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“I love the delicacy of Asian women,” one wife commented to me. “So petite, so graceful.” Self-conscious with the language, I could only nod and smile while I railed against her silently in a string of words that were anything but delicate. Cow! Tell me next how my culture has given me the skills to be an amazing house cleaner. An obedient wife. Ask me how many of my friends were prostitutes for GIs. They were kind—too kind—as if I were helpless as a bald little newborn mole and they had to show how careful they could be with me, a testament to their generous and socially liberal natures.
“Once you realize all our assumptions about power are created by the powerful, you understand it must be changed. You rethink power. Not the power that is desire, or dominance. The power that is strength.”
“A stranger in a strange land,” she said in English when she stood up, then spoke again in Mandarin. “I moved to Taiwan from Fuzhou when I was thirty-two. It always felt like exile. But now that I’m here, Taiwan feels like home. Isn’t it funny? The two of us here, so far away, brought together by the island?”
Americans have a hearty appetite for the horror stories of other lands.”
The loss of freedom isn’t a restriction of movement; it’s the unending feeling of being watched.”
Taking the manuscript had not been just theft, but emasculation.
“No. We’ll wait. I won’t let them scare us off.” He eyed the customs agent like he was preparing for a bar fight. “Assholes.”
“I just want you to be careful. Big fish, small fish—they will take them all. Don’t forget that.”
But even if no one believed the lie, they could do nothing but shut up and take it and write thinly veiled poems and make thinly veiled films and write thinly veiled songs. The whole country existed in metaphor.
Now I understood there was something stronger than fate. Choice. It was ugly and quotidian and lacked romance, and that was exactly what gave it its strength.
