Let's stop reflexively comparing Chinese writers to Chinese writers, Indian writers to Indian writers, black writers to black writers. Let's focus on the writing itself: the characters, the language, the narrative style.
Celeste NgRead
Spend enough time wrangling a toddler, and you get good at being kind but firm. Like your child, you must be doggedly single-minded when it matters.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Effective parenting requires balancing kindness and firmness while being determined in important matters.
In this quote, Celeste Ng highlights the duality of parenting where nurturing a child's needs must be balanced with the need to set boundaries. The act of wrangling a toddler teaches parents to be compassionate yet resolute, emphasizing that both qualities are essential in raising a disciplined and loving child who understands the importance of focus and perseverance.
Themes
ParentingKindnessFirmnessDeterminationChild-Rearing
In practice
Example use cases
During a parenting workshop to illustrate effective parenting strategies.
More from Celeste Ng
All quotes βFor me, any story I tackle begins with the human relationships and not the plot.
Celeste NgRead
It's so easy, as a writer, to get stuck in your own head, to live in the little worlds you create. To forget that there are people out there reading your work, people who may be deeply affected by what you do, that you are writing not just for yourself, but for them.
Celeste NgRead
What I remember about race relations in the 1990s is that you showed your awareness by saying you didn't see race, that you were colour-blind.
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In fiction you're not often writing about the typical; you are interested in outliers, the points of interest. Part of it comes from feeling I was the only Asian or person of colour... another part comes from my personality: I'm an introvert, and my usual survival mode in a large group is to stand by a wall and watch everybody.
Celeste NgRead
Writing is like shouting into the world. So when someone shouts back, it's a really big deal. To have people who read hundreds and hundreds of books a year say, 'Hey, we thought this was really great,' that's a huge self-esteem boost.
Celeste NgRead
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The real meditative practice is to open up to the full range of what happens in life. And parenting is a fantastic arena for doing that kind of spiritual training. It's as much a potential door into enlightenment as anything else.
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