More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Seeing something once is better than hearing about it a hundred times. Doing something once is better than seeing it a hundred times.”
That’s when I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t those places with their manicured lawns that were strange; it was my family’s and our neighbors’ gardens that were strange.”
I’ve found Joy, but will I ever have joy in my heart again?
As she spoke, I wanted to cry, because sometimes it’s just so damn hard to be a mother. We have to wait and wait and wait for our children to open their hearts to us. And if that doesn’t work, we have to bide our time and look for the moment of weakness when we can sneak back into their lives and they will see us and remember us for the people who love them unconditionally.
No thrust into the heart is greater or more harmful than that from one who says she loves you the most. I know, because my sister drove that knife into my heart many times.
She’s chosen a life I wouldn’t pick, but it is her life and she’s going to have to figure things out for herself—as a woman. It kills me to let her go, but it’s the best and only thing I can do as her mother.
I’m finally over Z.G. and my fear of sex. Those two circles have closed. It’s unclear what this will mean for me—a widow—but I feel possibilities are now open to me that I haven’t had since I was a young woman.
The realization that truth, forgiveness, and goodness are more important than revenge, condemnation, and cruelty gives me courage and certainty.
Mao may say that women hold up half the sky, but it is the lesser half.
I thought I could use idealism to solve my inner conflicts, but in healing my inner conflicts I destroyed my idealism.
I slice open my arm and let the blood drip into a cup. For millennia, daughters-in-law have done this for their mothers-in-law out of respect and reverence during times of famine. I do it because I love my daughter.
The boy stares at the rice. Then Z.G. and I watch as he counts out one grain of rice at a time—one to Z.G., one to me, one for himself—setting them on the table in three small piles. This is how hungry they once were. Life and death are separated by a thread or, these days, by a few kernels of rice.
“True suffering has taken away my taste for brooding about the past,”
Art for art’s sake is not what motivates me. Certainly politics are not what motivate me anymore. Emotions are what motivate me. Of those emotions, the strongest is love—love
But what are the most beautiful things I know? They are the emotions of the heart—the love you feel for Samantha, the love you feel for Pearl and May. These things are pure, true, and unchanging.”
Kung ai—encompassing love—is most important.”
“Art is the heartbeat of the artist, and you’ve found your heartbeat.”
“Baba, can’t you stay? Don’t you want to talk?” “Maybe stories and memories are destined to be incomplete,”
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, but where I once again discovered the person I was meant to be—a
