Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.

My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.

wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything. I think this to myself even though I love my daughter. She and I have shared the same body. There is a part of her mind that is a part of mine. But when she was born she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore.

I began to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.

I like to go somewhere where I learn something I didn't know before, like the Dry Tortugas between Florida and Cuba.

How I saw in her my own true nature. What was beneath my skin. Inside my bones... Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain. This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.

I think we often write because we feel a loneliness, and people read for the same reason, and then they come away feeling a little less lonely.