For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, ‘This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.’ And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.
Fate once made you American. Fate took it away.
Now you see why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else’s joy.
I now lived in an invisible place made of my own dwindling breath, and because no one else could see it, they could not yank me out of it.
I was born in the year of the Tiger. It was a very bad year to be born, a very good year to be a Tiger.
She didn’t even pause to think. She simply said in a way that made it clear there was no more to the story: “Your father is not my first husband. You are not those babies.
The mind fools the eye. The eye makes us fools.
So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren’t allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy.
I asked myself, What is true about a person? Would I change in the same way the river changes color but still be the same person? And then I saw the curtains blowing wildly, and outside rain was falling harder, causing everyone to scurry and shout. I smiled. And then I realized it was the first time I could see the power of the wing. I couldn’t see the wind itself, but I could see it carried the water that filled the rivers and shaped the countryside. It caused men to yelp and dance.
I made a promise to myself: I would always remember my parents’ wishes, but I would never forget myself.
Her mastery of the language was a blissful expression of the spirit to her, like playing a musical instrument.
The Doppler Effect of Communication”: There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. “The.
I was appalled at the idea. Evaporate? Would that happen to me? I wanted to expand, to fill the void, to reclaim all that I had wasted. I wanted to fill the silence with all the words I had not yet spoken.
They say this is what happens if you lack metal. You begin to think as an independent person.
No puedes tener suerte cuando otra persona tiene habilidad.
Japanese chase-away juice.” And.
Mile after mile, all of it familiar, yet not, this distance that separates us, me from my mother.
She was either temperamental, meaning short-tempered and unhappy, or she was melancholy, meaning listless and unhappy.
Americans don’t really look at one another when talking. They talk to their reflections. They look at others or themselves only when they think nobody is watching. So they never see how they really look. They see themselves smiling without their mouth open, or turned to the side where they cannot see their faults.
Hugging and being hugged by everybody in moments of sadness and triumph, because hugging is something that never came naturally to me, and now it does.