Sublime

“You know, I don’t think she ever lost her shit around her white friends.” “Yeah, well,” Erin said ruefully, “we were family.”

Well-meaning friends never failed to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him.

Charlie doesn’t reply. Her gaze is flicking over Forrest critically, and she’s thinking that if she and Barbara really are like North and South Korea, she would just as soon they dropped this pretense and North Korea took Forrest political prisoner. There’s always the worry of starvation and reeducation, of course, but maybe he’d be detained in one

Lady Plackett took the binoculars. Her sight was less keen than her daughter’s but she too agreed that the girl was Ruth. She turned to Miss Somerville. ‘This is unfortunate,’ she said. ‘And quite irregular. The girl is a Jewish refugee who seems to think that she is entitled to every sort of privilege.’