Every word, every gesture is now loaded with ambiguity, nothing can be taken at face value. We speak to each other from a safe distance, pretending all the years we soaped each other's backs and pisse...
Each person is made of five different elements, she told me. Too much fire and you had a bad temper. That was like my father, whom my mother always critized for his cigarette habit and who always shou...
Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.
Chaos is the penance for leisure.
But I don't have anything left inside of me to figure out where I fit in or what I want. If I want anything, it's to know what's possible to want.
A pious man explained to his followers: 'It is evil to take lives and noble to save them. Each day I pledge to save a hundred lives. I drop my net in the lake and scoop out a hundred fishes. I place t...
You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who’s saved? Who’s not?
To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing.-Jing-mei
This is the kind of China you Americans always see in the movies - the poor countryside, people wearing big hats to protect themselves from the sun. No, I never wore a hat like that! I was from Shangh...
That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love - that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more maybe less, then thousand different thin...
That is the problem with modern ink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito...
Suffer more now, suffer less later.
Lack of clarity is a writer's truth.
If I stopped running and stood still, I would be accepting that what I had was all I would ever have. And then I would no longer be lost, because there would nowhere else to go
If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too?
I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents' promiise. This means nothing to you, because to you promises mean nothing... But later, she will forget her promise. She will forget she had a grandmother...
I imagine a hundred Chinese Icaruses, molding wings out of earwax. You can't stop people from wishing.
Forever did not mean what it once had. Forever was what changed inevitably over time.
But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people - men, women...
But it was the love of a ghost. Arms that encircled but did not touch. A bowl full of rice but without my appetite to eat it. No hunger. No fullness.