As a precaution, Ruth had also gnawed over the worst possibilities – brain tumor, Alzheimer’s, stroke – believing this would ensure that it was not these things. History had always proven that she worried for nothing.
I had discarded pride, that useless burden of self-importance I had carried around like my portable vanity with its broken mirror.
This was not chance that they met twice, my mother would tell me whenever she recounted this story. It was fate.
She didn’t understand people who thrived on argument and being right all the time. Her mother was that way, and what did that get her? Nothing but unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and anger.
Poor service, bad treatment, no respect – that’s the penalty for not speaking English well in America.
But your thoughts and emotions after death are no different from what they were when you were alive, I suppose. You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.
Most of the girls were like me, the love children of suicides, singsong girls, and unmarried maidens.
Maybe too many opinions is an American custom. I think Chinese people don’t like to have different opinions at the same time. We believe in one thing, we stick to it for one hundred years, five hundred years. Less confusion that way.
The gray-green surface changes to the bright colors of our three images, sharpening and deepening all at once. And although we don’t speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish.
In truth, this was a bad thing that Yan Chang had done, telling me my mother’s story. Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.
In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English.
And so fate – if you can call it that – changed course over the rainforest canopy, and kindnesses and miracles poured like quenching rain after a drought. Such is the nature of happy endings.
It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn’t get straight As. I didn’t become class president. I didn’t get into Stanford. I dropped out of college. For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.
A person should consider how things begin. A particular beginning results in a particular end. I.
Lust leaves you blind long after you’ve lost your mind in bed.
It was sad and beautiful knowledge that a person cannot be found elsewhere but in his own spirit.
Jane Eyre taught me that loneliness had more to do with being misunderstood than being alone.
When a husband stops paying attention to the garden, he’s thinking of pulling up roots.
Or maybe he would turn to religion. Many Americans did so when faced with heartache and hardship.
He should go away and study, let his mind wander freely. Until then, he should not be obeisant in spirit to those who trampled it.