Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.
. . .
Our countrymen preferred euphemisms to acronyms, calling people like me the dust of life. More technically, the Oxford English Dictionary I consulted at Occidental revealed that I could be called a “natural child,” while the law in all countries I know of hails me as its illegitimate son. My mother called me her love child, but I do not like to dwell on that. In the end, my father had it right. He called me nothing at all.
. . .
[H]e was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.
. . .
Even if they found themselves in Heaven, our countrymen would find occasion to remark that it was not as warm as Hell.
. . .
Although every country thought itself superior in its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many “super” terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?
. . .
Still, no matter how divided, all saw themselves as patriots fighting for a country to which they belonged.
. . .
It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.
. . .
So I fell in love with Phi Phi, a harmless enough emotion. I was wont to fall in love two or three times a year and was now well past due.
. . .
Like all good students, I yearned for nothing but approval, even from fools.
. . .
Even poor people in America had refrigerators, not to mention running water, flush toilets, and twenty-four-hour electricity, amenities that even some of the middle class did not have back home. Why, then, did I feel poor?
. . .
Always a shy one, he swallowed his pill of Catholicism seriously. He was more embarrassed and discreet about sex than about things I thought more difficult, like killing people, which pretty much defined the history of Catholicism, where sex of the homo, hetero, or pederastic variety supposedly never happened, hidden underneath the Vatican’s cassocks.
. . .
Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much. I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word “murder” made us mumble as much as the word “masturbation.”
. . .
While he was an expert by necessity, I was a novice by choice, despite having had my opportunities.
. . .
The airing of moral doubts was as tiresome as the airing of domestic squabbles, no one really interested except for the ones directly involved.
. . .
We threatened the sanctity and symmetry of a white and black America whose yin and yang racial politics left no room for any other color, particularly that of pathetic little yellow-skinned people pickpocketing the American purse.
. . .
A slogan is just an empty suit, she said. Anyone can wear it.
. . .
Have you ever noticed how a white man can learn a few words of some Asian language and we just eat it up? He could ask for a glass of water and we’d treat him like Einstein.
. . .
I was impure, and impurity was all I wanted and all I deserved.
. . .
One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else’s pain until we talk about it.
. . .
I had failed and the Auteur would make The Hamlet as he intended, with my countrymen serving merely as raw material for an epic about white men saving good yellow people from bad yellow people. I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit.
. . .
We don’t succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do.
. . .
I was careful, then, to present myself as just another immigrant, glad to be in the land where the pursuit of happiness was guaranteed in writing, which, when one comes to think about it, is not such a great deal. Now a guarantee of happiness—that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket.
. . .
Drenched in café au lait stucco, the mall was bordered by an example of America’s most unique architectural contribution to the world, a parking lot. Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better? One could drive for miles along a boulevard and see nothing but parking lots and the kudzu of strip malls catering to every need, from pet shops to water dispensaries to ethnic restaurants and every other imaginable category of mom-and-pop small business, each one an advertisement for the pursuit of happiness.
. . .
Art could not be separated from politics, and politics needed art in order to reach the people where they lived, through entertaining them.
. . .
They owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in edgewise before our anonymous deaths.
. . .
The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just. At least we who believe in our own guilt know what dark things we can do.
. . .
Five thousand dollars is wonderful if I thought only of myself, but an Asian—here I paused and allowed a faraway look to come into my eyes, the better to give them time to imagine the vast genealogical banyan tree extending above me, overshadowing me with the oppressive weight of generations come to root on the top of my head—an Asian cannot think just about himself.
. . .
I admit to not being an aficionado of children, having been one and having found my cohort and myself generally despicable. Unlike many, I was not intent on reproducing myself, deliberately or accidentally, since one of myself was more than enough for me to handle. But these children, just a year old, were still unconscious of their guilt. In their sleeping, alien faces I could see them as the naked and easily frightened new immigrants they were, so recently exiled into our world.
. . .
Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen.
. . .
It seems to me that one way to understand a person’s character is to understand what he thinks of others, especially those like oneself.
. . .
Spiritual teleportation unsettled most people, who, if they thought of others at all, preferred to think that others were just like them or could be just like them.
. . .
Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word.
. . .
Before I only wanted to change the world. I still want that, but it was ironic how I never wanted to change myself. Yet that’s where revolutions start! And it’s the only way revolutions can continue, if we keep looking inward, looking at how others might see us.
. . .
Your problem isn’t that you think too much; your problem is letting everyone know what you’re thinking.
. . .
But the only thing harder than knowing the right thing to do, I went on, is to actually do the right thing.
. . .
While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored.
. . .
I was guilty of the crime of doing nothing. I was the man to whom things are done because he had done nothing!
. . .
[T]ime howled in my ear, screaming with laughter at the idea that we could control it with wristwatches, alarm clocks, revolutions, history.
. . .
Our life and our death have taught us always to sympathize with the undesirables among the undesirables. Thus magnetized by experience, our compass continually points toward those who suffer.
