Anyone who says that women do not have influence in men’s decisions makes a vast and stupid mistake.
I know a lot about women and their suffering, but I still know almost nothing about men.
Gone were my girlish ideas about romantic love and my later ideas about sexual love. From Yi, I learned to appreciate deep-heart love. Peony in Love.
I think all women have a friend who at some point dumped them or betrayed them or deeply disappointed them. And at the same time all women have a friend who they dumped or betrayed or hurt in some way. That’s universal in women’s friendships.
Perhaps he was afraid as I was that we’d be caught. Or perhaps he was breathing me in just as I was letting him come into my lungs, my eyes, my heart.
Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life.
In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are if only.
I’ve never thought much about whether I was happy or if I had fun as a child. I was a so-so girl who lived with a so-so family in a so-so village. I didn’t know that there might be another way to live, and I didn’t worry about it either.
How can we not create a fantasy in our minds when the reality is so hard?
What stays with me most is a general sense of loss, unease, and longing for the past that cannot be relieved.
When people are alive they love, when they die, they keep loving. If love ends when person dies, that is not real love.
Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming – weren’t our dreams what gave us strength, hope, and desire?
My love for him had never gone away but only changed, growing deeper like wine fermenting or pickles curing. It bore into me with the pervasiveness of water working its way to the center of a mountain.
Snow Flower was my old same for life. I had a greater and deeper love for her than I could ever feel for a person who was my husband.
People say you need to be strong, smart, and lucky to survive hard times, war, a natural disaster, or physical torture. But I say emotional abuse – anxiety, fear, guilt, and degradation – is far worse and much harder to survive.
But there are certain books I would never put on a Kindle because you want to be able to look at graphs and photos or the footnotes and maps. You can’t see that.
And often it would be a woman who was in her 70s or 80s who would win the beauty contest, because bound feet never age.
As she spoke, I wanted to cry, because sometimes it’s just so damn hard to be a mother. We have to wait and wait and wait for our children to open their hearts to us. And if that doesn’t work, we have to bide our time and look for the moment of weakness when we can sneak back into their lives and they will see us and remember us for the people who love them unconditionally.
They did this to me. They did that to me. A woman who thinks that way will never overcome her anger. You are not being punished for your anger. You’re being punished by your anger.
No coincidence, no story.