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This isn’t how Joe and my professors described Red China. I expected utilitarian Communist quarters or even an artist’s single room. Instead, my father lives in an elegant art deco house with a lovely garden. What does this say about him exactly?
My mother used to say that a widow is the unluckiest person on earth, because either she committed an unforgivable crime in a previous life
This is one of the most ideal matches, and yet I believed that Z.G. and I were the ones meant to be together. The knowledge is devastating and it breaks my heart, but right now I have other things to worry about.
“The People’s Republic of China is very good at propaganda, but so is your country. You Americans think the People’s Republic of China is completely closed.
“Never forget this is Shanghai. Never forget you are Shanghainese. Never forget your hai pah. You carry that inside you no matter what new campaign that fat chairman launches.”
“A woman is like a vine. She can’t survive without the support of a tree. Isn’t that what you had in your marriage?”
I’ve ruined not just my life but hers as well. My actions have only made things worse, and I’m unable to change or fix them. And now that she’s gone, the dark feelings that have plagued me since my father’s death wrap their oily blackness around me.
So, buried far from home, he is consigned to becoming a hungry ghost, forever wandering and lost. And we can seek no solace in Buddhism or Daoism for fear of being labeled reactionaries.
My hunger is all I can feel or think about. It’s like a snake slithering through my brain, down to my stomach, out to my fingers, then down my legs and back up to my brain. It never stops.
When I left for China three years ago, I thought of something my sister once said to me: everything always returns to the beginning. I was returning home to my roots, to the place where I’d been so ruined as a woman,
