Zana > Recent Status Updates

“When the customers came back, the milk ran freely from her breasts, and they sucked it out of her like leeches.”

That's enough for today

‘One of the sons was interested in jazz, and so they had attended a basement jazz concert they’d seen advertised on a flyer, but she wasn’t terribly impressed by the music. It had sounded more like a student production. No one did any improvising; they just played from sheet music, and not very well. “We’re from Brooklyn,” she told me. “So our standards are a bit higher.”’

Lmao

‘I explained: When the Communists took over, China didn’t have enough food to go around, so they put a limit on how many children people could have, and no one wanted girls, so people were aborting or abandoning baby girls until they gave birth to boys. “Wow,” said Erin. “So your parents would have left you in a field.” I said that I thought my parents were more progressive than that, but yes—perhaps so.’

I snorted

Omg Lily STFU (me saying this even though I was the same annoying brat at her age)

“Once, when I was in ninth grade, my mother had told me that it was lucky I was so good at school, because if they didn’t have me, if they just had Jasmine, then my father would have killed himself a long time ago. Keep it up, she said. So that was the kind of relationship we had.”

Jesus

“The last time they had spoken to us, meaningfully spoken to us, we had been children. Now we were verbally arrested, even worse at Chinese than we had been at three, four, and five, and unable to do anything but echo those childish refrains. Gonggong, Popo, hello! It’s me! I’m good. I’m very good. I’m studying hard. Yes, I’ve eaten. Wishing you good health. Here’s Mom, now. Bye-bye.”

At least this part's relatable

‘“You’ve got a kid from Hong Kong, a kid from Singapore, a kid from Beijing, and a kid from Taiwan. So you had Communists and Nationalists and peasants and landlords. Your grandparents would have killed each other, you know? But here you are, acting like the mere fact of your Chineseness is some centrifugal force. Isn’t that bizarre?”’

Damn called out by a white boy

“...I had worked his penis for at least twenty minutes; did that not count for something? Anyhow, I had more right to be angry. He had been a most ungenerous lover. He hadn’t even gestured toward my clitoris. But I was just glad to be on my way home.”

Girl

“My freshman year had been very instructive. I knew how to handle a penis.

Thoughts of milking a cow rose unbidden to my mind, but once the image was there I couldn’t get rid of it. Yes, this was what I would have to do—milk him dry, and then I could go to sleep.”

I can't deal with this lol

‘JC kicked at the gate. “Why on a Friday?”

His vehemence startled me; I shrank back. “It’s okay.”

“But people come out on Fridays!” His cheeks were flushed red, and his voice carried a sudden, childish hitch. For a moment, I thought he might cry. “Why would you close it today, of all the fucking days?”’

Girl dump him 🤮🤮

“My child and I bathed her as she sat on the shower chair, naked, slumped over, a defeated animal. Death was still abstract, it could slip down the drain. Sadness was still indivisible. In twenty-three days, it would detonate and shower us like confetti. The water flattened my mother’s hair and began burying her tongue.”

😔

“I wonder if, when people die, they hear a bell. Or if they taste something sweet, or if they feel a knife cutting them in half, dragging through the flesh like sheet cake.”

Oof that hurts

“It occurred to me that perhaps JC didn’t want Anna to come—that perhaps her absence was the point. But did I want to go if Anna had been excluded on purpose? And if JC didn’t want Anna there, then why did he want me?”

Goddamn I'm really too old for this shit

“The most daring thing I had done last semester was stay out late after a Broadway show with a group of girls from my floor, and though we were safely home by two in the morning, I felt a sick dread the entire time. I wasn’t afraid I would get in trouble—how would my parents find out?—but I felt a moral horror, like I was losing my discipline and virtue and being corrupted to the ways of sloth.”

I'm too old for this

“And as my fluency increased, I had intensifying fantasies about my doppelgänger in Taipei: a person who didn’t have to regain her Chinese but had rather always had it; a parallel self who was unburdened with my inadequacies, who did not repeat halting greetings to her grandparents over video...”

Girl

‘Each victim was restrained and forced to listen to the same audio recording, detailing what lay ahead for her in the coming weeks: what she would be subjected to, the rules, and punishment for disobeying. Slaughter claimed to believe that this would help “break” them, and make them more compliant.’

So gross

“Dad” 🥲

What in the Scarlet Witch is happening here

‘“Ozlie, I don’t know what the fuck this says.”

“Isn’t this your fucking major?” Ozlie shook her head, before pointing to a line that read System of arrangement.’

Lmao

“These people aren’t real.

That was the only explanation that made sense. This had all been one long fever dream.

Emery was still strapped to a hospital bed.

She couldn’t be here. With these people and all the splendor that glittered before her eyes.”

I'm so fucking confused

“SHE was
inviting
ME

out

like

CINDERELLA

to
the ball.

but was SHE
the prince?

or the

GLASS SLIPPER?

=)”

Okay Rupi Kaur

“SHE
was like
the stormy
sea.

like
the dark
clouds

twisting above
the
black tide.

like the faintest glimmers

of the

setting sun,

fighting through

THE coming NIGHT

just to
shine.

=)”

Between this and Taipei Story idk which one is cringier

Okay plot twist

‘My blood solidifies in my veins, and I shoot my eyes open. Father Robert stands before me, dressed in an all black robe. A white collar covers his Adam's apple and a rosary hangs to his chest.

“You look like you need something to fill that hole inside of you.”’

Oh my

“...The job seems too good to be true, and I have half a mind to ask whoever picks up the phone whose dick I have to suck to get the position because I most definitely will suck a few penises to get out of this dump and be able to make myself a goddamn omelet.”

👁️👄👁️

‘If the point of transliteration was to approximate the original sound, then it seemed I should just say “Manchester,” “Georgia,” and “Morehouse” instead of the belabored pinyin approximations, which always felt vaguely racist to utter out loud—like I was imitating someone with broken English. But Teacher Shen made a face whenever I used the English pronunciations.’

Damn

‘...U. S. involvement in the [1953] coup and the 1954 consortium agreement convinced the Iranian people that the United States cared little for their interests, that it was more concerned with propping up British imperialism... These convictions led Iranian nationalists to dub the United States the Great Satan and to blame it for all their nation’s ills during the next twenty-five years...’

Understandable

“Undoubtedly, there would have been no coup in August 1953 if it had not been for the CIA. The CIA devised Operation Ajax, paid a large sum to carry it out—estimates of the final cost range from $100,000 to $20 million, depending on which expenses are counted—and assigned one of its most imaginative agents to direct it. Yet Kermit Roosevelt and his comrades could not have succeeded without help from Iranians.”

“Dulles was indeed planning. The next year he and his brother organized the CIA’s second coup d’etat, which led to the fall of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala and set off a sequence of events in that country that led to civil war and hundreds of thousands of violent deaths. Later the CIA set out to kill or depose foreign leaders from Cuba and Chile to the Congo and Vietnam...”

“How did Iran reach the tragic crossroads of August 1953? The main responsibility lies with the obtuse neocolonialism that guided the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and with the British government’s willingness to accept it. If the company had shown even a modicum of good sense, it could have reached a compromise with the Iranian authorities....”