True Joy in Life

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. 

George Bernard Shaw

Stay True

Eventually, we would fold ourselves into my car and drive to an all-night donut shop on San Pablo. I hated when my friends talked over my music, and I hated it even more when Ken led them to sing-alongs, replacing the perfect harmonies of "God Only Knows" with their wounded cadences. It was my car, but it was no longer my kingdom. Sean, Ben, and King delighted in singing loudly and out of tune.

At first, perhaps it was just to annoy me, three young men singing, one begging them to stop. But then it became a noise that felt safe, possibly better than the original. In the immediacy of the song, as its seconds tick away, you're experiencing it as a community—as a vision of the world vibrating together. It tickles your ear, then the rest of you, as your voice merges with everyone else's. The violent dissonance when someone, and then another, slips off-key, and everyone ventures off toward their own ba-ba-baa solo. I finally felt in my body how music worked. A chorus of nonbelievers, channeling God. A harmonic coming together capable of overtaking lyrics about drift and catastrophe, a song as proof that people can work together. We would sit in the parking lot until the song ended. The donuts weren't very good, but at least they provided a destination for our moving choir. We were sharing something, a combination of delirium and fraternity. 

Hua Hsu

In the Room with Peter Do and Ocean Vuong

I want to touch on this idea of imposter syndrome that so many of us experience. It's an interesting word, because it's a pathology, an illness. It troubled me for a long time. I think when you said that there was a breakthrough for you when you started to see that, "Oh, I can make something for myself." I had a similar thought when I said, "Wait a minute. My imposter syndrome is actually my strength. I don't ever want to be comfortable in positions of power." The day that I'm comfortable in these large institutions, in these reified ivory towers, is my death. So I am an impostor, it was never meant for me. They didn't imagine me when they built these sites of power. May I always be an imposter. My imposter syndrome is my strength because it gives me vigilance, discernment, awareness, and fruitful doubt. My mother used to say, "You can tell everything by how they look at you." So I started to see this as my tool, my asset, and I don't want to lose that. I think the great work that we do is to turn an imposter syndrome that it started out as into a kind of immune system that protects us. I don't know if I feel at home anywhere. But I realized that the idea of the imposter is such a beautiful idea, the idea that someone can disguise and sneak in the back door with their head down and just do the threading work and then one day, put their head up and there's a fashion house or a book under their name.

Ocean Vuong in Cero Magazine 

The Loneliest Americans

In my twenties in Korea, enveloped by the boundless plentitudes of language, I would take fresh words that had just grown into themselves and sing the joys, anger, and sorrows of tumultuous youth until they became a thick, rich soup upon tiring of the pleasures of speech. I would abbreviate self-expression and communication into silence and poetry.

One day, my language, abruptly severed in a foreign land, became sealed off inside of me, where it suffocated, and in the deafness of insensibility, I was absolutely lonely.

To save my dying mouth, ears, head, heart, smile, tears, frisson, and skin, I frantically became a child again to relearn the burbling of English. 

My short and impoverished new language changed me. 

In consversation, I spared my words, spoke forthrightly, was unable to make puns, always pressed to communicate intent, and I presented myself simple as I was. That attitude became entrenched in my speech and my way of thinking. Now my English has gained some color, sprouted new flesh, and can provoke sentiment, and although I have the leeway to wordlessly understand and respond with facial expressions, my impoverished habits of language remain.

On the other hand, at a certain point, I've somehow become unable to bear people who are alone, now inclined to approach them. Without exception, they become good friends of mine. This is the precious blessing that the solitude of my immigrant life has quietly delivered to me. 

Mother of Jay Caspian Kang

Acceptance Speech for APEX for Youth Inspiration Award

Nations will rise and fall as they have done in our species. The Romes and the empires will come and go. But the only nation that I truly believe in, the only nation that will be here long before any country that we understand, is the imagination. It is the one that I have absolute allegiance to. And it's the only one, it's the only nation on this planet that will remain unstoppable. 

To the young Asian American makers and dreamers, I want to say this to you: You don't have anything to prove. We are already proud of you. That even if you do nothing, make nothing, surviving itself is a creative act. That if you can survive, and you can survive together, then you have innovated. That by surviving itself, you have won and deserved the breath that you take. 

Ocean Vuong 

From Nothing Personal

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.

James Baldwin 

On Identity

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desrt, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

James Baldwin

I Cannot Say I Did Not

I asked, with everything I did not
have, to be born. And nowhere in any
of it was there meaning, there was only the asking
for being, and then the being, the turn
taken. I want to say that love
is the meaning, but I think that love may be
the means, what we ask with. 

Sharon Olds

Just Kids

It was our first and last show together. My work with my band and crew in the seventies would take me far from Robert and our universe. And as I toured the world I had time to reflect that Robert and I never traveled together. We never saw beyond New York save in books and never sat in an airplane holding each other's hand to ascend into a new sky and descend onto a new earth. 

Yet Robert and I had explored the frontier of our work and created space for each other. When I walked on the stages of the world without him I would close my eyes and picture him taking off his jacket, entering with me the infinite land of a thousand dances. 

Patti Smith (on Robert Mapplethorpe)

Just Kids

Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up. 

Patti Smith