119 Quotes by Charles Yu

What is it about an Asian Man that makes him so hard to assimilate?

This is the dream. Sustainable employment. Some semblance of work-life balance. Talk white. Not a lot. Get contact lenses. Smile. They will assume you’re smart. The less you say, the better. Try to project: Responsible, Harmless.

You haven’t experienced awkwardness until you’ve seen a three-million-dollar piece of software cry.

But at the same time, I’m guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I’ve lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins. And letting that define how I see other people. I’m as guilty of it as anyone. Fetishizing Black people and their coolness. Romanticizing White women. Wishing I were a White man. Putting myself into this category.

How do you convince someone to change, to stop being afraid of himself? How do you convince yourself not to be so scared all the time?

And there’s just something about Asians – their faces, their skin color – it just automatically takes you out of this reality. Forces you to step back and say, Whoa, whoa, whoa, what is this? What kind of world are we in? And what are these Asians doing in our cop show?

We break ourselves up into parts. To lie to ourselves, to hide things from ourselves. You are not you. You are not what you think you are. You are bigger than you think. More complicated than you think...

The truth is, she’s a weirdo. Just like you were. Are. A glorious, perfectly weird weirdo. Like all kids before they forget how to be exactly how weird they really are. Into whatever they’re into, pure. Before knowing. Before they learn from others how to act. Before they learn they are Asian, or Black, or Brown, or White. Before they learn that all the things they are and about all the things they will never be.

Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodate as little or as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, live inside of it.