And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.

I always thought it mattered, to know what is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, to know how you can avoid it, to not be drawn by the magic of the unspeakable.

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

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

Only two kinds of daughters, she shouted in Chinese. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!

While it is good to speak well, it is better to speak the truth.

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.