As I got older, I realised that people saw me as other things - sometimes Korean, sometimes Japanese, sometimes just Asian. When my family moved to a more affluent white neighbourhood, I started to see myself as 'other', this amorphous category. I didn't even know what 'not other' was, but I knew I wasn't it; I wasn't what was normal.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the experience of racial identity and feeling like an outsider due to societal perceptions.
In this quote, Jenny Zhang discusses how her understanding of her identity evolved as she grew older, particularly in response to the way others categorized her based on her ethnicity. Moving to a predominantly white neighborhood led her to recognize herself as 'other,' prompting a sense of alienation as she navigated her identity in a context where she felt she did not belong to the 'normal' or dominant cultural group.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about cultural identity at a diversity workshop.
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.
In general-like not just in fiction but in life-it doesn't work out well when someone imagines someone else as a manic pixie dream girl or an Edward Cullen or anything other than a full, complex human being. That said, while I've tried to reflect that in my books, I don't think I've always succeeded, because I am always running up against my own insufficiencies and biases etc.
We must be our own before we can be another's.
You took the best, so why not take the rest?
At least 260 species of animal have been noted exhibiting homosexual behavior but only one species of animal ever, so far as we know, has exhibited homophobic behavior - and that's the human being.
He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.
I don't believe in marriage. It's bloody impractical. 'To love, honor, and obey.' If it weren't, you wouldn't have to sign a contract.
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