Sterne Library News

Abrasive teacher, incisive comedian,
Painted Lady, dark domestic-
Sweep minds’ attics; burnish our sense;
keep house, make love, wreak vengeance.

~Merle Woo “Yellow Woman Speaks,” Breaking Silence, 1982.

“Only two kinds of daughters,” she shouted in Chinese.  “those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!  Only one kind of daughter can live in this house.  Obedient daughter!”

“Then I wish I wasn’t your daughter.  I wish you weren’t my mother,” I shouted.  As I said these things I got scared.  I felt like worms and toads and slimy things were crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good, as if this awful side of me had surfaced at last.

“Too late to change this,” said my mother shrilly.

~Amy Tan, “Two Kinds,” The Joy Luck Club 1989.

It’s the tyranny of the American dream that scares me.  First, you don’t exist.  Then you’re invisible.  Then you’re funny.  Then you’re disgusting.  Insult, my American friends will tell me, is a kind of acceptance.  No instant dignity here.

~Bharati Mukherjee, “A Wife’s Story,” The Middleman and Other Stories 1988.

In the evening the air was thick with mosquitoes, gnats and moths. The cicadas buzzed in deafening chorus from every tree.  The danced in frenzied legions around the porch light and did kamikaze dives into the bath water.  All of them came in dusty gray hordes, as though the desert had sapped the color from them, but not their energy.

~Valerie Matsumoto, “Two Deserts” (1986), The Forbidden Stitch:  An Asian-American Women’s Anthology.

From time to time, I wrote for the outside world, when the outside world overwhelmed me, when things outside in the street, drove me crazy.

~Marguerite Duras, Introduction, Outside: Selecting Writings 1984.