You have to be your own person. You can't let people's opinions determine how you think about yourself. There's a difference between identity and self-identity.

It means we're looking one way, while following another. We're for one side and also the other. We mean what we say, but our intentions are different.

Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it - that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her.

The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.

That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.

Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.