Best Of Katherine Min's "The Fetishist"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from The Fetishist by Katherine Min
But in spite of her cuteness, her size (5'3", 103 pounds), and her age (twenty-three), Kyoko's life had been deformed by grief; grief, in turn, twisted to hate, hate hammered to anger, until the anger, the hate, and the grief had become grotesquely fused. Kyoko believed that violence would alleviate all three. In fact, she had bet on it.
p.4
A parade of rice kings wherever she went, lecherous, treacherous, beseeching— enfolded like origami, bent like bonsai, draped in silk, and embellished with hanzi-presenting themselves like gifts to a foreign bride. The Other as envoy, as smitten colonizer. Like an heiress with a fortune, then, Alma has learned to be suspicious of all suitors lest they should desire her solely for her luscious yellowness. Whether for cultural status, sexual conquest, or racial solidarity, she would be no one's Tiger Lily, China Doll, Geisha Girl, Baby San, Miss Saigon, Suzie Wong, Me Love You Long Time, goddamn Madame Butterfly!
p.75
Except. Except, and here is the thing that even from the depths of coma Alma finds hard to face, from Mr. Steinhart, Eric, Vincent, Kristophe, Paolo, and even Daniel-echoing all the way back to Johnny Appleby in ninth grade-there is a part of her that believes that she is, in fact, all these things, a part of her that believes this is what she has to offer. For how do you separate out the race from the gil, the singular desirability of an individual from the menu of collective traits? It was trickier than one might think.
p.75
When someone dies, our impulse is to flatten her out, to press her between wax paper like a leaf, or to fix her in amber like a bug. Death as capture, death as collected works. But death is a false terminus, one moment only. It seems more significant because it is the last moment, the most recent, when really it is the smallest and least telling. Life is the plumpness of all directions, of surprises and contradictions, of impulses, mistakes, duplicities, and redemptions. While the vanishing point on the horizon line is a dot, a blip, the same for us all.
p.126-127
His eyes were a shade of untrustworthy blue, which made Kyoko think of those one-way mirrors on cop shows. You thought it was a mirror, because all you could see was a reflection of your own face, but it was really a window, with invisible people on the other side, watching you.
p.158
