I think being a writer is being heavily attuned to the absolute absurdity of things you take for granted, and I think that having actual parents who lived through the Cultural Revolution who are also interested in literature, they're also very attuned to those moments.

Jenny Zhang

Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me - an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American - there were limits.

Jenny Zhang

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 attaining myriad American dreams: love, fluency, citizenship, legitimacy, acceptance, success, freedom.

Jenny Zhang

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, not only accepted that she would always be an outsider in this country but also believed it to be a finer fate and home than any other she could have had.

Jenny Zhang

Faced with ostracization at school and confinement at home, I turned to karaoke.

Jenny Zhang

Rage can be so common it turns ambient.

Jenny Zhang

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

Jenny Zhang

I'm drawn to the figure of the ungrateful subaltern as a trope in literature. In real life, it is often dangerous to demand more.

Jenny Zhang

I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.

Jenny Zhang

I like to keep a book underneath the pillow that I'm not sleeping on so I can reach over and grab it when I wake up. I don't always do that, but I like to. I try to make sure it's a book and not my laptop. I also try not to get too excited about who might've been trying to contact me while I was asleep.

Jenny Zhang

In my mind, scatological writing is a core of the English canon.

Jenny Zhang

How do we form a coalition of resistance without obliterating our differences? Not all lives matter, and we are not all the same immigrants.

Jenny Zhang

For a decade, Emma-Lee Moss has been steadily making weird, moody, melancholic music under the moniker 'Emmy the Great' that has been referred to as nue-folk, anti-folk, synthpop, and, most of all, literary.

Jenny Zhang

'Sour Heart' is a collection of seven linked short stories narrated by young Chinese-American girls living in New York City in the '90s. It's exceptionally hard to describe what I've written without sounding delusional or boring, so I'll just say they are stories about growing up and the pleasures and agonies of having a family, a body, and a home.

Jenny Zhang

Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for 'Rookie'.

Jenny Zhang

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 they were at this particular juncture in American literature.

Jenny Zhang

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 - and so it's a real honor that they've chosen to announce their imprint with my stories.

Jenny Zhang

We're not the best about knowing what's the most interesting about ourselves.

Jenny Zhang

I lived so completely in my mind - a place of unchecked delusion and complete fantasy!

Jenny Zhang

I often wonder if my being a fairly small Asian woman with a high-pitched quietish voice plays a role in how often men feel entitled to come up to me and tell me, 'You have this doll act,' or whatever.

Jenny Zhang

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 arresting, but kind of the more unsolvable violence that lurks underneath.

Jenny Zhang