[found this book randomly at a lending library. so beautiful.]
"Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?"
"I want her fear to have lasted just as long as rape lasted so that the fear could have been contained. No drawn-out fear. But women at sex hazarded birth and hence lifetimes. The fear did not stop but permeated everywhere. She told the man, 'I think I'm pregnant.' He organized the raid against her."
"I inspired my army, and I fed them. At night I sang to them glorious songs that came out of the sky and into my head. When I opened my mouth, the songs poured out and were loud enough for the whole encampment to hear; my army stretched out for a mile."
"At my great-uncle's funeral I secretly tested out feeling glad that he was dead - the six-foot bearish masculinity of him."
"I went away to college - Berkeley in the sixties - and I studied, and I marched to change the world, but I did not turn into a boy. I would have liked to bring myself back as a boy for my parents to welcome with chickens and pigs. That was for my brother, who returned alive from Vietnam."
"If I took the sword, which my hate must surely have forged out of the air, and gutted him, I would put color and wrinkles into his shirt."
"When I dream that I am wire without flesh, there is a letter on blue airmail paper that floats above the night ocean between here and China. It must arrive safely or else my grandmother and I will lose each other."
"Perhaps human beings just die, and that's the end. I don't think I'd mind that too much. Which would you rather be? A ghost who is constantly wanting to be fed? Or nothing?"
"Nor did she change her name: Brave Orchid. Professional women have the right to use their maiden names if they like. Even when she emigrated, my mother kept Brave Orchid, adding no American name nor holding one in reserve for American emergencies."
"To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which as in Chinese, the language of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-packed with homemade underwear."
"As a child I feared the size of the world. The farther away the sound of howling dogs, the farther away the sound of the trains, the tighter I curled myself under the quilt. The trains sounded deeper and deeper into the night. They had not reached the end of the world before I stopped hearing them, the last long moan diminishing toward China. How large the world must be to make my grandmother only a taste by the time she reaches me."
"'We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.'"
"My throat cut off the word - silence in front of the most understanding teacher. There were secrets never to be said in front of the ghosts, immigration secrets whose telling could get us sent back to China."
"I'd like to go to New Society Village someday and find out exactly how far I can walk before people stop talking like me. I continue to sort out what's just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living."
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