Chinese American Quotes

“The crack in your heart allows light in. ~ GOOD FORTUNE page 238”
― Leslie Bratspis

“Perhaps women were once so dangerous they had to have their feet bound.”
― Maxine Hong Kingston

“They said I looked like a foreign devil; they said I spoke like a foreign devil. I made mistakes in manners, and I didn't know delicacies that had grown up since my father left. They wouldn't have me. You can believe it or not - I'm less foreign here than I was in China.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Fly you crows. My father was not a spectacle. He was the greatest man I ever knew. He was my everything.”
― Stacey Lee, Under a Painted Sky

“Xuan and I had decided to take a trip together in honor of our one-thousand-day anniversary. We ate Korean barbecue, shared a decadent cake, and then drove three and a half hours to Yosemite. I’d never heard of such an occasion. But in Seoul, where Ji-Hoon was born and raised, there was almost a monthly holiday devoted to romance. We wore similar out- fits, which Xuan said was common for couples in Asian countries. Three years was a big deal, especially when we didn’t know how many more we’d have.”
― Kayla Cunningham, Fated to Love You

“I'm wondering whether I can explain," said Lee. "Where there is no likeness of experience it's very difficult. I understand you were not born in America."
"No, in Ireland."
"And in a few years you can almost disappear; while I, who was born in Grass Valley, went to school and several years to the University of California, have no chance of mixing."
"If you cut your queue, dressed and talked like other people?"
"No. I tried it. To the so-called whites I was still a Chinese, but an untrustworthy one; and at the same time my Chinese friends steered clear of me. I had to give it up.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true. I once thought love was supposed to be nothing but bliss. I now know it is also worry and grief, hope and trust. And believing in ghosts--that's believing that love never dies. If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.”
― Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses

“It’s my fault she is this way. I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix?”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“We continued dancing as a swift gale wheeled through the hills of Santa Cruz. Xuan leaned down to whisper into my ear, his lips lightly brushing the helix. “Once upon a time there was a boy, and he loved a girl very much. He was sad because he didn’t think the girl noticed him. Until one day the uni- verse intervened and a beautiful comet brought them together after a tragic accident occurred that day. The boy and the girl found comfort and friendship in each other that night. And something new and extraordinary began to blossom under the heavens, something that would burn with such bright- ness that all the stars would be in awe. And the boy fell madly in love with the girl and promised to always find her, in this life and the next.”
“That’s my favorite story.”
Xuan smiled. “It’s the best one I’ve ever told, Ms. Steel.”
― Kayla Cunningham, Fated to Love You

“I looked at his hand clasping mine. Three years ago, on October 15, 2016, the brilliant blue blaze of the comet had crossed the vastness of our world in Colombia. I could see it, almost as if we were back there, standing on the roof of the dorms as we looked over the city together. We didn’t know it then, but our life together was just beginning.”
― Kayla Cunningham, Fated to Love You

“What makes you think I ever got married? Married women work themselves to death, all their money goes to husbands who gamble it away. Why would I ever do that to myself?”
― Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight

“Okay. I’m not a white male. At least, not predominantly so. And as I mentioned before, I’m in an environment right now where race is really important. See, Chinese men are not that physically intimidating. We’re not that tall. We’re not that built. We have exactly one thing going for us in a fight — that our opponent recognizes that there’s a possibility, no matter how remote, that we might know kung-fu.”
― Phillip Andrew Bennett Low, Indecision Now! A Libertarian Rage

“For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, 'This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.' And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Dare I ask Mao and his Communist Party?
I fear my throat will be cut into two pieces.
In the name of revolution, for thought crimes,
Such questions can turn me to ashes.”
― Zoë S. Roy, Calls Across the Pacific

“Then he asked my age, and I asked his. That's the tradition in China. If we know each other's ages we can understand each other's past. We chinese have been collective for so long, personal histories are not worth mentioning. Therefore as soon as Xiaolin and I knew how old the other was, we knew exactly what big shit happened in our lives. The introduction of the One Child Policy shortly before our births, for instance, and the fact that, in 1985, two pandas were sent to the USA as a national gift and we had to sing a tearful panda song at school. 1989 was the Tiananment Square student demonstration.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Most of my friends didn’t believe in destiny. Nothing supernatural, nothing sent from above... no magic, no fate, just life, circumstances, and probability. But there were many signs from the universe pointing to Xuan. I never thought my love story would begin as a blockbuster, but everything that happened seemed like a big neon celestial sign that we were meant to be together. My friends would never understand, not really. If I hadn’t met Xuan, I would likely feel the same as them.”
― Kayla Cunningham

“Westerners who go native with Chinese ideas are called 'eggs' - outside white, inside yellow -, and are often systematically excluded from their expat community's activities, let alone the financial support system.”
― Thorsten J. Pattberg

“The first Chinese star, they call her, and it's the qualifications that are crucial. First. Chinese. A star may play only him- or herself, but she is supposed to play a race. How can she be herself and represent millions, both at once? And who does she represent them to? To themselves or others?" Who does she thinks she is? "an outraged Nationalist critic has demanded. She wishes she could say.

Not a star, then. A star gives off its own light. Another celestial body, a moon, reflecting others' light.”
― Peter Ho Davies, The Fortunes

“They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“Some people have a great fashion of calling things they do not like yellow. You exclude the yellow man. You fear the yellow peril. I edit a white paper turned out by yellow men, and many white men turn out yellow papers.”
― Julia Flynn Siler, The White Devil's Daughters: The Fight Against Slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown

“Folks care less about which door Chinese people use nowadays, compared with when the laborers were shipped in to replace the field slaves after the war. Perhaps whites feel the same way about us as they do about ladybugs: A few are fine, but a swarm turns the stomach”
― Stacey Lee, The Downstairs Girl

“Ming searches through the family kitchen for supplies. Winnie left them overstocked with canned and dried goods, but the Chao men don't buy groceries. The fridge is stuffed with take-out containers. While Katherine pretends to catch up on emails from work, Ming digs out from the piled-up counter a sprouting yellow onion and some aged potatoes. He dices the onion, and, after digging the eyes out of the potatoes, he cubes them. He watches Katherine's reflection in the picture window. She studies his wiry hands moving with confidence from knife to bowl to pan handle. (At home, he won't use the wok.) He cracks some eggs deftly, showing off his dexterousness perhaps, and makes a savory Spanish omelet. Dagou isn't the only talented cook among the Chao brothers. The aging cabbage and the carrots from the fridge become, with a few flicks of magic, a salad, dressed with sesame oil and sweetened rice vinegar, sprinkled with sesame seeds. Ming and Katherine sit down at the cluttered kitchen table and eat together, not talking. Although doubtless Katherine would've preferred something" more authentic "----fried rice with eggs, green onions instead of yellow, and stir-fried cabbage instead of salad---the dinner leaves her curiously softened.”
― Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

“But diaspora was this, too: two cultures that could both be his, history that was waiting to be made.”
― Grace D Li

“We are more than stereotypes.
We are more than rice.
And we cry and laugh and dream
and hope.
Our passions open eyes.
Yet they spit on us and hate on us.
Yeah, they aren’t very nice.
But we won't ever wave the white flag.
Come and heed our battle cries.”
― Phoenix Ning, Eastern Dragons Don't Breathe Fire