asian-americans

"Have no fear of perfection; you'll never reach it."

"A really strong woman accepts the war she went through and is ennobles by her scars."

"If you're a writer, you do get pulled toward that, attracted toward that idea of duality, because it is what attracts you to language. The idea of language as not just attentive to the surface matter of experience, but to the other things that might lie underneath, is why we write. (2006)"

"One cannot expect to be a writer without being a reader!…I often draw from contemporary works, but I remind my students that radical progression does not only mean looking for the newest thing: it also comes from a reinvigorated understanding of how works that have come before us -- including the classics -- can instruct us in new ways. I like to remind my students too that we may be heir to certain cultural histories and traditions, ways of doing things with language -- but that there are other global traditions of literature and we have really only just skimmed the surface in our understanding of these riches. (2014)"

"I feel that poetry is mystery, an intangible magic that I approach again and again in the hopes that I might be able to learn some of its lessons well. (2006)"

"(LR: Do you have any advice for young poets just out of, or in the midst of, writing programs?) LI: Don’t lose whatever fuels your passion for life and for language. Don’t lose the fire in your gut. (2009)"

"I believe that art does not arise out of a void, and that it is effective when it makes heartfelt human connections, and even more so when it enables a sense of agency (the belief that there is something we can do in the world so that change might be effected). There is power in its ability to engage memory and intellect, compress and distill emotion, idea, and experience—and it is this power which poets and writers seek to harness when speaking to others through their art. Why does one have to sing, when there is suffering? Why is beauty necessary, when there is so much poverty or violence or depravity in the world? (2009)"

"Every poem carries the seed of a story. And like music, it’s able to get to the emotional heart of an experience, sometimes even before we grasp the idea of it. It’s that capacity for opening up and listening more deeply to the world around us that poetry offers. Poetry is powerful this way because it asks us to really pay attention to the world. I think poems can convey some of our deepest feelings in images, in language that shows rather than masks. The sense of communing with others, which is at the root of the idea of community, is when we feel we can talk to each other about our joys, our doubts, our fears, our hopes—in the same way, perhaps, in which a poem talks to us and invites us in. (2022)"

"Writing poetry is always a little archaeological—we dig and sift not only through our fund of experiences and memories, but also through a variety of textual fragments. As a writer in the diaspora, I am always reminded that the past, history, is a hallucinatory presence right here with us; that our life in the contemporary moment is marked by the displacements that time is eternally enacting."

"Written in an English of singular resonance, of lyric richness informed by history, by legend, by political awareness, and everywhere by a deep perception, the poems of this and her other books bring her background of Philippine culture, its past and present, into the larger world of late 20th Century concerns. This is a poetry outside of schools, of fads and fashion, highly accomplished and deserving of wide, enthusiastic readership."

"I think what I was trying to say in Trill & Mordent (2005) is that we are all affected by this climate of anxiety; we're living in an age of terror. People are getting deployed; there's the fear of avian flu, and those riots in Paris. What do you do in the face of anxiety? Do you go into a hole and shut yourself up in a safe place and not come out again? I've heard people say how hard it was for them to do the normal things they enjoyed after 9/11, or after those sniper shootings, or after every event tinged with tragedy or trauma. But you need to find a way back to the experience of beauty and release, and I think that's what I was trying to say in this book. (2006)"

"History is a field at once very large and very intimate. But I like to think of the past as not completely done, of history’s archives as not static; we can enter the archive, we can reconstruct and re-imagine events, we can insert ourselves as figures or characters into its landscapes."

"...what we love most fiercely, the joys that deliver the keenest edge -- are the way they are because we understand their perishability. (2014)"

"What I am most moved by about poetry through all these years, is how it works in this ineffable register—how it’s really something (in the way that we would say, isn’t that something? meaning, how amazing is it!) to note that we often don’t even know what it is that’s seized us by the hair-roots, or caught us in the gut. For me it’s a process that very much begins with intuition—in the gut, or in the heart. The “head” or thinking part of it starts to get involved as we follow the lure, whatever it was to begin with, and try to figure out what shape and structure to house it in. (2009)"

"Desperate eunuch"

"Kamala's dangerous rhetoric is directly to blame for the multiple assassination attempts against President Trump, and she continues to stoke the flames of violence, all in the name of politics. She is despicable, and her grotesque behavior proves she is wholly unfit for office."

"The so-called no kings protests have been a complete and utter failure with minuscule attendance."

"Despite the threat of rain, over 250,000 patriots showed up to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army."

"It's clear to see that Haley's campaign is just one giant grift to either build her name ID for life after politics or to audition for a cable news contributor contract."

"He can barely put two coherent sentences together and slowly shuffles around like he has a full diaper in his pants, often falling on his a** in front of the world."

"CNN had this blithering idiot on @InsidePolitics from the Daily Beast named @JoannaColes making unsubstantiated claims about President Trump’s health. Joanna is a piece of s***, clearly suffering from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome rotting her pea-sized brain."

"Everything she's ever achieved will be thrown into a dumpster fire that she lit herself."

"I have always been interested in conducting observational experiments, large or small, making use of aircraft, radar, satellite, etc. I also like to collect my personal data and analyze them when I am tired of doing scientific research for too long. [...] During the four postwar years in Japan, I experienced a 10,000% inflation rate. Keeping the bitter memory in mind, I worked on my own financial experiment from time to time while drinking glasses of beer."

"Ted had an amazing curiosity to investigate everything. [His] publications still set the standard which we can only improve upon but never replace."

"I got into a tremendous argument. [...] You talk about a tornado; people take lots of pictures of a ‘nice’ tornado [which has] one funnel. How can I say there's a small vortex running around, dancing around? [They] said: ‘You're dead wrong.’ But I still pursued my concept."

"Indianapolis TV stations sent me a beautiful [movie] that showed my suction vortices dancing around, and I went to the spot to find exactly what I expected. One house was damaged; the one right next to it was standing, untouched. Houses located in between the path of suction vortices left standing confirmed everything."

"He was so much more than ‘Mr. Tornado.’ He had a way to beautifully organize observations that would speak the truth of the phenomenon he was studying. He taught people how to think about these storms in a creative way that gets the storm, its behavior. He has so many legacies."

"He said people shouldn’t be afraid to propose ideas. You don’t want to be so scared that you don’t propose something you believe in."

"The Japanese had the habit of sticking pieces of bamboo into the ground at cemeteries to hold flowers. So he went to all of the graveyards around town and measured the burn shadows on the insides of the bamboo flutes—the sides that had been facing away from the explosion. And just from that, he was able to triangulate very precisely where the bomb had come from and how far up in the sky it had been when it exploded."

"What made Ted unique was his forensic or engineering approach to meteorology. [...] Only Ted would spend dozens of hours lining up 100-plus photos of the Fargo [North Dakota] tornado to create a timeline so he could study the birth, life and death of that tornado. Ted was absolutely meticulous."

"People would just say, 'That was a weak tornado, or that was a strong tornado,’ and that was pretty much before his scale came out, that's how it was recorded. But now even today you say EF5, or back in Fujita's day, F5 -- people know exactly what you're talking about."

"I consider my time spent with Ted the personal highlight of my professional career. I started at the University of Chicago unsure of my abilities to succeed. I left with a wealth of knowledge and confidence that I could successfully embark on a teaching and research career. Fujita was a demanding advisor, but his enthusiasm, deep insights, and ability to conceptualize mesoscale processes were truly inspiring. Ted loved to argue with other researchers when there was pushback for his suction vortex model, the existence of microbursts, and the accuracy of his windspeed estimates based on the F-scale. Debates on these topics seem to energize him, and he often said that time would prove that his theories were correct. I was always in awe that his seminars and other public events would be literally packed to the rafters. He was a brilliant speaker and one of the greatest spokespersons for our community. I often think that today's TED talks were appropriately named after him."

"I consider him, and most people do, the father of tornado research. Nobody thought there were would be multiple vortices in a tornado but there are. There are small swirls within tornadoes. That’s what helps explain why damage is so funky in a tornado."

"I was struck, as a child first learning about Fujita's work, by how even I could understand many of his graphics. They were simultaneously highly complex and yet crystal clear in their content and messaging….practically works of art, even more so because each image or frame of animation was painstakingly drafted by Fujita's own hand. As a junior scientist, the lesson I took is that one can almost never spend too much time perfecting a figure. It will be remembered long after the accompanying, explanatory text is forgotten."

"As a tornado nerd growing up in Minnesota in the 1980s, Fujita was a supernatural figure. I consider myself an heir of his scientific legacy. No matter which line of scientific inquiry I make in my tornado research, I always seem to come back to Fujita's books and papers. [...] Even today with mobile Doppler radars, accurate wind measurements in tornadoes are exceedingly rare. Fujita recognized that the only consistently available indicator of a tornado's wind speed is the damage path that it leaves behind. By studying hundreds of tornado damage tracks, he was able to correlate damage to a standard indicator (a well-built house) to wind speeds, thereby creating the Fujita scale that is the basis for the Enhanced Fujita scale that we use today. All of this research was done without the aid of Doppler radars, drones, or machine learning."

"He used to say that the computer doesn’t understand these things."

"My term “minor feelings” is deeply indebted to theorist Sianne Ngai, who wrote extensively on the affective qualities of ugly feelings, negative emotions—like envy, irritation, and boredom—symptomatic of today’s late-capitalist gig economy."

"In many Asian American novels, writers set trauma in a distant mother country or within an insular Asian family to ensure that their pain is not a reproof against American imperial geopolitics or domestic racism; the outlying forces that cause their pain—Asian Patriarchal Fathers, White People Back Then—are remote enough to allow everyone, including the reader, off the hook."

"I’d rather be indebted than be the kind of white man who thinks the world owes him, because to live an ethical life is to be held accountable to history."

"The most damaging legacy of the West has been its power to decide who our enemies are, turning us not only against our own people, like North and South Korea, but turning me against myself."

"A lot of us come from countries—if you’re South Asian or Southeast Asian—that have been colonized by Western powers. But that’s never talked about. It’s almost as if in immigrant stories we’re supposed to forget our past once our family comes over here. Or there is a kind of writing about the past, but it’s divorced from US foreign policy. It comes from immigrant parents as well. They say, “Oh, you’re here, it’s a rich land, and there are so many opportunities here, you should be grateful,” without actually acknowledging why we ended up here in the first place. I wanted to show how it was all interrelated."

"I have to address whiteness because Asian Americans have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy of this country."

"Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement."

"Racism is never new. It just changes, it adapts. I think people are louder. But when I hear Asians being called “chink” on the street, that’s not really different from what I experienced as a kid. It’s all part of a historical continuum. The issue is that people forget. My book is not offering new ideas exactly, it’s just a reminder. It’s a reminder of the history of Asian Americans in this white supremacist capitalist nation. I think sometimes we get lulled because we forget. Being a person of color, you’re either invisible or hypervisible. And when you’re hypervisible, your hypervisibility—when there’s a target on your back—is dependent entirely on what’s happening economically in this nation, or what’s happening with foreign policy. One year it’s Muslims, another year it’s undocumented Latinx people, and this year it’s East Asians. It’s like musical chairs."

"Two thousand and sixteen was the year of white tears...And white tears are why 63 percent of white men and 53 percent of white women elected a malignant man-child as their leader. For to be aware of history, they would be forced to be held accountable, and rather than face that shame, they'd rather, by any means necessary, maintain their innocence."

"Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How do we speak honestly about the Asian American condition—if such a thing exists?"

"Whether our families come from Guatemala, Afghanistan, or South Korea, the immigrants since 1965 have shared histories that extend beyond this nation, to our countries of origin, where our lineage has been decimated by Western imperialism, war, and dictatorships orchestrated or supported by the United States. In our efforts to belong in America, we act grateful, as if we've been given a second chance at life. But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us but how the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy has enriched itself off the blood of our countries. We cannot forget this."

"The Western is now a global fantasy. It’s hard to pin down what the myth means because the frontier is now so abstract. To dream of the frontier is to dream of progress. But there’s also the fantasy of the frontier as being lawless. There are no regulations that hamper the body; there is no superego in the frontier."

"Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst"

"The flip side of innocence is shame."