I am obsessed with Chinese restaurants. Like many Americans, I first discovered them in my childhood.
Headline writing is an art form.
Chinese restaurants have long been a weekly or monthly ritual for many Americans.
Chinese cooking is noisy – a multitasking activity that requires constant vigilance. There is no downtime.
My siblings and I are known as ABCs, American-born Chinese.
Let your heart beat for music. Don’t be a DJ for the wrong reasons, do it because you have a passion for it.
If you don’t want the nickname, don’t live up to it.
In deference to American traditions, my family put our oven to rare use at Thanksgiving during my childhood, with odd roast-turkey experiments involving sticky-rice stuffing or newfangled basting techniques that we read about in magazines.
That the good that we do might live on after us, while the evil lies interred with their bones.
Stupidity makes you dangerous-to yourself and everyone around you.
Laughter in the face of danger is a mark of courage.
Food is an intimate language that everyone understands, everyone shares. It is the primary ambassador of first contact between cultures, one that transcends spoken language. Food crosses cultural barriers. It bridges oceans. Becoming competent in a foreign language takes a lot of time, and learning a culture’s history and literature requires a great deal of effort. But everyone can immediately have an opinion on food.
Chinese have a bigger sense of self-sacrifice. Americans are about self-enjoyment, not self-sacrifice,” he’d.
The purpose of fortune cookies became startlingly clear to me then: this is Western wisdom recycled for an American audience. The Chinese are just the middlemen.
In a world where you can choose to be anything, choose to be KIND.
Happiness isn’t a destination. It’s a journey. And sometimes the journey is hard.
Cicero said that gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others. If that’s true, then my happiness does not cause me to be grateful for what I have. My gratitude for what I have causes me to be happy. Gratitude births the virtue of happiness.
Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion. BRENNAN MANNING.
God is with you in the spectacular, and he’s with you in the regular. There is dignity in both places.
The art of happy-making begins when we find our happiness within instead of without.
In God, happiness and purposeful work are a package deal.