24 Quotes by Jade Chang

She had headed towards town aimlessly, looking for the kind of escape that could be found only in a solitary walk through a crowd.

Giant canvases that glorified her naked breasts and half smile, songs rhyming Saina and wanna, unfinished novels about an unknowable girl of dreams – none of that (and she’d had all of it) was as romantic as a boyfriend who would notice that the lightbulb in her hallway had blown out and change it without even bothering to mention the favour.

But she couldn't formulate the sentence in Chinese. Her knowledge of the language only extended to the daily necessities and small affections.

America usually felt like iPhones and pizza and swimming pools to Andrew. L.A. was America. New sneakers. Sunshine. Pot and blue balls. Phoenix was America. Sprinklers and blow jobs and riding shotgun. Vegas was America, all of it. But if there were monsters and magic anywhere in this country, they would be here in New Orleans. New Orleans was an ancient doppelgänger city that grew in some other America that never really existed.

As many Chinas as there were, there were that many Charleses as well. Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside.

He did it for that bubbling, champagne-in-the-veins high, that desire to be part of someone else’s new life, someone else’s realised potential.Vampires must feel like that.

I’m not going to be part of this,” said Leo. He opened his hand and dropped the flowers. Fragrant, obedient, they beheaded themselves on Saina’s salvaged-wood floors.

No one thinks to make the goddess a cup of tea; they just ply her with useless perfumed oils and impotent carved fetishes.

Charles could feel himself sagging with middle-aged defeat, a loser who lacked the hot-blooded need to wrestle America to the ground and take her milk money, who never had the balls to flip his father’s shame into a triumphant empire, who marched obediently towards death and hid from life and always chose the wrong path. No. Not yet. He was still Charles Fucking Wang and he would lead the way out of the wilderness.