Words matter. These are the best Jenny Zhang Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When it comes to love, maturity often gets a bad rap – second love is boring; it’s practical. It’s what our parents feel for each other.
I’m surely not the only one to notice we employ metaphors to make sense of the news. I always like to take note of who hides their origins and who shows them off.
Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for ‘Rookie’.
While I was growing up in Flushing, Queens, we socialized exclusively with other Chinese immigrants. I was forbidden to make contact with nonapproved, non-Chinese peers outside school. That was fine with me.
I know I am not the first woman to ask this, but how can I be both damaged and loveable? How do I become the protagonist of a story?
I’m drawn to the figure of the ungrateful subaltern as a trope in literature. In real life, it is often dangerous to demand more.
I wish I had acted better. I wish I had been the kind of sister who was patient enough to show my brother the proper spelling for ‘Power Rangers.’
I often wonder if my being a fairly small Asian woman with a high-pitched quietish voice plays a role in how often men feel entitled to come up to me and tell me, ‘You have this doll act,’ or whatever.
I lived so completely in my mind – a place of unchecked delusion and complete fantasy!
Does self-acceptance ultimately require another person, or is there a kind of love that does not dabble in the dream of a perfect twinship?
Whenever I passed by a Chinese restaurant in a car, I’d joke to my friends, ‘Oh yeah, my uncle owns that place.’
Karaoke was my family’s happy secret. In those early years in America, like many immigrants, my parents struggled with poverty and loneliness, but they also built provisional families, and inside our bubble there was joy, understanding, an intimate language I could never translate – and above all there was song.
Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me – an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American – there were limits.
Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who founded Lenny Books together, also happen to have exquisite reading tastes – from obscure small press poetry chapbook to dishy memoirs to literary novels – and so it’s a real honor that they’ve chosen to announce their imprint with my stories.
Of course I want the things I write to reflect well on me or anyone who might feel represented by me, but also, I’m not writing a guidebook on how to be or how my people should be seen. I’m telling very specific stories.
Faced with ostracization at school and confinement at home, I turned to karaoke.
I hadn’t ever worked with an ‘editor’ until I was 26 – although that could be partly chalked up to the MFA vs. NYC thing, where I came up through institutions that encouraged writers to write privately for a long, long time and not sully themselves with concerns about audience or the business side of writing.
In my mind, scatological writing is a core of the English canon.
Mothers have always held such symbolic weight in determining a person’s worth. Your mother tongue, your motherland, your mother’s values – these things can qualify or disqualify you from attaining myriad American dreams: love, fluency, citizenship, legitimacy, acceptance, success, freedom.
Michael Derrick Hudson is not the first person to slip into the identity of a person of color to give himself some perceived advantage. He can slip back into his life and not walk around in this world as a person of color who endures racism.
It’s okay if someone is disgusted or offended by my performance. It’s just a performance.
It’s very Western to idealize a kind of love that does not come with any expectations, that still permits both the giver and recipient to be completely free.
I grew up in a Chinese American enclave where the person who lived down the street had literally lived down the street from my mother in Shanghai.
‘Alphabet’ by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen. It’s a book-length abecedarian poem. It’s an activist text but also a portal to wonder.
I think being a writer is being heavily attuned to the absolute absurdity of things you take for granted, and I think that having actual parents who lived through the Cultural Revolution who are also interested in literature, they’re also very attuned to those moments.
Rage can be so common it turns ambient.
Our culture is bloodthirsty for stories about women in pain; we hunger for women to expose their traumas and to be rescued by the love of a good man.
For a decade, Emma-Lee Moss has been steadily making weird, moody, melancholic music under the moniker ‘Emmy the Great’ that has been referred to as nue-folk, anti-folk, synthpop, and, most of all, literary.
The ‘New York Times’ is not reviewing books by non-white people.
Growing up, I had to cobble together a scarecrow of things I loved from various different writers.
I wish it wasn’t so natural for me to dwell on the past.
Growing up, I had a face that people wanted to tell things to, and I grew up with adults who had so much to say. They had lived through decades of unbelievable poverty, starvation, political upheaval, chaos.
I’d behave savagely if I had access to Bjoerk’s closet.
Early in my life, without any supporting evidence, I fretted over what I believed was my fate: accidentally becoming an international pop star. The pages of my diary were filled with hypothetical ethical dilemmas.
My mother had two unshakable beliefs that she tried to drill into me. The first was that I had to study and work twice as hard as my white peers if I wanted to survive in America, and the second was that it was delusional and dangerous to believe I possessed the same freedom white people had to pursue my dreams.
One of the founding tenets of racism: a society that will never allow white people to think that because they are white, they won’t succeed.
Coming out of the closet doesn’t always mean liberation.
If you were to make a quick judgment call on my intelligence and articulation when I first moved to the U.S. based on my speaking skills, it would be very low.
I’m always interested in what is seen as obscene or profane or unfit.
As a child, I would go days without speaking, and then suddenly I would scream until everyone was looking at me.
That’s what people expect: They don’t want to read a slight novel. People don’t want to waste their time on anything less than ‘great.’
We’re not the best about knowing what’s the most interesting about ourselves.
When I was an undergrad at Stanford, there was a girl named Jennie Kim who worked for the school newspaper. Sometimes people would come up to me and talk to me about articles she had written. ‘That one on getting a Brazilian was hilarious’, some guy said, high-fiving me.
Once I decided I was happy with something, I’d try to send it off into the world, and either someone would want it exactly as it was, or it would remain in my notebook/laptop, and no one would ever see it. This is probably why I didn’t work with an editor until I was 26. The solipsism!
Asian American success is often presented as something of a horror – robotic, unfeeling machines psychotically hellbent on excelling, products of abusive tiger parenting who care only about test scores and perfection, driven to succeed without even knowing why.
Shanghai, the city where I was born and spent my first four and a half years. It’s not necessarily the most pleasant or most comforting place, but I have blood memory there, my core was formed there, so I need to go back often, or else I become empty, lost, without meaning.
People who have very devastating lives sometimes have the most wild, avant-garde humor. It’s like when you’ve seen it all and been through it all, nothing is off-limits in a way.
Visibility doesn’t always equal freedom.
From its very inception, Lenny Letter set out to create a supportive, positive, inclusive space on the Internet that does not shy away from complexity and nuance.
We lived in one of those half-basement apartments, and on our first night of being in America, someone reached through the grate that protects the window and stole our laundry detergent – which wasn’t a big deal, but it felt symbolic when I heard about it later as an adult.