My Year Abroad: A Novel

Keep on singing, bromeo.

the main thing you learn about yourself and everyone else toiling away is how much of your mental activity and chatter is about dreaming of doing something else, whether noble or debauched or downright silly.

Val encounters life and persons as they come to her, this total acceptance of the fact that you’re here, that you belong to the space you’re taking up, that it’s all and only yours. A rare thing, IMHO. If you think about it, most persons, including many of those who say they love you, can’t help but question your particular coordinates in whatever

I understood at last that it was a con I needed. Now and from the beginning. For maybe your favorite teacher or coach or best friend conned you, too, into believing in a version of yourself you hadn’t yet imagined, a person many factors more capable, a person who might not have otherwise bloomed.

“You have a business,” Pong said to me quite seriously. “You just don’t know what it is yet.”

a semidiasporic postcolonial indeterminate like me

be greedy in your appreciations. Practice extravagant gratitude. Savor whatever your portion. This may sound like carpe diem but what I really mean is for the dies to carpere te, to have the moment, the person, the world, grab you right back in their full rankness and glory.

Jamesonian view of capitalism’s

Pong was generous because he had a bottomless wonder for our multitudinous human family, this perpetual appreciation of how people are. And maybe: can and will be.