Always remember If you don’t love tea, you can’t make good tea.
You have special abilities,” she goes on. “I don’t mean you are a witch or a fox spirit. And you’ve never seemed drawn to the special gift of healing or magic. Rather, you are like A-ma Mata, who gave birth to the Akha people, who pushed against her restraints, who said, ‘No, I will not accept my bad fate,’ and who endured against all odds with her intelligence, compassion, and perseverance. All that comes from this grove. And the mother tree.” A-ma.
I’ve had to think about the dark shadow side of friendship. This is the person who knows and loves you best, which means she knows all the ways to hurt and betray you.
Suffering has brought clarity into my life. Maybe the things that have happened to me are punishment for what I did in a previous life, maybe they were fate or destiny, and maybe they’re all just part of a natural cycle – like the short but spectacular lives of cherry blossoms in spring or leaves falling away in autumn.
Rice is to nourish,” A-ma says. “Tea is to heal. Always remember that food is medicine, and medicine is food. If you take care of the trees, the trees will take care of you.
It’s said that great sorrow is no more than a reflection of one’s capacity for great joy.
To understand everything is to forgive.
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.