Only Americans think they have rights,” Magic Gourd said. “What laws of heaven give you more rights and allow you to keep them? They are words on paper written by men who make them up and claim them. One day they can blow away, just like that.” She.
My mother could sense that the women of these families also had unspeakable tragedies they had left behind in China and hopes they couldn’t begin to express in their fragile English.
And once you reached the top, you would be able to see everything and feel such happiness it would be enough to never have worries in your life ever again.
Life was good until the putges came. After that, there was nothing to do except flee into the jungle, high up, where it was so thick only wold things grew. When the putgest stopped Black Spot and his grids and cousin went quietly to the town of Nyang Shwe, where they were not known. They procured black-market identity cards of dead people with good reputations. After that they lived two ways: in the open life of the dead, and in the hidden life of the living.
I am crying now, sobbing and laughing at the same time, seeing but not understanding this loyalty to my mother.
When there is great suffering, he said, everyone struggles the same. But when there is peace, no one wants to be the same. The rich no longer share. The less rich envy and steal.
Turn around then and lean against that boulder with your bottom facing me. I’ll enter you from behind. Are you damp yet?” In.
My mother knows how to hit a nerve. And the pain I feel is worse than any other kind of misery. Because what she does always comes as a shock, exactly like an electric jolt, that grounds itself permanently in my memory. I still remember the first time I felt it.
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?
Whenever others disapprove of you, you must disregard them and be the only one to judge your own decisions and actions.
Every Sunday, the Jesus Worshippers asked me, “Do you believe?” I had to say not yet. I wanted to say yes to be polite. But then I would have been lying, and when I died maybe they would come after me and make me pay two kinds of penalty to the foreign devil, one for not believing, another for pretending that I did.
Lies spread faster than you can catch them.
Death was not necessarily a portal to the blank bliss of absolute nothingness. It was a deep dive into the unknown.
All depend what you love, what you believe. You love Jesus, go Jesus House. You love Allah, go Allah Land. You love sleep, go sleep.
With imagined tragedy hovering over us, we became inseparable, two halves creating the whole: yin and yang.
And later, I discovered that maybe it was fate alla long, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you’re in control. i found out the most I could have was hope, and with that I was not denying any possibility, good or bad.
How to obey parents and listen to your mother’s mind. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities. Why easy things are not worth pursuing. How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best.
Could you wrap your arms around me to keep me warm?
We both knew we were speaking about the effortlessness with which one falls in love without intending to, as if we were two stalks of bamboo bend toward each other by the chance of the wind. And then we bent toward each other and kissed, lost in the nowhere of being together.
I want us to love each other so deeply we ache with the fullness of it.