The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

by Jamie Ford

Epigenetics combined with the philosophical idea of Determinism made me wonder if free will is—if not an illusion—a bit of a mirage. That, in addition to the environment we grow up in, the contour and texture of our lives are shaped—in part—by some form of genetic predetermination.

her words were a wish and, like most wishes, if you say them out loud, you diminish their chances of ever coming true.

a lesson plan for toddlers is like a swimming plan for cats.

In America, a lie becomes the truth with sufficient repetition. I merely tell the crowd what they need to hear to be satisfied.”

If people were rain, men would be drizzle, and women a hurricane.

The idea of treating trauma passed down from one generation to the next in humans was highly controversial, to say the least. Just the idea of historical trauma was argumentative, though the concept had been widely accepted in Native American communities for hundreds of years, or more recently, within groups descended from Holocaust survivors. Yet therapists and geneticists had been puzzled for decades, searching for evidence of what they called transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.

That understanding where a loved one came from often eased the burden of letting them go to a place of such shadowed uncertainty.

Even if that place, that final destination, was just an ossuary of memory in the minds of the survivors.

five-flavored tea of forgetfulness—mai wan tong—the waters of oblivion. That the soul will forget everything from this life, and all the lives before. That the slate will be clean when she accompanies them to a long bridge of mist that the soul must traverse to return to this world, where they can begin again at a different point in time without being weighed down by memories of family, of suffering, of wishes unfulfilled.”

being praised for having wings but kept in a cage.

We’re consumed with the here and now, the death and destruction around us, our hopes and dreams, our longings and aspirations, our failings and our regrets. We’re too occupied with the abundance of the present and our hopes for the future to remember all the details of the past.”

Sometimes bad weather is a good thing, Dorothy thought. It tears down what’s weak and forces you to rebuild something stronger, with a lasting permanence.

“But that’s the point, isn’t it, to keep learning, to grow, to do more good than harm, to create compassion, to understand that every person you encounter is not there by coincidence? All of us play a role in another person’s life.”

“Strangers are the people we forgot we needed in this life,”