But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter. -Ying Ying.
We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.
To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing. -Jing-mei.
That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.
I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.
Your life is what you see in front of you. -An-mei.
They know where happiness lies, not in a cave or a country, but in love and the freedom to give and take what has been there all along.
My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A’s from the time I was in kindergarten.
I like to go somewhere where I learn something I didn’t know before, like the Dry Tortugas between Florida and Cuba.
I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
I don’t steer clear of genres. I simply haven’t steered myself toward some of them.
Chaos is the penance for leisure.
I didn’t fear failure. I expected failure.
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn’t have encouragement, but I didn’t have discouragement, because I don’t think anybody knew what that meant.
You can get sucked into the idea that, ‘Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.’ Or ‘I’ll write like this because it will impress that critic.’
My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.
My favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite.
Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.
I’d like to be more forgiving. There are times when I’ve had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me.