If there is happiness at age three, it will last until you reach eighty.
I had always thought it was her way of blinding herself to the messiness of the way we lived. Now I realised it was easier for her mind to go out through the air far above the clouds than to acknowledge the ugliness right before her eyes.
The river passes through our mountains, changing its name to Mekong where China, Laos, and Burma meet, before flowing through Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and eventually to the South China Sea. “Yes! It is called the Danube of the East.
I was a haenyeo – independent and resilient – but I’d missed my husband.
The realization that truth, forgiveness, and goodness are more important than revenge, condemnation, and cruelty gives me courage and certainty.
It’s said that great sorrow is no more than a reflection of one’s capacity for great joy. I see it from the opposite direction. I’m happy, but there’s an empty space inside me that will never stop suffering from the loss of Yan-yeh.
The lotus symbolizes purity, because it rises out of the mud but looks pristine.
To make an ox or water buffalo work so hard, it needs to be blinded and uninformed. That’s what the government is doing to the masses now.
Finally, the nima returns to our plane. “Wrong cannot be hidden. An outside spirit is insulted because Deh-ja made a mistake in one of her ancestor offerings.
You’ll never get a marriage proposal if you have to rely on your needlework.
Every day Fu-shee, the smaller children, and I fan out in the hills around Green Dragon to strip trees of their bark and leaves, dig up roots and search for wild grass. We’ll eat anything, and we have. But you can’t eat a leather belt like it’s a crisp cucumber. You soak it, boil it, and chew on it for days.
Peony, think of your own feet when you do this. You know how the toes are tucked under and how your mid-foot is folded in on itself? We accomplish this by rolling the bones under the foot as if you were rolling a sock. Can you do that?
What was the purpose of being wrapped like a present if you had no feelings for the person you were being given to?
You look at me now and see an old face, but once I was beautiful.
Yao Niang, the first tiny-footed lady. When that woman.
I accepted these limitations, knowing that my worth was based entirely on the child growing inside me.
To protect my heart, this is what I would have to do with Snow Flower. I couldn’t let anyone know I was dying from anguish that she no longer loved me.
She’s grabbed onto old traditions-outdated traditions- in the same way I latch onto them now: as a means of survival, as a way to hang on to ghost memories.
I’d never waste the hours of light in the darkness of slumber.
My home is here with this family I’ve built from scraps of tragedy.