I have always known a thing before it happens.

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?

Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.

That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.

I have survivor skills. Some of that is superficial - what I present to people outwardly - but what makes people resilient is the ability to find humour and irony in situations that would otherwise overpower you.

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?