"Between love and rejection lies fear."
"Keeping a Protestant family together hinges on the beliefs that everyone is the same and nobody should be treated different and nobody should get anything special - which is not faith in the invisible, but invisibility."
"My mother feels that she has to choose between two things: her own goodness or the truth of my experience. In the end, she chooses her own goodness."
"But what was more immediately pressing than criticism from strangers or my being Asian American or his being white was that every day people have to eat. People can fall in love over a series of dinners. They can fall out of love the same way."
"If they knew the true nature of desperation, would you still use the word 'choice' as a synonym for the relinquishment or abandonment of a child?"
"They didn't know that adoption would erase the people who we once were so completely, so irrevocably. Our adoptions would take our language, our culture, our families, our names, our birth dates, our citizenship, and our identities in a perfectly legal process. And the world would view it as charitable and ethical."
"Meanwhile, the praise Koreans lavish upon white people who are trying to speak Korean brings my tentative speech to a screeching halt. The same low level of proficiency that is considered a great accomplishment for a white person is just more proof of defectiveness in an adoptee."
"My lover says, I slept with a lot of women just to sleep with them. Men can do that. Doesn't he know that women can do that too, that a woman's loneliness can be as penetrating as a man's, that a woman can fill herself with man after man, easily, wake up the next morning feeling hollow, so easily, can do that..."
"Jae-dal, you are the son of a white man, and I am the daughter of a white man. We are Americans living in Korea. Your father a soldier, my mother's first husband a soldier, a war that we never lived through but that marks us, that we can neither remember nor forget."
"When a beautiful fairy tale crumbles in your hands, what remains?"
"I fled the U.S. during its war against terror. The Americans had not yet taken the children of Afghanistan or Iraq for adoption, though they tried, because every war displaces family members and creates orphans. I had become more and more a foreigner in my own country, an unpatriot."
"Without a lover, I had such exquisite, cruel freedom."
"If I had been born the first son of my Korean father - not his fifth daughter - I don't think he would have tried to smother me with a blanket when I was born. I probably would have grown up in Korea and continued my father's family line."
"What else could I want? Why am I still not happy? I feel better when I have few connections, few obligations, few things, no furniture. What was I thinking when I ripped up all the sod in the back lawn and planted a garden of vegetables, herbs, and flowers? The following summer I gave my friends all the perennials - the hollyhocks, coneflowers, rosemary, and strawberry vines. I had even told myself that I would wait a decade for the asparagus to mature, but that too I dug up by its roots and distributed in cardboard boxes with the rest."
"Strangers become lovers and then strangers again."
"Although we have traveled oceans and spent all our money just to be together, this is a sad and empty kind of togetherness when everything's cool, it's all OK, everyone can make their own choices and it's not anyone else's problem or responsibility, nothing matters."
"The futility of love, the indifference of the world, and the responsibility of freedom are the tree things that I learned from watching Dominique's life."
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