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“We have many lives, Afong, but this life begins when we realize we only have one.”
“Women are born to lead lives of inconsistency.” She tried not to cry as she held Afong’s hands. “While it is our curse, it can also be our strength.”
she’d graduate and be forced to join the real world, which, while pretending to be a democracy, was just a sexist illusion, a mirage of freedom.
“Who was she? She seemed so familiar.”
“Was that me?” Dr. Shedhorn gently put her hand on Dorothy’s arm. “They’re all you.”
She stumbled away from who she was, who she once wanted to be, disappearing into the dark night, vanishing from the newspapers, the headlines, forever.
that families are like a school of sharks: it’s a miracle they don’t eat each other or simply swim their separate ways. Something compels them to stay together.
“But the ah-ma I knew had become very sad. She struggled. Always searching for what she’d lost and unfortunately, she never found it again. Then she finally went away.” “Why did she have to go away?” Annabel asked. “Because she had a broken heart and needed to mend it.” Annabel contemplated this. “Did they make her all better?” Dorothy smiled, but her eyes watered.
swear that’s part of our DNA. Maybe the next Human Genome Project will locate our highly evolved guilt triggers and the overwhelming desire to never let our Asian parents down. It’s like karma on steroids.”
My parents always stressed that karma is transpersonal. It’s not about doing good or bad, making wise of foolish choices, for our own karmic benefit. It’s about how our choices can improve the quality of other people’s journeys. Our family’s, our children’s, our partners’, romantic and otherwise.
That’s the one good thing about being poor, having nothing, Lai King thought. Happiness is free.
never settle for what others want you to be. Find a way to be the person you need to be to truly be happy. Don’t give in to convention.
Love was real. The way she’d felt—the way she still felt—was a confirmation. There was something and someone out there. There was more. That her lifetime of restless wandering hadn’t been in vain. That her mistakes, her heartaches, her regrets, all led her here, to the place where he could find her.
He gently put the eartips in her ears, then slipped the metal chest piece between the buttons of his shirt, directly above his heart. “What are you doing?” He smiled again and leaned closer. “I wanted you to hear my heartbeat when I kiss you for the first time.”
“It’s okay to miss someone. It means you loved them. Grief is unexpressed love.”
“Strangers are the people we forgot we needed in this life,” the woman said reverently. “That line has stuck with me for years; I’ve never forgotten it.”
