Best Of Jen Sookfong Lee's "Superfan"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke by Heart by Jen Sookfong Lee
What is real, and what I know for certain, is that there are spaces in which we move from destination to destination, spaces through which we move with so much velocity that we are impossible to define, spaces that require change, that ask us to access one of the multiple identities we carry at any given moment, that allow us to be as fluid as we want to be. It’s a beautiful fact. And it’s ours.
p.134
For the first time, I realized my grandfather and father had both been young men when they came to this country, walking the streets of Vancouver with a straight posture that sometimes read as primness, even as they carried an unwieldy burden of otherness and fear. At nineteen, I walked those same streets with. Slouch, dragging the hems of my oversized pants on the sidewalk. I never worried that I might be stopped on the street by police, that my presence could be construed as illegal. This relative freedom was what they had worked for, thought they never experienced it themselves, and this filled me with an almost unbearable sadness.
p. 214
Until then, I had not realized that being Chinese could mean this place, the city I was born in and had lived all my life. I had always imagined China and Canada as two separate bubbles, with me snuggling between the two, or more precisely, existing in a netherworld in between, a stateless place with no name and no markers. For my parents and grandparents, this disconnect was lived experience; they had migrated here, after all, and the definitions of home and away were constantly shifting, dependent on current events and how white people treated them. It must have felt like belonging was a myth.
p.216
What she [Awkwafina] didn’t say, and what I wished she would have said, is that white supremacy always seeks to divide radicalized people, to put communities against each other because if those groups united, the power would be unstoppable and white supremacy would topple. To that end, within the racial hierarchy established by white supremacy, there is a distinct function and place for each racialized community, and often Asian North Americans participate in reinforcing those roles. There is anti-Blackness in the Asian diaspora and there are no excuses for that, even though many of us are trying to do better.
p.222
