How can we not create a fantasy in our minds when the reality is so hard?

I am an eighth Chinese, and I come from a large Chinese-American family in Los Angeles.

Anyone who says that women do not have influence in men's decisions makes a vast and stupid mistake.

It used to happen in villages and towns in China that they would have - I guess you'd call them beauty contests - where all of the women of a particular village or town would be seated behind these screens or curtains with only their feet showing.

Maybe we're all like that with our mothers. They seem ordinary until one day they're extraordinary.

Mama used to tell us a story about a cicada sitting high in a tree. It chirps and drinks in dew, oblivious to the praying mantis behind it. The mantis arches up its front leg to stab the cicada, but it doesn't know an oriole perches behind it. The bird stretches out its neck to snap up the mantis for a midday meal, but its unaware of the boy who's come into the garden with a net. Three creatures—the cicada, the mantis and the oriole—all coveted gains without being aware of the greater and inescapable danger that was coming.

Obey, obey, obey, then do what you want.