“I refused to be stuck. In Pasaje, California. In the smallness of my mother's life. In a fixed notion of my cooking, my abilities, my worth as ascribed to my Chineseness my Asianness my smallness my womanness my perpetual foreignness--myself.” LifeWomenLabelsChineseAsianAssumptionsForeignnessTags Book:Land of Milk and Honey Source: Land of Milk and Honey
“We all die. We have only the choice, if we are privileged, of whether death comes with a whimper or a bang; of what worlds we taste before we go.” LifeDeathDyingPrivilegeOpportunities Book:Land of Milk and Honey Source: Land of Milk and Honey
“So much of what my generation had been promised disintegrated at our touch. Consider the friend, a painter of seascapes, who dreamed of affording waterfront property. On the day the levees broke, the Gulf flooded her studio and painted her walls with costly oils. Consider the friend who worked for six years at a company he hated on the promise of a sabbatical, only to be let go. The friend who complained about family reunions and lost every relative over the age of fifty to a virus. The friend who saved up to invest in a fund and saw her money dissolve like sugar on the tongues of bankers who barely got a scolding from the SEC. The life we'd been promised was a scam, the world a scam, the whole goddamn play a scam and there seemed nothing to do but burn it down as rioters did in Paris, New York, Nairobi—and then creep back through the embers because what other choice did we have?” WorldLifeChallengesPromisesDifficultiesBroken PromisesScamsDisintegration Book:Land of Milk and Honey Source: Land of Milk and Honey