Jenny Zhang's writing is a knife in the heart.


"It was my mother who tucked him in and told him that there exists a sort of love in the world that only survives as long as no one speaks of it, and that was the reason why he would never have to worry because my grandmother was never going to be the kind of mother who held her children in her arms and told them how smart and beautiful and talented they were. She was only ever going to scold them, make them feel diminutive, make them feel they were never good enough, make them know this world wouldn’t be kind to them. She wasn’t going to let someone else be better than her at making her children feel pain or scare them more than she could, and to her, that was a form of protection.

That’s how we will be with our own children, my mother told my uncle, proud that she had realized this." 
             --Jenny Zhang, "Our Mothers Before Them," from her collection Sour Heart


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