Barry Welsh

“The plantation owners farmed on a large scale, exporting sugar and pineapple. They had made Hawaiʻi an American territory to avoid high export tariffs. They initially used indigenous people as workers, but the numbers were far from sufficient. So they had hired Europeans, but they couldn’t stand the hot weather and hard work. Then the owners had looked toward Asia. The first to be brought in were Chinese, but the majority of them left the farms at the end of their contract and went to work on the mainland. The next to come were Japanese. They also went to the mainland after the end of their contract, and frequently held strikes, demanding increased wages and improved treatment. The first workers from Korea arrived in 1903.”
― Lee Geum-yi, The Picture Bride

“What he’d really returned to was this noisy, crowded, queuing, waiting, leering world. The world where, as his doctor explained, the only way to survive was through sheer force of will.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“Rather than working and becoming a socially responsible person, rather than listening to my wife's lectures, I wanted to be as idle as the idlest animal on earth. I wanted to cast off as much as possible the meaningless mask of humanity.
I was shy of human society. I was shy of life. Everything was strange and unfamiliar to me.”
― Yi Sang, The Wings

“Though the 20th century saw horrific genocides inspired by Nazi pseudoscience about genetics and race, it also saw horrific genocides inspired by Marxist pseudoscience about the malleability of human nature. The real threat to humanity comes from totalizing ideologies and the denial of human rights, rather than a curiosity about nature and nurture.”
― Steven Pinker