To shut the door at the end of the workday, which does not spill over into evening. To throw away books after reading them so they... don't have to be dusted. To go through boxes on New Year's Eve and throw out half of what is inside. Sometimes for extravagance to pick a bunch of flowers for the one table. Other women besides me must have this daydream about a carefree life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. Petals are bone marrow; pearls com...e from oysters. The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes, and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium. Its voice thunders and jingles like copper pans. It breathes fire and water; and sometimes the dragon is one, sometimes many.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No husband of mine will say, "I could have been a drummer, but I had to think about the wife and kids. You know how it is." Nobody... supports me at the expense of his own adventure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The idioms for revenge are "report a crime" and "report to five families." The reporting is the vengeance--not the beheading, not ...the gutting, but the words.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I am useless, one more girl who couldn't be sold. When I visit the family now, I wrap my American successes around me like a pr...ivate shawl. I am worthy of eating the food. From afar I can believe my family loves me fundamentally. They only say, "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls," because that is what one says about daughters. But I watched such words come out of my own mother's and father's mouths; I looked at their ink drawing of poor people snagging their neighbors' flotage with long flood hooks and pushing the girl babies on down the river. And I had to get out of hating range. I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, "Girls are necessary too"; I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession. Perhaps it was a saying in another village.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We cou...ld be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I've learned exactly who the enemy are. I easily recognize them--business-suited in their modern American executive guise, each... boss two feet taller than I am and impossible to meet eye to eye.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »