- I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.
- When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?
- No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the writer, however, it is the mother tongue. But what if the mother tongue is stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely? The Vietnamese I own is the one you gave me, the one whose diction and syntax reach only the second-grade level. As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.
- Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t it?
- It’s a beautiful country, she’s been told, depending on who you are
- The rain keeps on because nourishment, too, is a force
- I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?
- Even when I know something to be true as bone I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real. I’m breaking us apart again so that I might carry us somewhere else—where, exactly, I’m not sure. Just as I don’t know what to call you—White, Asian, orphan, American, mother?
- Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.To be or not to be. That is the question.
- To be or not to be. That is the question. A question, yes, but not a choice.
- Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.
- But by writing, I mar it. I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once.
- The boy from whom I learned there was something even more brutal and total than work—want.
- And because I am your son, I said, “Sorry.” Because I am your son, my apology had become, by then, an extension of myself. It was my Hello.
- I was seen—I who had seldom been seen by anyone. I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe
- Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself
- She pain, the boy thought, mulling over her words. How can anyone be a feeling?
- They say a song can be a bridge, Ma. But I say it’s also the ground we stand on. And maybe we sing to keep ourselves from falling. Maybe we sing to keep ourselves.
- We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another.
- tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.
- I’m broken in two, the message said. In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two.
- It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.
- They say every snowflake is different—but the blizzard, it covers us all the same.
- In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly
- They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.
- It’s like when all you’ve been seeing before you is a cliff and then this bright bridge appears out of nowhere, and you run fast across it knowing, sooner or later, there’ll be yet another cliff on the other side. What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher? And the lesson is always this: You don’t have to be like the buffaloes. You can stop
- A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.
- It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for.
- I say it as if it is the only answer to your question—as if a name is also a sound we can be found in.
- All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.
- To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.
dec 9 2021 ∞
dec 9 2021 +