Jenny Zhang

“Rage can be so common it turns ambient.”

“When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than t...”

“The reader who likes my stories, I think they would see the violence on the surface, but I think they would also see a deeper violence - the one that's not as showy or as immediately arresti...”

“If you were to make a quick judgment call on my intelligence and articulation when I first moved to the U.S. based on my speaking skills, it would be very low.”

“Mothers have always held such symbolic weight in determining a person's worth. Your mother tongue, your motherland, your mother's values - these things can qualify or disqualify you from att...”

“With nonfiction, I had to learn how to be a clear communicator, but it was also a relief to be able to articulate some of my political ideas and beliefs. I also try to do that in my fiction,...”

“Does self-acceptance ultimately require another person, or is there a kind of love that does not dabble in the dream of a perfect twinship?”

“My privileged upbringing and education and linguistic fluency gave me such proximity to whiteness that it stung all the more to still find myself outside of it. My mother, on the other hand,...”

“Early in my life, without any supporting evidence, I fretted over what I believed was my fate: accidentally becoming an international pop star. The pages of my diary were filled with hypothe...”

“It's very Western to idealize a kind of love that does not come with any expectations, that still permits both the giver and recipient to be completely free.”

“I think Lena Dunham, the public figure, is - I hate the word 'brand,' but I'm going to use it - it's such a brand that is so tethered to her public persona and to 'Girls', but also this prog...”

“Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who founded Lenny Books together, also happen to have exquisite reading tastes - from obscure small press poetry chapbook to dishy memoirs to literary novels -...”

“The year my mom worked as a secretary at an apparel company in midtown, she would often come home in tears because she had mistakenly called her boss by another coworker's name. 'You know ho...”

“I hadn't ever worked with an 'editor' until I was 26 - although that could be partly chalked up to the MFA vs. NYC thing, where I came up through institutions that encouraged writers to writ...”

“I just submitted what I had to the 'Octopus Books' contest open reading period, and they said they wanted to publish my poetry book. Then I started to publish more and more poetry because pe...”

“Karaoke was my family's happy secret. In those early years in America, like many immigrants, my parents struggled with poverty and loneliness, but they also built provisional families, and i...”

“While I was growing up in Flushing, Queens, we socialized exclusively with other Chinese immigrants. I was forbidden to make contact with nonapproved, non-Chinese peers outside school. That...”

“Chinese people of my parents' generation who lived through the Cultural Revolution knew so much of death at such a young age, and the psychic toll those experiences left was immense. I knew...”

“Asian American success is often presented as something of a horror - robotic, unfeeling machines psychotically hellbent on excelling, products of abusive tiger parenting who care only about...”

“I'm always interested in what is seen as obscene or profane or unfit.”