MIN JIN. LEE

FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES.

Beatrix

 Tina offered up her baby-sister smile; it said, Tell me something I need to learn. Let me adore you again

Everyone scrounged for an identity defined by objects. 

She was a biographer who did not understand her own children's lives. Life was just guesswork even if you were an eyewitness.

Iara Figueira

Casey wasn’t indifferent to her father’s pain. But she’d decided she didn’t want to hear about it anymore. His losses weren’t hers, and she didn’t want to hold them. She was in Queens, and it was 1993. But at the table it was 1953, and the Korean War refused to end.

Joseph smiled ruefully at Tina. “The night before I left on the ship, my mother sewed twenty gold rings in the lining of my coat with her own hand. She had these thick rheumatic fingers, and the servant girls usually did the sewing, but. . .” He lifted his right hand in the air as if he could make his mother’s hand appear in place of his own, then clasped the right one with his left. “She wrapped each ring with cotton batting so there’d be no noise when I moved around.” Joseph marveled at his mother’s thoughtfulness, recalling sharply how every time he had to sell a ring, he’d unstitch the white blanket thread that his mother had sewn into the coat fabric with her heavy needle. 

To Casey, it seemed upside down to call a minority person a racist, or a woman a sexist, a poor person a snob, a gay person a homophobe, an old person an ageist, a Jewish person an anti-Semite. All these labels were carelessly bandied about at school. But she admitted that it was possible to hate yourself and easy to hate others because you’d been hated. Hatred had its own logic of symbiosis.

FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES. quotes

Join the club