It’s said that great sorrow is no more than a reflection of one’s capacity for great joy.
How can I help change things if I sit by and do nothing?
When she reaches the ground, she looks from the old woman to me. A moment of confusion. Then recognition. I know her too, because I’ve seen traces of her in my face in the mirror. My mother. My a-ma.
All the time, I looked out our lattice window. I watched the birds fly by. I followed the clouds on their travels. I studied the moon as it grew larger, then shrank. So much happened outside my window that I almost forgot what was happening inside that room.
But why bother trying to turn a monkey into a goat?
Opium and heroin had not caused our poverty and hopelessness. Rather, poverty and hopelessness had brought about an unquenchable desire to forget. After.
Dreamers are born to be disappointed.
It’s fair to say I don’t know what I’m doing. I like to plot my life and proceed carefully, but life doesn’t always follow a plan.
One mistake can change the course of your life. You can never return to your original path or go back to the person you were.
What better place to look for trash than in America – the land of consumption and waste?
You cannot refuse to eat just because there’s a chance of being choked.
That I had been shallow, stubborn, and selfish did not alter the gravity and stupidity of what I had done. I had made the greatest mistake for a woman literate in nu shu: I had not considered texture, context, and shades of meaning.
The machete has been tested, and the rice already cooked.
What the body knows and what the mind chooses to believe are two different things, after all.
My writing is soaked with the tears of my heart, An invisible rebellion that no man can see. Let our life stories become tragic art. Oh, Mama, oh, sisters, hear me, hear me.” The.
Everything always returns to the beginning.
You have been a good mother to your children, but now you must be an even better and stronger mother. Children are hope and joy. On land, you will be a mother. In the sea, you can be a grieving widow. Your tears will be added to the oceans of salty tears that wash in great waves across our planet. This I know. If you try to live, you can live on well.
And it confused me to think that the cloven-footed ones could have so many marvelous creations.
Because inside we still carry the dreams of what could have been, of what should have been, of what we wish could still be. This doesn’t mean we aren’t content. We are content, but the romantic longings of our girlhood have never entirely left us. It’s like Yen-Yen said all those years ago: ‘I look in the mirror and I’m surprised by what I see.’ I look in the mirror and still expect to see my Shanghai-girl self- not the wife and mother I’ve become.
What husband wants a wife who thinks she’s smarter than he is?