Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure.
You know Anne,′ he said quietly, ’when I am with a Hmong or a French or an American person, I am always the one who laughs last at a joke. I am the chameleon animal. You can place me anyplace, and I will survive, but I will not belong. I must tell you that I do not really belong anywhere.
It is well known that involuntary migrants, no matter what pot they are thrown into, tend not to melt.
You go from the north of Laos and then you go across the Mekong, and when the Pathet Lao soldiers fire, you do not think about your family, just yourself only. When you are on the other side, you will not be like what you were before ou get through the Mekong. On the other side you cannot say to your wife, I love you more than my life. She saw! You cannot say that anymore! And when you try to restick this thing together is is like putting glue on a broken glass.
Cultural humility” acknowledges that doctors bring the baggage of their own cultures – their own ethnic backgrounds along with the culture of medicine – to the patient’s bedside, and that these may not necessarily be superior.
The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong.” So much for the Perambulating Postbox Theory.
You’re a romantic. What’s romantic about a guy wanting to go somewhere and actually getting there?
It was also true that if the Lees were still in Laos, Lia would probably have died before she was out of infancy, from a prolonged bout of untreated status epilepticus. American medicine had both preserved her life and compromised it. I was unsure which had hurt her family more.
On her ideal dinner party: ‘Virginia Woolf, Coleridge and Charles Lamb would have to be there. I would be scurrying around in the kitchen with Mary Lamb – she and I would do the cooking. Of course my brother would be there. I think that’s about enough. That number would sustain a single conversation. Virginia and I would be the centre of attention.
I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishman admire heroic failure. Given a choice – at least in my reading – I’m un-American enough to take quixotry over efficiency any day.
During the late 1910s and early ’20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory “Americanization” classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was “I am a good American.
When Pang was barely out of toddlerhood, she zoomed in and out of the apartment unsupervised, playing with plastic bags and, on occasion, with a large butcher knife.
The chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book’s physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller.
One night when I was pregnant with Henry, I lay in bed thinking for some reason, about “Treasure Island.” I realized that from the entire book there was only one sentence I remembered verbatim, something that Ben Gunn, who has been marooned for three years, says to Jim Hawkins: “Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese – toasted mostly.” I repeated the last two words over and over again, like a mantra. “Toasted, mostly. Toasted mostly.
The European immigrants who emerged from the Ford Motor Company melting pot came to the United States because they hoped to assimilate into mainstream American society. The Hmong came to the United States for the same reason they had left China in the nineteenth century: because they were trying to resist assimilation.
But like balloons, they were excessively buoyant, and if you weren’t careful, they floated away.
My interest is a lonely one. I cannot trot it out at cocktail parties. I feel sometimes as if I have spent a large part of my life learning a dead language that no one I know can speak.
To nature lovers, the season of new beginnings is the spring, but to people who excel in school, it’s the fall.
I’ll meet some people who’ll treat me mean and I’ll just pray that I’ll never be like them. And then I’ll meet some very nice people and I will take a little bit of them and make myself a better person.
Going through a dead parent’s memorabilia is a hazardous undertaking; there is a fine line between pleasure and pain.
As Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald, describing the act of letter-writing: “Such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.