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“The immensity of the infinite unknown was formidable, but for that brief moment, she did not feel small. With her sisters and a warm drink and flickering firelight, she only felt . . .

Possibility.”
― Maya Prasad, Drizzle, Dreams, and Lovestruck Things

“If you go to an “Asian American and Pacific Islander�� event, you’re not going to see Samoans, you’re not going to see Tongans, you’re not going to see Māori. We’re half of the acronym, but not even close to half the representation. The Indigenous story is always washed away by the immigrant story. Americans are proud to say that “we’re a nation of immigrants,�� but that’s also saying “f*ck the Indigenous people.�� We’re proud to be mixed in Hawaii, but we need to acknowledge that that comes at the price of Indigenous people. We can support each other, but there’s a difference between inclusion and erasure.”
― Jeff Yang, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

“Make no mistake about it, Ava.
I plan to win you back.
I will earn your forgiveness and trust.
Even if it takes years or even a lifetime.”
― Kaye Rockwell, Honest With You

“I can’t think when Brad looks at me like that.
Like I’m everything.
Like he can’t get enough.
Then he goes and kisses me like he can’t stand not touching me for a single second.”
― Kaye Rockwell, Glad You Exist

“I’m not going to push for more than you’re ready for. Right now, just take the time to figure things out. Hopefully you can start to see me not just as your friend but as the guy who is hopelessly in love with you.”
― Kaye Rockwell, Glad You Exist

“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

“Avani rolled her eyes. “You read too many romance novels.��

“I read exactly the right number of romance novels,�� Rani returned. “You’ll see. This family needs me.”
― Maya Prasad, Drizzle, Dreams, and Lovestruck Things

“Nothing is too much to ask for because time is so precious and fleeting and because anyone who has ever truly loved you should want the most for you and because you should want the most for yourself, too.”
― Maya Prasad, Drizzle, Dreams, and Lovestruck Things

“In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down. We are the carpenter ants of the service industry, the apparatchiks of the corporate world, we are math-crunching middle managers who keep the corporate wheels greased but who never get promoted since we don’t have the right ‘face�� for leadership. We have a content problem. They think we have no inner resources. But while I may look impassive, I'm frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.

There's a ton of literature on the self-hating Jew and the self-hating African American, but not enough has been said about the self-hating Asian. Racial self hatred is seeing yourself whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy. Your only defense is to be hard on yourself, which becomes compulsive, and therefore a comfort: to peck yourself to death. You don't like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head. Instead of solidarity, you feel that you are less than> around other Asians, the boundaries of yourself no longer distinct but congealed into a horde.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“In Pryor, I saw someone channel what I call minor feeling: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one's perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported. We have been cowed by the lie that we have it good. We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will reward us with our dignity, but our diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“In her satiric play Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, the playwright Young Jean Lee said: "The reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we are easier to get and have lower self-esteem. It's like going with an inferior brand so that you can afford more luxury features. Also, Asian women will date white guys who no white women would touch.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“Asians are always mistaken for other Asians, but the least we can do to honor the dead is to ensure they're never mistaken for anyone else again.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“Our respective racial containment isolates us from each other, enforcing our thoughts that our struggles are too specialized, unrelatable to anyone else except others in our group, which is why making myself, and by proxy other Asian Americans, more human is not enough for me. I want to destroy the universal. I want to rip it down. It is not whiteness, but our contained condition that is universal, because we are the global majority, by we, I mean nonwhites, the formally colonized. Survivors such as Native Americans, whose ancestors have already lived through endgames. Migrants and refugees living through endtimes currently, fleeing the floods and droughts and gang violence, reaped by climate changed that's been brought on by western empire. In Hollywood, whites have churned out dystopian fantasies by imagining themselves as slaves and refugees in the future.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“Justice Beyond Month (Sonnet 1182)

Pride that ends with the end of June,
is but an episode of looney tunes.
Divergence that dies with April's wake,
is no inclusion but bark of buffoons.

Black history that ends with the end of February,
is not solidarity but a hashtag cacophony.
Women's history that ends with the end of March,
is no celebration but a sacrilege of equality.

When AAPI are only visible in the month of May,
It ain't no visibility but a mockery of life.
When nativeness is welcome till October 15th,
It ain't integration but desecration of light.

Awareness is justice when it reduces prejudice.
But one that's trendy only in specific months,
is no awareness but a different kind of malice.

Acceptance is awareness, awareness is life.
100 calendars fall short to celebrate mindlight.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat