the unbearable smell of communal living

"The warm air of May mingled with the odour of people's bodies in the carriage, bringing home to him for the first time in ages the unbearable smell of communal living. He wanted to live, that was now certain. But could someone who had once managed to escape society's clutches find the courage to commit himself again to that pungent stench? Society operates smoothly precisely because people remain unaware of their own smell. The student's stinking socks that haven't been washed in a week . . . [to] . . . the middle-aged man who reeks like a chimney covered in soot. People never hold back when it comes to giving off their own scents. Hanio liked to think he produced no smell or odour, but he could not be certain."

~~ from Life for Sale by Yukio Mishima

honorary white status

"Apartheid, for all its power, had fatal flaws baked in, starting with the fact that it never made any sense. Racism is not logical. Consider this: Chinese people were classified as black in South Africa. I don't mean they were running around acting black. They were still Chinese. But, unlike Indians, there weren't enough Chinese people to warrant devising a whole separate classification. Apartheid, despite its intricacies and precision, didn't know what to do with them, so the government said, 'Eh, we'll just call 'em black. It's simpler that way.

"Interestingly, at the same time, Japanese people were labeled as white. The reason for this was that the South African government wanted to establish good relations with the Japanese in order to import their fancy cars and electronics. So Japanese people were given honorary white status while Chinese people stayed black. I always like to imagine being a South African policeman who likely couldn't tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese but whose job was to make sure that people of the wrong color weren't doing the wrong thing. If he saw an Asian person sitting on a whites-only bench, what would he say?

"'Hey, get off that bench, you Chinaman!'

"'Excuse me, I'm Japanese.'

"'Oh, I apologize, sir. I didn't mean to be racist. Have a lovely afternoon.'"

~~ from Born A Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

They did not want us.

"They did not want us as neighbors in their valleys. They did not want us as friends. We lived in unsightly shacks and could not speak plain English. We cared only about money. Our farming methods were poor. We used too much water. We did not plow deeply enough. Our husbands worked us like slaves. They import those girls from Japan as free labor. We worked in the fields all day long without stopping for supper. We worked in the fields late at night by the light of our kerosene lamps. We never took a single day off. A clock and a bed are two things a Japanese farmer never used in his life. We were taking over their cauliflower industry. We had taken over their spinach industry. We had a monopoly on their strawberry industry and had cornered their market on beans. We were unbeatable, unstoppable economic machine and if our progress was not checked the entire western United States would soon become the next Asiatic outpost and colony."

~~ from The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka