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“We always remember what we want to forget, and forget what we want to remember,”
“now we, the City, give you our hero. You promise you’ll take the best care of him, for the City.” Chunyu recoiled a little, looking away at the pink oleander blossoms outside the window, saying softly, “I look after my husband, and the City looks after its hero. You promise me, in front of everyone here, you’ll step in when I need help.”
Can anyone really be prepared, though, for a revolution any more than for a famine? If anything, famine was more predictable, with its battlefield restricted to the kitchen, stove, and dinner table. But a revolution may ambush anyone, just about anywhere. A wrong hair style, a wrong choice of clothing, a wrong conversation with a wrong group, a wrong smile, a wrong parent, or a wrong past—one could find it waiting right around the corner.
It was a thin line he had to tread, between his goodwill and Chunyu’s pride. No amount of goodwill could dull the edge of pride, he sadly realized.
Memory is subjective, so in that sense we are all gaslighting others somewhat when we assert our version of the past. But we have to trust our own memory, otherwise we crumble.
It was the fear of the unknown that tipped the scale. Sixteen is an awkward age, too young to die for honor, but too old to live with shame.
She listened in silence. She was supposed to say something comforting, but she didn’t. No more pity in reserve to offer to any men, or any rats. She was all dried up.
What’s remembered gets a life, she read once in a book.
What a marvel that her eyes had grown so sharp in such a short span of time. Two days, in everyone else’s calendar. Two lives, in her own.
What’s the purpose of life if she was to waste all the wrangling and wrestling that had gone into the outliving, when she didn’t even know what to do with the living? She came to a sober realization that she needed something substantial enough to weight her down and give her a new focus on life.
The mother version was familiar to Phoenix, but the sister version was the pearl in the oyster. But truth had taken its toll on Auntie. The pearl was harvested, leaving behind a damaged oyster.
