Among writers, if you don’t have a therapist, it’s like saying you don’t keep a journal or use the thesaurus. It’s a natural accompaniment.
I think books were my salvation, they saved me from being miserable.
People think it’s a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer’s. But in my mother’s case, it’s different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she’s happy.
I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.
I love my daughter. She and I have shared my body. There is a part of her mind that is a part of mine. But when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since.
I’ve always been a magnet for guilt.
Over time, passion wanes, differences don’t.
I can never remember things I didn’t understand in the first place.
Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.
My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the world of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco.
I always thought it mattered, to know what is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, to know how you can avoid it, to not be drawn by the magic of the unspeakable.
Wise guy, he not go against wind. In Chinese we say, Come from South, blow with wind – poom! – North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen.
Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?
I did not lose myself all at once.
My mother didn’t teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.
When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outside eyes. She has no chuming, no inside knowing of things. If she had chuming she would see a tiger lady. And she would have careful fear.
Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.
On the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother’s case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow.
I was punched breathless by the strongest emotions I have ever felt and they are now stored in my intuition as a writer.
I think I’ve always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.