Page 9
You couldn’t discriminate against the right answer. But I preferred to spend my time interpreting things.
Page 11
We spent summers and winters in Hsinchu; weeks would pass when the only people I spoke to were my parents and their middle-aged friends.
Page 21
The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories.
Page 40
When you’re young, you are certain of your capacity to imagine a way out of the previous generation’s problems. There is a different way to grow old, paths that don’t involve conforming and selling out. We would figure it out together, and we would be different together. I just had to find people to be different with.
Page 57
The present was a drag. We lived for the future. Youth is a pursuit of this kind of small immortality. You want to leave something behind.
Page 64
It was only in my zine that I admitted to dreaming of anything great. In real life, I feared stepping into too large a world and failing. But I wrote things that were earnest and open, that I would never dare say out loud.
Page 68
You make a world out of the things you buy. Everything you pick up is a potential gateway, a tiny, cosmetic change that might blossom into an entirely new you.
Page 101
Everybody likes something — a song, a movie, a TV show — so you choose not to; this is how you carve out space for yourself.
Page 180
Sifting through these small moments of the past was a way of resisting the future.
