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Reticence is a natural state. It is not hiding. People don’t show themselves equally and easily to all. Reticence doesn’t make one feel lonely as hiding does, yet it distances and invalidates others.
A dreamer: it’s the last thing I want to be called, in China or in America. No doubt when my friend in Beijing used the term, she was thinking of traits like persistence, single-mindedness, willfulness, and—particularly—impracticality, which she must have seen plenty of in me. Still, that one possesses a dreamer’s personality and that one has dreams do not guarantee that one knows how to dream.
drifted away, choosing a profession that makes hiding less feasible, if indeed
The transformation, however, is as superficial and deceitful as an ad placed on the back of a bus.
A real dreamer has a mutual trust with time.
I have desired for my characters and myself, knowing all the while the futility of such a wish. Only the lifeless can be immune to life.
That is when I wonder: What if I become less than nothing when I get rid of this emptiness? What if this emptiness is what keeps me going?
I did not explain that I had read Buddhist scriptures from the ages of twelve to twenty-three. For the longest time they offered the most comforting words. The teaching of nothingness diluted the intensity of that emptiness.
A WORD I hate to use in English is I. It is a melodramatic word. In Chinese, a language less grammatically strict, one can construct a sentence with an implied subject pronoun and skip that embarrassing I, or else replace it with we. Living is not an original business.
A person, by dismissing her own self with a morbid carelessness, could easily bulldoze another person’s beliefs.
The hospital reminded me of the army. Habitat-specific vocabularies form a prism through which the civilian world looks fantastical; jokes are shared property; one’s mind becomes a boundless maze, a compensation for the unavailability of physical space; to be seen by all is the easiest way to hide; to speak, and to speak someone else’s language, the best mode of silence. How can the world at large be any different? —
adjacent to campus, a vandalism that led to a police investigation. When the news spread we all went to visit the pavilion during lunch break. In every protester there is a heart capable
A glimpse into the depth of other people’s misfortunes makes us cling to the hope that suffering is measurable. There are more sorrowful sorrows, more despondent despondencies. When we recognize another’s suffering, we cannot avoid confronting our own, from which we escape to the thought of measurability. Well, at least, we emphasize. Our capacity to console extends only to what we can do to console ourselves.
have spent much of my life turning away from the scripts given to me, in China and in America; my refusal to be defined by the will of others is my one and only political statement. Melodrama is never political.
More damaging than becoming a victim of political or historical turmoil is becoming the casualty of someone else’s memory.
When we feel haunted, it is the pull of our old home we’re experiencing, but a more upsetting possibility is that the past has become homeless, and we are offering it a place to inhabit in the present.
and left. When the three children died in the same year she remained indifferent to Nikolai’s loss. Worse than enduring a tyrannical parent is to be the favored child.
Katherine Mansfield’s cool, at times cruel, command in her short stories is a sharp contrast to the unrestrained wildness in her letters. Hemingway, exact in each word and its weight in his fiction, could be garrulous in his correspondence. (Once, entertained
