What stays with me most is a general sense of loss, unease, and longing for the past that cannot be relieved.

We hug, but there are no tears. For every awful thing that's been said and done, she is my sister. Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life. She is the only person left in the world who shares my memories of our childhood, our parents, our Shanghai, our struggles, our sorrows, and, yes, even our moments of happiness and triumph. My sister is the one person who truly knows me, as I know her. The last thing May says to me is 'When our hair is white, we'll still have our sister love.

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

What stays with me most is a general sense of loss, unease, and longing for the past that cannot be relieved.

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.

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

And often it would be a woman who was in her 70s or 80s who would win the beauty contest, because bound feet never age.