Shanghai Girls Quotes

May and I are sisters. We'll always fight, but we'll always make up as well. That's what sisters do: we argue, we point out each other's frailties, mistakes, and bad judgment, we flash the insecurities we've had since childhood, and then we come back together. Until the next time.

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

We're told that men are strong & brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat & bear physical & mental agony much better than men.

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.

Seeing something once is better than hearing about it a hundred times. Doing something once is better than seeing it a hundred times.

Having a baby is painful in order to show how serious a thing life is.

As she spoke, I wanted to cry, because sometimes it's just so damn hard to be a mother. We have to wait and wait and wait for our children to open their hearts to us. And if that doesn't work, we have to bide our time and look for the moment of weakness when we can sneak back into their lives and they will see us and remember us for the people who love them unconditionally.

When you don’t have much, having less isn’t so bad.

I wonder if there was anything I would have done differently. I hope I would have done everything differently, except I know everything would have turned out the same. That's the meaning of fate.

i would rather be married to broken jade than flawless clay

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

When the sun is shining, think of the time it won't be, because even when you're sitting in your house with the doors shut, misfortune can fall from above.

Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life.

A brave heart? It feels like a swollen and aching thing in my chest.

Her heart was like a great road with room for everyone.

My mother used to tell me that Heaven never seals off all exits.

I came here to be happy, and I’m going to be happy. If I smile, then maybe I can convince my body just how happy I am.

When you're held underwater, you think only of air.

People say you need to be strong, smart, and lucky to survive hard times, war, a natural disaster, or physical torture. But I say emotional abuse—anxiety, fear, guilt, and degradation—is far worse and much harder to survive.

A dragon doesn't surrender. A dragon fights fate. This is not some loud, roaring feeling. It feels more like someone blew on an ember and found a slight orange glow.

Don't ever feel that you have to hide who you are. Nothing good ever comes from keeping secrets like that.

As I speak, I’m reminded of the old saying that diseases go in through the mouth, disasters come out of the mouth, meaning that words can be like bombs themselves.

No matter what you’re feeling or how desperate you become, always take a moral position. If you do that, God will watch over you.

But then this is how it is for women everywhere. You experience one lapse in conscience, in how low you think you'll go, in what you'll accept, and pretty soon you're at the bottom

Maybe stories and memories are destined to be incomplete...

إنني و ماي أختان ، ولطالما تشاجرنا ، ولكننا تصالحنا أيضاً . فهذا ماتفعله الأخوات . سنتشاجر ، و ستنتقد إحدانا عيوب الأخرى و أخطائها ، و ستحكم إحدانا على الأخرى ، وسننفّس عن كل القلق الذي شعرنا به منذ الطفولة ثم نعود لنتصالح مجدداً إلى أن تحين المره القادمة .

sisters,

Model communes are the ones where the leaders lie the best and the biggest.

We view the world very much as peasants in the countryside have for millennia. they've alsways said that the mountains are high and the emperor is far away, meaning palace intrigues and imperial threats have no impact on their lives.

It’s fair to say I don’t know what I’m doing. I like to plot my life and proceed carefully, but life doesn’t always follow a plan.

Miracles are everywhere, and as I watch my sister--forever, beautiful, forever my little sister--staring into the eyes of the one man she ever loved, I know that indeed things do return to the beginning. The world opens again, and I see a life of happiness without fear. I gaze at my family--complicated though it may be--and know that fate smiles on us.

So often, we're told that women's stories are unimportant. After all, what does it matter what happens in the main room, in the kitchen, or in the bedroom? Who cares about the relationships between mother, daughter, and sister? A baby's illness, the sorrows and pains of childbirth, keeping the family together during war, poverty, or even in the best of days are considered small and insignificant compared with the stories of men, who fight against nature to grow their crops, who wage battles to secure their homelands, who struggle to look inward in search of the perfect man. We're told that men are strong and brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat, and bear physical and mental agony much better than men. The men in my life—my father, Z.G., my husband, my father-in-law, my brother-in-law, and my son—faced, to one degree or another, those great male battles, but their hearts—so fragile—wilted, buckled, crippled, corrupted, broke, or shattered when confronted with the losses women face every day...Our men try to act strong, but it is May, Yen-yen, Joy, and I who must steady them and help them bear their pain, anguish, and shame.

It's funny how in that moment I see things clearly. Am I beaten down? Yes. Have I allowed myself to become a victim? Somewhat. Am I afraid? Always. Does some part of me still long to fly away from this place? Absolutely. But I can't leave. Sam and I have built a life for Joy. It isn't perfect, but it's a life. My family's happiness means more to me that starting over again.

When you lose your home country, what do you preserve and what do you abandon?

La felicità nasce dalla sofferenza, è questo ho intuito.

Understandably she had a lot of suitors, just like any other girls in China with two arms and legs.

The realization that truth, forgiveness, and goodness are more important than revenge, condemnation, and cruelty gives me courage and certainty.

We may look and act modern in many ways, but we can’t escape what we are... obedient chinese daughters.

winter gone, mountains clear, water sparkles.

Everything always returns to the beginning.

because sometimes it’s just so damn hard to be a mother. We have to wait and wait and wait for our children to open their hearts to us. And if that doesn’t work, we have to bide our time and look for the moment of weakness when we can sneak back into their lives and they will see us and remember us for the people who love them unconditionally.

I focus my eyes on my jade bracelet. All these years and for all the years after I die, it will remain unchanged. It will always be hard and cold- just a piece of stone. Yet for me it is an object that ties me to the past, to people and places that are gone forever. Its continued perfection serves as a physical reminder to keep living, to look to the future, to cherish what I have. It reminds me to endure. I'll live one morning after another.

There is nothing innate, immutable or inevitable about boys or girls doing particularly well or badly in different subjects. Girls in Shanghai outperform western boys in math, the same boys that outshine the girls in the US. The variable factor is the educational system, the society and the parents.

I don't want her to either, which is exactly what I've been saying. Still, there's a part of me that hates that our family businesses- the very things that have kept Joy fed, clothed, and housed- are so embarrassing to her...We raised our children to be Americans, but what we wanted were proper Chinese sons and daughters.

My dearest Friend, As I am urging our students to write a note to their mothers away from Shanghai, I think of you as a mother to so many of our Chinese girls. The greatness and depth of your love only God knows how to measure and reward you. Thinking of you has always been an inspiration to me. I love you. Lovingly yours, Tszo-Sing Chen

It has been said that marriages are arranged by Heaven, that destiny will bring even the most distantly separated people together, that all is settled before birth, and no matter how much we wander from our paths, no matter how our fortunes change—for good or bad—all we can do is accomplish the decree of fate. This, in the end, is our blessing and our heartbreak.

There was a typhoon the day you were born... It is said that a Dragon born in a storm will have a particularly tempestuous fate. You always believe you are right, and this makes you do things you shouldn't... You're a Dragon, and of all the signs only a Dragon can tame the fates. Only a Dragon can wear all the horns of destiny, duty, and power. Your sister is merely a Sheep...

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.

Because inside we still carry the dreams of what could have been, of what should have been, of what we wish could still be. This doesn't mean we aren't content. We are content, but the romantic longings of our girlhood have never entirely left us. It's like Yen-Yen said all those years ago: 'I look in the mirror and I'm surprised by what I see.' I look in the mirror and still expect to see my Shanghai-girl self- not the wife and mother I've become.

Wrapped in Maddy’s red coat, she feels almost possessed by all the tough women she’s admired in movies. Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai. Crawford in, well, everything. The kind of women men don’t know if they want to kiss or kill. Women who claw and scrape through life because they have to. Now it’s Charlie’s turn. She’s no longer the scared, self-loathing girl she was when she left campus. She’s something else. A fucking femme fatale.

Partying and dancing have never been my thing, but drinking I could do with reasonable familiarity and skills. I decided to begin there.

People keep asking me why I don’t return to China. I tell them I can’t return to a place I’ve never been. In

The lotus symbolizes purity, because it rises out of the mud but looks pristine.

People are shaped by the earth and water around them.

spring comes, flowers fragrant, bird sings.

To make an ox or water buffalo work so hard, it needs to be blinded and uninformed. That’s what the government is doing to the masses now.

It feels like all we've been doing day after day is partying with Shanghai's Gossip Girl crowd.

We’re told that men are strong and brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat, and bear physical and mental agony much better than men.

What's your first impression of a new place? Is it the first meal you eat? Your first ice cream cone? The first person you meet? The first night you spend in your new bed in your new home? The first broken promise?

Sometimes you think you have all of tomorrow ahead of you,’ Mama often said. ‘When the sun is shinning, think of the time it won’t be, because even when you’re sitting in your house with the doors shut, misfortune can fall from above.

It was an aspiring neighbourhood that retained a faint edge of slum, typical of Shanghai. Pensioners in Mao-era padded jackets would sit on doorsteps playing mah-jong, oblivious to the Prada-clad girls sweeping past on their way to work.

In my life, no three miles have been flat and no three days have had sun. I've been brave in the past, but now I'm beyond devastated. My grief is like dense clouds that cannot be dispersed. I can't think beyond the blackness of my clothes and heart.

The girls here are so young. One of them twines her fingers into mine, her hand so small I could crush it. There are more of them in the ballroom, standing well outside the pools of light that demarcate the dancing from the sitting, the illusion from the reality.

But I’m not just shocked. I’m also disappointed in May for allowing Z.G. to talk her into this. I’m angry at him for preying on her vulnerability. And I’m heartsick that May and I have to take it. This is how women end up on the street selling their bodies. But then this is how it is for women everywhere. You experience one lapse in conscience, in how low you think you’ll go, in what you’ll accept, and pretty soon you’re at the bottom. You’ve become a girl with three holes, the lowest form of prostitute, living on one of the floating brothels in Soochow Creek, catering to Chinese so poor they don’t mind catching a loathsome disease in exchange for a few humping moments of the husband-wife thing.

I read it when I was a kid. Shanghai’s about to fall into the ocean, and a group of people go house to house seizing life preservers and then destroying them en masse, for the sole purpose of making sure that no one would live if everyone couldn’t. I remember in particular there was one little girl who took the group to the door of one house and cried out, ‘They still have one!

In response, five nearby Scarlet gangsters who were waiting around a restaurant also stilled, waiting to see if they would be summoned. They were killersand extortionistsand raging forces of violence, butas the rumors went, Juliette Cai was the girl who had strangled and killed her American lover with a string of pearls. Juliette Cai was the heiress who, on her second day back in Shanghai, had stepped into a brawl between four White Flowers and two Scarletsand killed all four White Flowers with only three bullets. Only one of those rumors was true. Juliette smiled and waved to the Scarlet men. In response, one waved back, and the other four nervously laughed among themselves. They feared Lord Cai’s wrath if anything were to happen to her, but they feared her wrath more if they were to test the truth of the rumors.

When you’re held underwater, you think only of air. I remember how I felt about Shanghai in the days after our lives changed - how streets that had once seemed exciting suddenly stank of nightsoil, how beautiful women suddenly were nothing more than girls with three holes, how all the money and prosperity suddenly rendered everything forlon, dissolute and futile. The way I see Los Angeles and Chinatown during these difficult and frightening days couldn’t be more different.

That lazy servant next door was sloppy with the Tso family’s nightstool and stunk up the street with their nightsoil,” Mama says. “And Cook!” She allows herself a low hiss of disapproval. “Cook has served us shrimp so old that the smell has made me lose my appetite.” We don’t contradict her, but the odor suffocating us comes not from spilled nightsoil or day-old shrimp but from her. Since we don’t have our servants to keep the air moving in the room, the smell that rises from the blood and pus that seep through the bandages holding Mama’s feet in their tiny shape clings to the back of my throat.

EUROS SIDE WITH MEXICAN GANG RAPIST Mexico, President Bush’s dearest international ally, brought a lawsuit against the United States in the International Court of Justice on behalf of its native son, Jose Ernesto Medellin, arguing that Texas failed to inform him of his right to confer with the Mexican consulate. It probably didn’t occur to the police to ask Medellin if he was Mexican, with the media referring to the suspects exclusively as: “five Houston teens,” “five youths,” “the youths,” “young men,” “members of ‘a social club,’” “a bunch of guys,” “six young men,” “six teen-agers,” and “these guys”23 (and, oddly, “America’s hottest boy band”). The World Court agreed with Mexico, confirming my suspicion that any organization with “world” in its title—International World Court, the World Bank, World Cup Soccer, the World Trade Organization—is inherently evil. The court ordered that Mexican illegal aliens in American prisons must be retried unless they had been promptly advised of their consular rights—a ruling that would have emptied Texas’s prisons. It wasn’t as if America had shanghaied Medellin and dragged him into our country. He sneaked in illegally, demanded the full panoply of rights accorded American citizens, and when things didn’t go his way, suddenly announced he was an illegal alien entitled to rights as a Mexican citizen. Or as the New York Times hyperventilated: A failure to enforce the World Court’s ruling “could imperil American tourists or business travelers if they are ever arrested and need the help of a consular official.”24 If an American tourist or business traveler ever gang-rapes and murders two teenaged girls in a foreign country, I don’t care what they do to him.

Listen. How long you been going around with her, this sculpture babe?" I asked him. I was really interested. "Did you know her when you were at Whooton?" "Hardly. She just arrived in this country a few months ago." "She did? Where's she from? "She happens to be from Shanghai." "No kidding! She Chinese, for Chrissake?" "Obviously." "No kidding! Do you like that? Her being Chinese?" "Obviously." "Why? I'd be interested to know. I really would." "I simply happen to find Eastern philosophy more satisfactory than Western. Since you ask." "You do? Wuddaya mean 'philosophy'? Ya mean sex and all? You mean it's better in China? That what you mean?" "Not necessarily in China, for God's sake. The East I said. Must we go on with this inane conversation?" " Listen, I'm serious," I said. "No kidding. Why's it better in the East?" "It's too involved to go into, for God's sake," old Luce said. "They simply happen to regard sex as both a physical and spiritual experience. If you think I'm -" "So do I! So do I regard it was a wuddayacallit - a physical and spiritual experience and all. I really dop. But it depends on who the hell I'm doing it with. If I'm doing it with somebody I don't even-" "Not so loud, for God's sake, Caulfield. If you can't manage to keep your voice down, let's drop the whole -" "All right, but listen," I said. I was getting excited and I was talking too loud. Sometimes I talk a little loud when I get excited. "This is what I mean, though," I said. "I know it's supposed to be physical and spiritual and artistic and all. But what I mean is, you can't do it with everybody - every girl you neck with and all - and make it come out that way. Canyou?" "Let's drop it," Old Luce said. "Do you mind?" "All right, but listen. Take you and this Chinese babe. What's so good about you two?" "Drop it, I said.

Little Nicky heads to the Badlands to see the show for himself. The Western Roads are outside his remit as a U.S. Treasury agent, but he knows the men he wants are its denizens. Standing on the corner of the Great Western and Edinburgh Roads, a sideshow, a carnival of the doped, the beaten, and the crazed. He walks round to the Avenue Haig strip and encounters the playground of Shanghai’s crackpots, cranks, gondoos, and lunatics. He’s accosted constantly: casino touts, hustling pimps, dope dealers; monkeys on chains, dancing dogs, kids turning tumbles, Chinese ‘look see’ boys offering to watch your car. Their numbers rise as the Japs turn the screws on Shanghai ever tighter. Half-crazy American missionaries try to sell him Bibles printed on rice paper—saving souls in the Badlands is one tough beat. The Chinese hawkers do no better with their porno cards of naked dyed blondes, Disney characters in lewd poses, and bare-arsed Chinese girls, all underage. Barkers for the strip shows and porno flicks up the alleyways guarantee genuine French celluloid of the filthiest kind. Beggars abound, near the dealers and bootleggers in the shadows, selling fake heroin pills and bootleg samogon Russian vodka, distilled in alleyways, that just might leave you blind. Off the Avenue Haig, Nicky, making sure of his gun in its shoulder holster, ventures up the side streets and narrow laneways that buzz with the purveyors of cure-all tonics, hawkers of appetite suppressants, male pick-me-ups promising endless virility. Everything is for sale—back-street abortions and unwanted baby girls alongside corn and callus removers, street barbers, and earwax pickers. The stalls of the letter writers for the illiterate are next to the sellers of pills to cure opium addiction. He sees desperate refugees offered spurious Nansen passports, dubious visas for neutral Macao, well-forged letters of transit for Brazil. He could have his fortune told twenty times over (gypsy tarot cards or Chinese bone chuckers? Your choice). He could eat his fill—grilled meat and rice stalls—or he could start a whole new life: end-of-the-worlders and Korean propagandists offer cheap land in Mongolia and Manchukuo.

Their parents had been progressive by nature.  They had taken their daughters with them to the Far East on a business trip with the intention of letting the girls see other cultures.  The trip had ended in disaster.  Their parents had been killed by local thieves, somewhere in the suburbs of Shanghai.  The girls had been taken and sold to the Yakuza.  Because their bodies had not been found, and they were not seen after the death of their parents, it was assumed the girls were dead and buried.  That women were still not as important in the culture of their home country had sped the closure of their case. Edith Cromwell spent a lot of sleepless nights that first week wondering about the psyches of the males she worked with each day.  Were they capable of the sort of crimes against women that these poor girls had endured?  The suspicions, the fears that this line of thought provoked could end in alcoholism, drug abuse, even suicide.  Edith decided that she had best just leave it well enough alone.  If not, she would never be able to work with any man ever again.

I thought I could use idealism to solve my inner conflicts, but in healing my inner conflicts I destroyed my idealism.

Tuhan memang menciptakan perempuan, namun Dia lupa menciptakan kebahagiaan.

unpack, polish, or sell. There are

So often we're told that women's stories are unimportant. After all, what does it matter what happens in the main room, in the kitchen, or in the bedroom? Who cares about relationships between mother, daughter, and sister? A baby's illness, the sorrows and pains of childbirth, keeping the family together during war, poverty, or even in the best of days are considered small and insignificant compared with the stories of men, who fight against nature to grow their crops, who wage battles to secure their homelands, who struggle to look inward in search of the perfect man. We're told that men are strong and brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat, and bear physical and mental agony much better than men.

I didn’t know what to do with her. Little girls were not worth much. All across Shanghai, girls were abandoned, starved, sold, or used; some were as young as five years old. I had seen them, tied with a rope, huddled in the corner near the temple in the Old City as men examined them.

I followed her gaze. Along the dilapidated city wall, a group of children dressed in black tunics were all tied together by a rope around their waists. They looked to be no more than ten, with long hair, bare feet, and stagnant eyes; obediently they stood in front of a man with a long braid who inspected them, lifting their chins, unbuttoning their tunics and peering inside. Finally, the man handed a coin to the old man holding the rope, who untied a girl in the cluster and pushed her to him.

The worthless girls near the Old City God Temple, abandoned by their families, sold and used at a young age.

I close my eyes. I hear the voices of the past in the wind and in the beating of my heart. My two mothers, my two fathers, and my dear uncle all tried to tell me I was wrong about the People's Republic of China. In the beginning, going all the way back to the University of Chicago, I thought socialism and communism were good, that people should share equally, that it wasn't fair that my family had suffered in America when others drove fancy cars, lived in big houses, and shopped in Beverly Hills. I ran away and came here in hopes of finding an ideal world, to find my birth father, to avoid my mother and aunt, and to crush my guilt. None of that worked the way I expected. The ideal world was filled with hypocrisy and with people like Z.G., who went to parties while the masses suffered. In finding my birth father, I only remembered how wonderful my father Sam was. He loved me unconditionally, while Z.G. wanted me as a muse, as a pretty daughter to show off, as a physical manifestation of his love for Auntie May, as an artist who would reflect how great an artist he is. I thought I could use idealism to solve my inner conflicts, but in healing my inner conflicts I destroyed my idealism. As I gaze into my daughter's face, everything becomes very clear. My mother and aunt loved me, stood by me, and supported me, no matter what. They were both good mothers. My greatest misery and grief is that I have not been a good mother and I can't save my daughter. I pray that in our final days and hours Samantha will know how much I love her.

Never before in all North Kiangsu had a child been recovered without a ransom ... The next Sunday, as Mrs. Billy Graham often told the story to her own children, Ruth saw ' Mr. Kao Er and his wife stand up in the church to give public thanks to God for what he had done. Mr. Kao was carrying the little boy who still couldn't walk, and his wife was carrying the little girl. And they stood up before the whole congregation to give God the glory. The Billy Graham children would then pray for Kao Er's son and daughter who would have been twenty-four and seventeen at the Communist revolution of 1949. Many years later Ruth received a photograph of the son from Shanghai with a personal inscription.

He’s saying that Escapism needs to be treated as harshly as the ETO, and that a guided missile needs to be dropped on anyone making a Noah’s Ark.” “That’s kind of harsh.” “No,” he said forcefully. “It’s the wisest strategy. I came up with it long ago. And even if it doesn’t come to that, no one’s going to fly away, anyway. You ever read a book by Liang Xiaosheng called Floating City?” “I haven’t. It’s pretty old, isn’t it?” “Right. I read it when I was a kid. Shanghai’s about to fall into the ocean, and a group of people go house to house seizing life preservers and then destroying them en masse, for the sole purpose of making sure that no one would live if everyone couldn’t. I remember in particular there was one little girl who took the group to the door of one house and cried out, ‘They still have one!

For a brief period, nationality did not seem to matter. A Japanese girl in high heels stepped carefully among the injured, alongside a Chinese nurse in a snow-white dress that gradually turned a deep scarlet.

Hua Mulan wore trousers.' I invoke one of my heroes, the girl who took on an army and proved herself the equal of any man. 'Hua Mulan wore trousers because she was a warrior', Big Wang says. 'You are a lady.

Gone the glitter and glamour; gone the pompous wealth beside naked starvation; gone the strange excitement of a polyglot and many-sided city; gone the island of Western civilization flourishing in the vast slum that was Shanghai. Good-by to all that: the well-dressed Chinese in their chauffeured cars behind bullet-proof glass; the gangsters, the shakedowns, the kid­napers; the exclusive foreign clubs, the men in white dinner jackets, their women beautifully gowned; the white-coated Chinese “boys” ob­sequiously waiting to be tipped; Jimmy’s Kitchen with its good Amer­ican coffee, hamburgers, chili and sirloin steaks. Good-by to all the night life: the gilded singing girl in her enameled hair-do, her stage make-up, her tight-fitting gown with its slit skirt breaking at the silk­ clad hip, and her polished ebony and silver-trimmed rickshaw with its crown of lights; the hundred dance halls and the thousands of taxi dolls; the opium dens and gambling halls; the flashing lights of the great restaurants, the clatter of mah-jongg pieces, the yells of Chinese feasting and playing the finger game for bottoms-up drinking; the sailors in their smelly bars and friendly brothels on Szechuan Road; the myriad short-time whores and pimps busily darting in and out of the alleyways; the display signs of foreign business, the innumerable shops spilling with silks, jades, embroideries, porcelains and all the wares of the East; the generations of foreign families who called Shanghai home and lived quiet conservative lives in their tiny vacuum untouched by China; the beggars on every downtown block and the scabby infants urinating or defecating on the curb while mendicant mothers absently scratched for lice; the “honey carts” hauling the night soil through the streets; the blocks-long funerals, the white-clad professional mourners weeping false tears, the tiers of paper palaces and paper money burned on the rich man’s tomb; the jungle free-for- all struggle for gold or survival and the day’s toll of unwanted infants and suicides floating in the canals; the knotted rickshaws with their owners fighting each other for customers and arguing fares; the peddlers and their plaintive cries; the armored white ships on the Whangpoo, “protecting foreign lives and property”; the Japanese conquerors and their American and Kuomintang successors; gone the wickedest and most colorful city of the old Orient: good-by to all that.

La felicità nasce dalla sofferenza, è questo che ho intuito.

Non vi è ferita più profonda o dolorosa di quella inferta da coloro che sostengono di amarti di più.

What’s the first impression you have of a new place? Is it the first meal you eat? The first time you have an ice cream cone? The first person you meet? The first night you spend in your new bed in your new home? The first broken promise?

It has been said that marriages are arranged by Heaven, that destiny will bring even the most distantly separated people together, that all is settled before birth, and no matter how much we wander from our paths, no matter how our fortunes change—for good or bad—all we can do is accomplish the decree of fate. This, in the end, is our blessing and our heartbreak. Regrets

Every day since waking up in the hospital I've wanted to die, but watching that man sink below the waves, I feel something inside me rise up. A Dragon doesn't surrender. A Dragon fights fate. This is not some loud, roaring feeling. It feels more like someone blew on an ember and found a slight orang glow. I have to hang on to my life—however ruined and useless. Mama's voice comes floating to me, reciting one of her favorite sayings, "There is no catastrophe except death; one cannot be poorer than a beggar." I want—need—to do something braver and finer than dying.

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

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

She's grabbed onto old traditions-outdated traditions- in the same way I latch onto them now: as a means of survival, as a way to hang on to ghost memories.

Waves of heat shimmy off the tarmac, and the air is stiflingly hot, with humidity that’s even worse

BE KIND AND BENEVOLENT. MAKE A CASUAL STOP ON THE ENDLESS WAY TO THE FUTURE. and PUT ALL TROUBLES FROM YOUR MIND.

My home is here with this family I've built from scraps of tragedy.

It's hard for a snake to go back to Hell once its had a taste of Heaven.

The other day in Shanghai, Nick and I were trying to get back to our hotel from Xintiandi. All the taxis had their signs lit up, but we couldn’t figure out why they wouldn’t stop for us. Finally, this Australian girl standing on the corner said to us, ‘Don’t you have the taxi app?’ We were like, The what? Turns out there’s an app

The streets of downtown Shanghai likewise seemed a continuous freak circus at first, unbelievably alive with all manner of people performing almost every physical and social function in public: yelling, gesturing, always acting, crushing throngs spilling through every kind of traffic, precariously amidst old cars and new ones and between coolies racing wildly to compete for ricksha fares, gingerly past "honey-carts" filled with excrement dragged down Bubbling Well Road, sardonically past perfumed, exquisitely gowned, mid-thigh-exposed Chinese ladies, jestingly past the Herculean bare-backed coolie trundling his taxi-wheelbarrow load of six giggling servant girls en route to home or work, carefully before singing peddlers bearing portable kitchens ready with delicious noodles on the spot, lovingly under gold-lettered shops overflowing with fine silks and brocades, dead-panning past village women staring wide-eyed at frightening Indian policemen, gravely past gambling mah-jongg ivories clicking and jai alai and parimutuel betting, slyly through streets hung with the heavy-sweet acrid smell of opium, sniffingly past southern restaurants and bright-lighted sing-song houses, indifferently past scrubbed, aloof young Englishmen in their Austins popping off to cricket on the Race Course, snickeringly round elderly white gentlemen in carriages with their wives or Russian mistresses out for the cool air along the Bund, and hastily past sailors looking for beer and women—from noisy dawn to plangent night the endless hawking and spitting, the baby's urine stream on the curb, the amah's scolding, the high falsetto of opera at Wing On Gardens where a dozen plays went on at once and hotel rooms next door filled up with plump virgins procured for wealthy merchants in from the provinces for business and debauch, the wail of dance bands moaning for slender bejeweled Chinese taxi dancers, the whiteness of innumerable beggars and their naked unwashed infants, the glamour of the Whangpoo with its white fleets of foreign warships, its shaggy freighters, its fan-sailed junks, its thousand lantern-lit sampans darting fire-flies on the moon-silvered water filled with deadly pollution. Shanghai!

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