Chang Rae Lee Quotes

It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.

For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

...whether the people are happy or not in their lives, they have learned to keep steadily moving, moving all the time.

For if there is ever a moment when we are most vulnerable, it’s when we’re closest to the idea of the attained desire, and thus farthest from ourselves, which is when we’ll tread through any flame.

I'm a B+ student of life.

A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there is finally no telling exactly where it begins, where it ends, or where it places you now.

You can be affected by a person because of something particular they said or did but sometimes how a person was, a manner of being, that gets most deeply absorbed, and prompts you to revisit certain parts of your life with an enhanced perspective, flowing forward right up to now.

And while it's easy to say this is a situation to be avoided, isn't this what we also fear and crave simultaneously, that some internal force which defies understanding might remake us into the people we dream we are?

He said you could tell about a person not from what he believed, but by what worried him.

What if loving something means you should mostly feel frustrated and thwarted? And then a little ruined, too, by the pursuit? But you keep coming back for more?

Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

This is how we were meant for each other. How we make our living. The lives of frustrated poets and imposters. This, too, how the love works and then doesn't: a mutual spectacle of imagination.

But maybe it’s the laboring that gives you shape. Might the most fulfilling times be those spent solo at your tasks, literally immersed or not, when you are able to uncover the smallest surprises and unlikely details of some process or operation that in turn exposes your proclivities and prejudices both?

We feel ever obliged by everday charges and tasks. They conscript us more and more. We find world enough in a frame. Until at last we take our places at the wheel, or wall, or line, having somewhere forgotten that we can look up.

Suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.

What hasty preparations we make for our future. Think of it: it seems almost tragic, the things we’re sure we ought to bring along. We pack too heavy with what we hope we’ll use, and too light of what we must. We thus go forth misladen, ill equipped for the dawn.

And perhaps most I loved this about her, her helpless way, love it still, how she can't hide a single thing, that she looks hurt when she is hurt, seems happy when happy. That I know at every moment the precise place where she stands. What else can move a man like me, who would find nothing as siren or comforting?

Behold a fire from the opposite shore.

I would give most anything to hear my father's talk again, the crash and bang and stop of his language, always hurtling by. I will listen for him forever in the streets of this city.

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.

For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

We have hopes and make plans, and if they are dashed or waylaid, we naturally rationalize and redraw the map to locate ourselves anew. Or else we brood and too firmly root. Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears.

sometimes you can’t help but crave some ruin in what you love.

Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.

And it occurred to me that in this new millennial life of instant and ubiquitous connection, you don't in fact communicate so much as leave messages for one another, these odd improvisational performances, often sorry bits and samplings of ourselves that can't help but seem out of context. And then when you do finally reach someone, everyone's so out of practice or too hopeful or else embittered that you wonder if it would be better not to attempt contact at all.

But let's suppose another way of considering her, which was that she had a special conviction of imagination. Few of us do, to be honest. We wish and wish and often with fury but never very deeply. For if we did, we'd see how the world can sometimes split open, in just the way we hope. That it and we are, in fact, unbounded. Free.

Her endeavor was misguided and wrong and maybe plain crazy, akin to someone waking up one day and deciding he’s going to scale Kilimanjaro because he can’t stop imagining the view from the top, the picture so arresting and beautiful that it too soon delivers him to a precarious ledge, where he can no longer turn back. And while it’s easy to say this is a situation to be avoided, isn’t this what we also fear and crave simultaneously, that some internal force which defies understanding might remake us into the people we dream we are?

It seems I have always been fortunate to be in a certain provident, which must be my sole skill, and worth, and luck. [p. 138]

We reshape the story even when we believe we are simply repeating it.

In every betrayal dwells a self-betrayal.

...it seems to me that life's moments don't have to be so right or not right anymore, so fraught and weighted with "valve", but just of themselves, what they are...

Our tainted world looms within us, every one.

That Fan did not see any of this is not so ironic, for all along her journey we’ve observed more of her than she’ll ever know. She moves on, she pushes forward, this her guileless calling, and we have to remind ourselves that it’s perhaps more laudable simply to keep heading out into the world than always tilting to leave one’s mark on it.

It was in the work that she came closest to finding herself, by which we don’t mean gaining “self-knowledge” or understanding one’s “true nature” but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how you fit in the wider ecology.

And though the implication is that I am the sort who is always careful and preparing, I that that's not right, either' in fact I feel I have not really been living anywhere or anytime, not for the future and not in the past and not at all of-the-moment, but rather in a lonely dream of an oblivion, the nothing-of-nothing drift from one pulse beat to the next, which is really the most bloodless marking-out, automatic and involuntary. [pp. 320-321]

Sometimes, when he wanted to hide or not outright lie, he chose to speak in English. He used to break into it when he argued with my mother, and it drove her crazy when he did and she would just plead, "No, no!" as though he had suddenly introduced a switchblade into a clean fistfight.

indelible, our last clues to a beautiful woman

it’s perhaps more laudable simply to keep heading out into the world than always tilting to leave one’s mark on it.

In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.

I wonder if my father, given the chance, would have wished to go back to the time before he made all that money, when he just had one store and we rented a tiny apartment in Queens. He worked hard and had worries but he had a joy then that he never seemed to regain once the money started coming in. He might turn on the radio and dance cheek to cheek with my mother. He worked on his car himself, a used green Impala with carburetor trouble. They had lots of Korean friends that they met in church and then even in the street, and when they talked in public there was a shared sense of how lucky they were, to be in America but still have countrymen near.

Moment to moment, we act freely, we make decisions and form opinions and there is very little to throttle us. We think each of us has a map marked with private routings and preferred habitual destinations, and go by a legend of our own. Yet it turns out you can overlay them and see a most amazing correspondence; what you believed were very personal contours aligning not exactly but enough that while our via points may diverge, our endings do not.

For no matter the shadows of an age, the picture of a young couple in love, we are told, speaks most luminously of the future, as the span of that passion makes us believe we can overleap any walls, obliterate whatever obstacles.

There is something universally chilling about a new plot. And I could see how my boy needed time and space for a story to bloom in his mind, because at any age what comes before sight is a conjuring. A trope, which is just a way to believe.

Isn’t it better that we send them off once and for all beneath the glow of carnival lights, with the taste of treats on our tongues, rather than invite the acrid tang of doubt, and undue longing, and the heart-stab of a freshly sundered bond?

I know again why I favor it so much here, how I esteem the hush of this suburban foliage in every season, the surprising naturalness of its studied, human plan, how the privying hills and vales and dead-end lanes make one feel this indeed is the good and decent living, a cloister for those of us who are modest and unspecial. [p. 130}

The constant cry is that you belong here, or you make yourself belong, or you must go. (1998: 319)

If there is ever a moment when we are most vulnerable, it's when we're closest to the idea of the attained desire, and thus farthest from ourselves, which is when we'll tread through any flame.

For each of us has a perch on the tree. After we are gone, that perch is marked by a notch, permanent, yes, but with its edges muting over time, assuming the tree is ever growing. Years from now someone can see that you were here, or there, and although you had little conception or care for the wider branching, in the next life there might be a sigh of wonder at how quietly flourishing it all was, if never majestic.

He should have had more faith in himself rather than give in to his weaker qualities, in particular his overeagerness to please and aversion to conflict and a lifelong infatuation with hope, which had him dreaming more than doing

I'm am a woman of change, But i am a woman of my word.

In America, he said, it’s even hard to stay Korean.

And too intense a longing, everyone knows, can lead to poor decisions, rash actions, hopes that become outsized and in turn deform reality

She was quite enrapt, we were certain, even as her face remained almost totally blank, just as a drinking glass remains unchanged when filled with water but of course it is not at all the same.

We have to wonder what this might suggest about the relationship between the public realm and private lives in our settlement. Some have proposed that we need to do more in encouraging individual interests and pursuits, even if they don't appear terribly useful or practical, to bolster and deepen those inner reserves that "make" a person into who she is, and how, by extension, she identifies and values herself. Other, more conservative, voices balk at this, countering that we need, in fact, to strengthen the bonds of the commune, so that to end one's own life would be tantamount to a grievous assault on us all.... But if we calm ourselves and open our eyes and step back far enough, we have to admit that our society, if not fundamentally unwell, has been profoundly wounded.

She believed that displays of emotion signaled a certain failure between people. The only person who could upset her, make her cry or laugh in the open, was my father. He could always unsettle her face with a stern admonition or an old joke or pun in Korean. Otherwise, I thought she possessed the most exquisite control over the muscles of her face. She seemed to have the subtle power of inflection over them, the way a tongue can move air.

We shouldn’t take for granted the security and comfort of our neighborhoods, we shouldn’t think that always leaving our windows open and our doors unlocked means that we’re beyond an encroachment. We may believe our gates are insurmountable and that we’re armored by routines, but can’t we be touched by chance or fate, plucked up like a mouse foraging along his well-worn trail? Before you know it, you’re looking down at the last faint print of your claws in the dirt.

Or maybe another baby might have helped us. Another try. Of course, that's the worst reason to have a child, anyone on the street can tell you that, because no one can handle being an attempt at something from the very start, (1998: 200)

What does the pilgrim hope for at journey's end? Her beliefs confirmed? Revelation? Or does she secretly wish that the destination never quite materializes, that it keeps receding, ever shrouded in the distance, all the more to feed an inextinguishable devotion?

There are also some moving sections about World War II in Anthony Burgess’s Any Old Iron, Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman, Kit Reed’s At War As Children, Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, and Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See.

A quantum of sweetness... what he meant was not just that a person should have a rightful share of whatever way you’d like to define sweetness, but also that the sweetness itself carries a special levy of contemplation of the infinitudes of sweetness that will go untasted, be forever unknown.

The men I've been with have this idea to make me over. I feel like a rock in some boy's polishing kit. I go in dull, scratched up, and then rumble rumble whirr, I'm supposed to come out precious and sparkling again." "Does it work?" "They seem to think so." "How do you feel?" I asked. "A little smaller." (1998: 148- 149)

It is in the rules, a woman like that. There is no choice. With someone like Sophie, you are part of a greater agency, you make sure things are going right for her. If she is not mean-spirited or too selfish, you fall in love. You grow up, you become a man, you realize you have clear responsibilities. Then you are truly with her. You are partners.

Fan would have expected that one or two of the Girls would have long rebelled at spending a life in a room, would have begged, say, the dentist, to help them steal away, but the funny thing about this existence is that once firmly settled we occupy it with less guard than we know. We watch ourselves routinely brushing our teeth, or coloring the wall, or blowing off the burn from a steaming yarn of soup noodles, and for every moment there is a companion moment that elides onto it, a secret span that deepens the original’s stamp. We feel ever obliged by everyday charges and tasks. They conscript us more and more. We find world enough in a frame. Until at last we take our places at the wheel, or wall, or line, having somewhere forgotten that we can look up.

The more we follow the turns of her journey, the more we realize that she is not quite the champion we would normally sing; she is not the heroine who wields the great sword; she is not the bearer of wisdom and light; she does not head the growing column, leading a new march. She is one of the ranks, this perfectly ordinary, exquisitely tiny person in whom we will reside, via both living and dreaming.

He handed her a plastic container of dried fruit Loreen had packed for the trip to use as a steering wheel so she could practice matching the turns....Fan's arms began to ache from holding up the container but she was beginning to enjoy herself, too, feeling an unlikely liberty and exhilaration, which if you think about it, can be seen as a good approximation of this life, where control is more believed than actual.

I've read the dying feel no pain but sense everything that goes on around them. They view the scene from a brief distance above and no matter who they are or how old, they gain a wisdom from that last vista. But we are the living, remaining on the ground, and what we know is the narrow and the unbroken. Here, we are strewn about in in the lengthy expanse of an archipelago, too far to call one another, too far to see.

And I do not live in broad infamy, nor hide from righteous pursuers or seekers of the truth. I do not mask my face or screen my doings of each day. I have not yet been banished from this earth. And though nearly every soul I've closely known has come to some dread or grave misfortune, I instead persist, with warmth and privilege accruing to me unabated, ever securing my good station here, the last place I will belong.

I knew I could have tried to comfort her, perhaps telling her how John Kim was probably just as hurt as she was and that his silence was more complicated than she presently understood. That perhaps the ways of his mother and his father had occupied whole regions of his heart. I know this. We perhaps depend too often on the faulty honor of silence, use it too liberally and for gaining advantage. I showed Lelia how this was done, sometimes brutally, my face a peerless mask, the bluntest instrument. (1998: 88-89)

It struck her how a man could seem to gain a little bit of magic or grace or virtue with every woman he was with, but that a woman--though she said maybe should should be fair and just speak for herself--relinquished something each time, even if it ended mutually and well.

Rita turns her face away and buries it in my neck, as if she can't bear to meet my eyes out of shame and self-disbelief, such that I can almost hear her mind going Idiot I am he's such a slime, and so it occurs to me that I should hug her as tightly and chastely as I know how, which I do, and in mid-clutch she sort of cracks, literally, her spine aligning with the sudden gravity, and I pretty much carry her to the sofa before I ease her up onto it, hands cupping her thighs, head in her throat, rubbing my face in the heat-heavy spot of her wishbone, the tiny redolent dugout I've tasted thousands of times. And if I could remake myself into just that shape and size it's right here I think I would forever reside.

THE JOURNEY WAS NEARLY OVER. The

I still imagine Mr. Kim's and Mr. Yoon's children, lonely for their fathers, gratefully eating whatever was brought home to them, our overripe and almost rotten mangoes, our papayas, kiwis, pineapples, those exotic tastes of their wondrous new country, this joyful fruit now too soft and too sweet for those of us who knew better, us near natives, us earlier Americans.

You never really said anything about what you Koreans believe in" she said. "Staying out of trouble," I said.

We nearly pressed each other to death, our swollen lips and eyes, wishing up on ourselves the fall of tears, that great free anger, that great obese heft of melancholy, enough of it piling on at once so that sometimes whether we wanted to or not we made love so hard and gritty we had to say fuck to be telling the very first part of the truth. In the bed, in the space between us, it was about the sad way of flesh, alive or dead or caught in between, it was about what must happen between people who lose forever the trust moment of their union.

My father like all successful immigrants before him gently and not so gently exploited his own. "This is way I learn business, this is way they learn business.

Americanah; Ayad Akhtar, American Dervish; Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents; Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Teju Cole, Open City; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds; Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban and King of Cuba; Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker.

(…) la belleza es la bendición más precaria y que, pese a que siempre parece atraer la gloria y la alabanza, quienes la poseen suelen concitar la mezquindad y la malevolencia.

People still vote for what they think they want; they're calling on a bright memory of a time that has gone, rather than voting for and demanding what they need for their children.

For let’s be honest, who is entirely well, lacking one? I mean throughout your life, so that you can proceed steadily, confidently, and without certain inevitable collapses?

I haven't spoken to him since before that. I never understood how he could just drop me like that. Is it a Korean thing? I mean, what kind of person does that?

I wondered if anything would have turned out differently had a careless nurse switched the two of us in a hospital nursery, whether his family would be significantly changed, whether mine would have been, whether any of us Koreans, raised as we were, would sense the barest tinge of a loss or estrangement.

I better tell you before, I know, but I know you don't like. So what I do?

Every means and source of struggle. They peeled and sorted and bunched and sprayed and cleaned and stacked and shelved and swept; my father put them to anything for which they didn't have to speak. They both had college degrees and knew no one in the country and spoke little English. The men, whom I knew as Mr. Yoon and Mr. Kim, were both recent immigrants in their thirties with wives and young children. They worked twelve-hour days six days a week for $200 cash and meals and all the fruit and vegetables we couldn't or wouldn't sell; it was the typical arrangement. My father like all successful immigrants before him gently and not so gently exploited his own.

The only noticeable thing was that he would come home much earlier than usual, maybe four in the afternoon instead of the usual eight or nine. He said he didn't want me coming home from school to an empty house, though he didn't actually spend any more time with me.

That perhaps the ways of his mother and his father had occupied whole regions of his heart. I know this.

I told him I would go up there; he said no, no, everything was fine. I drove up anyway and when I opened the door to the house he was sitting alone in the kitchen, the kettle on the stove madly whistling away. He was fast asleep; after the stroke he sometimes nodded off in the middle of things. I woke him, and when he saw me he patted my cheek. 'Good boy,' he muttered. I made him change his clothes and then fixed us a dinner of fried rice from some leftovers.

He didn't say anything and just helped me to my room...He gently patted my back and then left the house and drove off to one of his stores in the city.

Don't shame him! Your father is very proud. You don't know this, but he graduated from the best college in Korea, the very top, and he doesn't need to talk about selling fruits and vegetables. It's below him. He only does it for you, Byong-ho, he does everything for you. Now go and keep him company...I would learn in subsequent years that he had been trained as an industrial engineer, and had actually completed a master's degree.

Most of us can’t accept that the gig is ours, so we lurk around, we tug and scratch at ourselves as if in borrowed skins, and never fully belong to the moments that can steadily add up to nothing a lot quicker than you think.

life at its most complete and comfortable can feel like you’ve suddenly discovered yourself sous-viding in a plunge tub set exactly at your body temperature. One day the water’s no longer fine, which is when you crave a chill in your gut, a fresh sear on your chicken-tender ass, something to pep you the fuck up.

The official record ends there. But the story of what happened afterward is well-know, or at least it has been recounted by everyone in B-Mor—any maybe beyond—many times over, in messages and postings and vids and songs and, yes, in plain words, too, spoken to one another in the quieter moments of the evening, when the muscles are all used up to the point of near numbness and we feel more as though we are piloting our bodies rather than being at one with them, cooped up at the top and looking outward uncertain of what is real and what is perceived. And in this state of mind we can't help but build upon what is known, our elaborations not fantastical or untrue but at times vulnerable to our wishes for her, and for ourselves

We forget that every fervor will subside.

the most wretched of sights, the just-crushed spirit.

What is this?

Her father was one of those tall, angular, self-embalming types. All balls and liver. His kind predated the notion of alcoholism. Groton, Princeton, Harvard Business School. His neatly clipped silver hair and tailored suits and unmitigating stare of eyes and trim old body said it all over in a simple, clear language: Chief Executive Officer. Do not fuck with this man.

Does any program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?

Thank goodness they are curious! It's a sign of healthy minds. And while it may be obvious, it's our responsibility to educate them to the idea that romancing the unknown is attended by myriad possibilities, too, shepherding them through those heady periods of urge and instinct when they think they can soar, and deliver them, we hope whole, to a place where perspective begins to reign, where they know that the groggy old bear at the zoo will instantly wake the moment you step inside the cage.

If she possessed a genius—and a growing number of us think she did—it was a capacity for understanding and trusting the improvisational nature of her will. This might seem a contradictory state, and for most of us it would be. We have hopes and make plans, and if they are dashed or waylaid, we naturally rationalize and redraw the map to locate ourselves anew. Or else we brood and too firmly root. Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears. Fan was different. As we have come to realize, she was not one to hold herself back. Or to be fettered. In this way she startles us, inspires us. She was someone who pursued her project as a genuine artist might, following with focus and intensity as well as an enduring innocence a goal she could not quite yet understand or see but wholly believed.

Imagination might not be limitless. It’s still tethered to the universe of what we know, and as wild as our dreams might be, we can’t help but read them with the same grounded circumspection that guided our forebears when they mapped out our walls.