ENG181a midterm
"I'm glad you came. I hadn't expected to see you again, and really, it's funny because there's no one else I can talk to."
"No-No Boy" - John Okada
"Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, t.v. dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts."
"A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"Her hair seemed to stretch."
"A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"Her skin was fleshy, like squid out of which the glassy blades of bones had been pulled. I wanted tough skin, hard brown skin. I had callused my hands; I had scratched dirt to blacken the nails, which I cut straight across to make stubby fingers. I gave her face a squeeze. "Talk." When I let go, the pink rushed back into my white thumbprint on her skin...Her skin seemed to stretch. I let go in horror. What if it came away in my hand? "No, huh?" I said, rubbing the touch of her off my fingers."
"A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"I had stopped pinching her cheek because I did not like the feel of her skin. I would go crazy if it came away in my hand."
"A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"I looked into her face so I could hate it close up. She wore black bangs, and her cheeks were pink and white. She was baby soft. I thought I could put my thumb on her nose and push it bonelessly in, indent her face. I could poke dimples into her cheeks. I could work her face around like dough."
"A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"I was getting dizzy from the air I was gulping. Her sobs and my sobs were bouncing wildly off the tile, sometimes together, sometimes alternating."
"A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"My silence was thickest--total—during the three years that I covered my school paintings with black paint...I was making a stage curtain, and it was the moment before the curtain parted or rose...I spread them out (so black and full of possibilities) and pretended the curtains were swinging open, flying open, one after another, sunlight underneath, mighty operas."
"A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"Sniffing and snorting, I couldn't stop crying and talking at the same time. I kept wiping my nose on my arm, my sweater lost somewhere."
"A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"Sounds did come out of her mouth, sobs, chokes, noises that were almost words. Snot ran out of her nose. She tried to wipe it on her hands, but there was too much of it. She used her sleeve."
"A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"We stood on tiptoes and on one another's shoulders, and through the door we saw spotlights open on tall singers afire with sequins. An opera from San Francisco! ...I heard one line sung out into the night air in a woman's voice high and clear as ice. She was standing on a chair, and she sang, "Beat me, then, beat me." The crowd laughed until tears rolled down their cheeks..."
"A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"When my second grade class did a play, the whole class went to the auditorium except the Chinese girls. The teacher, lovely and Hawaiian, should have understood about us, but instead left us behind in the classroom...We opened the door a crack and peeked out, but closed it again quickly."
"A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"But so romantic," Mrs. Das said dreamily, breaking her extended silence. She lifted her pinkish brown sunglasses and arranged them on top of her head like a tiara. For the first time, her eyes met Mr. Kapasi's in the rearview mirror; pale, a bit small, their gaze fixed but drowsy."
"Interpreter of Maladies" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"But we do not face a language barrier. What need is there for an interpreter?" "That's not what I mean. I would never have told you otherwise. Don't you realize what it means for me to tell you? "What does it mean?"
"Interpreter of Maladies" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"I thought that the Sun Temple is only eighteen miles north of Puri," Mr. Das said, tapping on the tour book. "The roads to Konarak are poor. Actually it is a distance of fifty-two miles."
"Interpreter of Maladies" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"In fact, every year I take my students on a trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York City. In a way we have a lot in common, you could say, you and I. How long have you been a tour guide, Mr. Kapasi?"
"Interpreter of Maladies" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"In the rearview mirror Mr. Kapasi watched as Mrs. Das emerged slowly..."
"Interpreter of Maladies" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"Mr. Das tapped on his lens cap, and his tour book...Mrs. Das...had still not removed her sunglasses."
"Interpreter of Maladies" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"Mr. Kapasi felt insulted that Mrs. Das should ask him to interpret her common, trivial little secret. She did not resemble the patients in the doctor's office, those who came glassy-eyed and desperate, unable to sleep or breathe or urinate with ease, unable, above all, to give words to their pains. ..."Is it really pain you feel, Mrs. Das, or is it guilt?" She turned to him and glared, mustard oil thick on her frosty pink lips. She opened her mouth to say something, but as she glared at Mr. Kapasi some certain knowledge seemed to pass before her eyes, and she stopped. It crushed him; he knew at that moment that he was not even important enough to be properly insulted."
"Interpreter of Maladies" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"Mr. Kapasi pulled over to the side of the road as Mr. Das took a picture of a barefoot man, his head wrapped in a dirty turban, seated on top of a cart of grain sacks pulled by a pair of bullocks. Both the man and the bullocks were emaciated."
"Interpreter of Maladies" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"When she whipped our the hairbrush, the slip of paper with Mr. Kapasi's address on it fluttered away in the wind. No one but Mr. Kapasi noticed. He watched as it rose, carried higher and higher by the breeze, into the trees where the monkeys now sat, solemnly observing the scene below. Mr. Kapasi observed it too, knowing that this was the picture of the Das family he would preserve forever in his mind."
"Interpreter of Maladies" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"[Mr. Das] glanced up from his paperback tour book, which said "INDIA" in yellow letters and looked as if it had been published abroad."
"Interpreter of Maladies" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"... "Mrs. Sasaki would have let the matter go, were it not for the fact that Miss Sasagawara was so absorbed a spectator of this horseplay that her head was bent to one side and she actually had one finger in her mouth as she gazed." (32)
"Legend of Miss Sasagawara" - Hisaye Yamamoto
"But the mystery had been solved late one night, when Joe gradually awoke in his cot with the feeling that he was being watched. Warily he had opened one eye slightly and had been thoroughly awakened and chilled in the bargain by what he saw. For what he saw was Miss Sasagawara sitting there on his apple crate, her long hair all undone and flowing about her...And all she was doing was sitting there watching him..."
"Legend of Miss Sasagawara" - Hisaye Yamamoto
"The day came at last, however, when his wife died and other circumstances made it unnecessary for him to earn a competitive living. These circumstances were considered by those about him as sheer imprisonment, but he had felt free for the first time in his long life."
"Legend of Miss Sasagawara" - Hisaye Yamamoto
"the first published poem of a Japanese American woman who is, at present, an evacuee from the West Coast making her home in a War Relocation center in Arizona."
"Legend of Miss Sasagawara" - Hisaye Yamamoto
"Recalling all this [memories of the islands] before the hour of midnight I remembered you, brother, and hoped you Could watch with me the splendid glide Of limousines in this street, and in that other, The long parade of hungry working men That approached my window at dawn to remind Me once again of the coughing orbit of life In this strange land, their beloved country. We didn't have the poet's vision or the hangman's Dream to twist the whole of living on our finger, But in those islands, under familiar trees we spoke Of the littlest things with the simplest joys..."
"Letter in Exile" - Carlos Bulosan
"I could not understand why my mother had to die. I could not understand why my brother had to live. I was fearful of the motives of the living and the meaning of their presence on the earth. And I felt that my little brother, because he had brought upon my life a terrorizing grief, would be a stranger to me forever and ever. It was my first encounter with death; so great was its impress on my thinking that for years I could not forget my mother's pitiful cries as she lay dying."
"Life and Death of a Filipino in America" - Carlos Bulosan
" 'You're a big boy now, Eliot,' she told him. 'You okay?' Eliot looked out the kitchen window, at the gray waves receding from the shore, and said that he was fine."
"Mrs. Sen's" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"'You have to turn and speed up fast,' Eliot said. That was the way his mother did it, as if without thinking. It seemed so simple when he sat beside his mother, gliding in the evenings back to the beach house. Then the road was just a road, with other cars merely part of the scenery. But when he sat with Mrs. Sen, under an autumn sun that glowed without warmth through the trees, he saw how the same stream of cars made her knuckles pale, her wrists tremble, and her English falter."
"Mrs. Sen's" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"...she used a blade that curved like the prow of a Viking ship, sailing to battle in distant seas."
"Mrs. Sen's" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"As the bones cracked apart over the blade her golden bangles jostled, her forearms glowed..."
"Mrs. Sen's" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"Both smiled with their mouths closed, squinting into the wind. Mrs. Sen's red sari leaping like flames under her coat."
"Mrs. Sen's" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"Brimming bowls and colanders lined the countertops..."
"Mrs. Sen's" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"Her face was in her hands and tears dripped through her fingers."
"Mrs. Sen's" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"She knotted a scarf under her chin, arranged her sunglasses on top of her head, and put a pocket camera in her purse."
"Mrs. Sen's" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"She was about thirty. She had a small gap between her teeth and faded pockmarks on her chin, yet her eyes were beautiful with thick, flaring brows and liquid flourishes that extended beyond the natural width of the lids. She wore a shimmering white sari patterned with orange paisleys, more suitable for an evening affair than for that quiet, faintly drizzling August afternoon. Her lips were coated in a complementary coral gloss, and a bit of the color had strayed beyond the borders. Yet it was his mother, Eliot thought, in her cuffed, beige shorts and her rope-soled shoes, who looked odd. Her cropped hair, a shade similar to her shorts, seemed to lank and sensible, and in that room where all things were so carefully covered, her shaved knees and thighs too exposed."
"Mrs. Sen's" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"She wore navy blue sunglasses a little too big for her face. Her sari, a different pattern each day, fluttered below the hem of a checkered all-weather coat."
"Mrs. Sen's" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"They drove in silence, along the same roads that Eliot and his mother took back to the beach house each evening. But in the back seat of Mr. and Mrs. Sen's car the ride seemed unfamiliar and took longer than usual. The gulls whose tedious cries woke him each morning now thrilled him as they dipped and flapped across the sky."
"Mrs. Sen's" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"...And sometimes I will write them out now, again, though for myself, those old strokes, unofficial versions of any newcomer I see in the street or on the bus or in the demi-shops of the city, the need in me still to undo the cipherlike faces scrawled with hard work, and no work, and all trouble. The faces of my father and his workers, and Ahjuhma, and the ever-dimming one of my mother. I will write out the face of the young girl I saw only yesterday wearily unloading small sacks of basmati..."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"And at the very moment I fall back for good he glimpses who I am, and I see him crouch down, like a broken child, shielding from me his wide immigrant face."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"And if I remember everything now in the form of lists it is that these notions come to me along a floating string of memory, a long and lyric processional that leads me out from the city in which I live, to return me her, back to this place of our ghosts."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"And now I have Kwang. There are scores and scores of his versions scattered about the room, myriad trunks of him, thistling branches, specied and catalogued, a thousand stills of him from every possible angle. ...The fact is I had in my sights. I believed I had a grasp of his identity, not only the many things he was to the public and to his family and to his staff and to me, but who he was to himself, the man he beheld in his most private mirror. I will say again that none of this was my duty. My job, which I executed faithfully, was never to spy out those moments of his self-regard, it was not to peer through the crack of the door and watch as he bore off each successive visage. My appointed plan was just to give a good scratch to the surface, come away with some spice or flavor under my nails. As Hoagland would half-joke, whatever grit of an ethnicity. But then all that is a sham. Through events both arbitrary and conceived it so happened that one of his faces fell away, and the another, and another, until he revealed to me a final level that would nor strip off. The last mask. And what I saw in him I had not thought to seek, but will search out now for the long remainder of my days."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"And whenever I hear the strains of a different English, I will still shatter a little inside. Within every echo from a city storefront or window, I can hear the old laments of my mother and my father, and mine as a confused schoolboy, and then even the fitful mumblings of our Ahjuhma, the instant American inventions of her tongue. They speak to me, as John Kwang could always, not simply in new accents or notes but in the ancient untold music of a newcomer's heart, sonorous with longing and hope."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"And yet you may know me. I am an amiable man. I can be most personable, if not charming, and whatever I possess in this life is more or less the result of a talent I have for making you feel good about yourself when you are with me. In this sense I am not a seducer. I am hardly seen. I won't speak untruths to you, I won't pass easy compliments or odious offerings of flattery. I make do with on-hand materials, what I can chip out of you, your natural ore. Then I fuel the fire of your most secret vanity."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"At Janice's request I played John Kwang. Eduardo cleared the way. We must have looked like a small troupe of performance artists staging an imaginary event. People on the sidewalk stepped back into doorways to watch us, not knowing what they were looking at. Mostly they were focused on me, whispering, nodding, conjecturing on who I was. Someone important, maybe. Known. Powerful. I was unaccustomed to this scope of attention. With Janice and Eduardo orbiting me like flitting moons I felt like the emperor of a secret world. I put myself in the onlookers' places and considered the scene: here is an Asian man in his thirties. He could pass for twenty-four. He's pleasant of face, not so much handsome as he is gentle-looking, and pink of cheek; he only shaves in spots. His gait is casual and patient and straight. He's not looking at anything in particular, his gaze too fair. Too fair all around, as though he couldn't offend anybody. So he looks friendly, he looks like he'd be willing to talk to you, but really because of the way his gaze circles about you, gets at your outline instead of your live center, you think he's really stepping back as he approaches, stepping back inside and back away from you so nothing can get around or behind him."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"For a moment I think Lelia is trying to map out for herself what might have gone on here, to imagine a version of me and what I would do on a particular day, and I begin to think this is a terrible mistake, a horrible conflation. Now, with a piece of chalk, Lelia starts writing out my name, over and over, as if she's kept herself after school to work a lesson into her head. She starts in the corner and writes steadily across, my name and my name traversing everything else."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"For although I have spent ample hours of my adult life rigorously assessing and figuring all sorts of human calculations, the flesh math, as we say, I retain an amazing facility for discharging to hope and dumb chance the things most precious to me."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"He would be the one to bring all the various peoples to the steps of Gracie Mansion, bear them with him not as trophies or the subdued, but as the living voice of the city, which must always be renewed...He was how I imagined a Korean would be, at least one living in any renown. He would stride the daises and the stages with his voice strong and clear, unafraid to speak the language like a Puritan and like a Chinaman and like every boat person in between. I found him most moving and beautiful in those moments. And whenever I hear the strains of a different English, I will still shatter a little inside. Within every echo from a city storefront or window, I can hear the old laments of my mother and my father, and mine as a confused schoolboy, and then even the fitful mumblings of our Ahjuhma, the instant American inventions of her tongue. They speak to me, as John Kwang could always, not simply in new accents or notes but in the ancient untold music of a newcomer's heart, sonorous with longing and hope."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"I had always thought that I could be anyone, perhaps several anyone's at once. Dennis Hoagland and his private firm had conveniently appeared at the right time, offering the perfect vocation for the person I was, someone who could reside in his one place and take half-steps out whenever he wished. For that I felt indebted to him for life. I found a sanction from our work, for I thought I had finally found my truest place in the culture."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"I had begun to think that each of us was leading the life of a career criminal, in which the commission of acts was not by a single man but a series of men. One Jack killed the boy guard in Cyprus, another Jack seduced Mrs. Ochoa-Perez, and so on. Our work is but a string of serial identity. But then who was the Jack that loved and buried Sophie; was he just another version in the schema, or the true soul, or could he have been both?"
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"Ichiro watched his father, detecting an insuppressible air of enthusiasm and bubbling glee as he scratched in the names and addresses in both English and Japanese in several places on each package. There were four in all. The packages were the symbol of his freedom in a way. He no longer had just to think about sending them. It was his will to send them and nothing was any longer to prevent his so doing. He had no visions about Japan or about a victory that had never existed. While he might have been a weakling in the shadow of his wife, he was a reasonable man. He knew how things were and he was elated to be able finally to exercise his reasonable ways. Above all, he was a man of natural feelings and that, he felt, had always been the trouble with his wife. She tried to live her life and theirs according to manufactured feelings. It was not to be so."
"No-No Boy" - John Okada
"I had ready connections to him, of course. He knew I was Korean, or Korean-American, though perhaps not exactly the same way he was. We were of different stripes, like any two people, though taken together you might say that one was an outlying version of the other. I think we both understood this from the beginning, and insofar as it was evident I suppose you could call ours a kind of romance, though I don't exactly know what he saw in me. Maybe a someone we Koreans were becoming, the latest brand of American. That I was from the future. ...I suppose it was a question of imagination. What I was able to see. Before I knew him, I had never even conceived of someone like him. A Korean man, of his age, as part of the vernacular, Not just a respectable grocer or dry cleaner or doctor, but a larger public figure who was willing to speak and act outside the tight sphere of his family. He displayed an ambition I didn't recognize, or more, one I hadn't yet envisioned as something a Korean man would find significant or worthy of energy and devotion..."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"I know Lelia is right. My father was a kind of trickster all his own. He'd keep me guessing with his storefront patois. Any moment I had him square in my sights, he'd surprise me with a dip, a shake, a move from the street that I'd never heard or seen."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"I think of the list of Kwang's people. His best and most loving. In some way I see it as the expression of the past seven years of his life, who he has been at the camp meetings and rallies, at the picnics and races and high school wrestling matches. I almost hear their voices as I open the envelopes, the stiff new bills that rush into us in even greater tides now that he is publicly troubled, sounding out in marginal English their love for him, their devotion."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"I work alone in the Kwang's basement late at night. I black out the basement windows with thick muslin. I leave on one dull light in the corner. I work mostly in silence. The one bug silence. Then the hum of the machine. The phone rings and I stop everything. I pick it up and it's Janice. She wonders how I've been. No one sees me anymore. Have I gone up and died? I do the same thing every night. I enter the giving in vertical rows. I have the machine sort the figures into two dozen categories. Every way it comes out I add it up, recompiling every bit of information we have to date. I have steadily become a compiler of lives. I am writing a new book of the land. Like John Kwang, I am remembering every last piece of them. Whether I wish it or not, I possess them, their spouses and children, their jobs and money and life. And the more I see and remember the more their story is the same. The story is mine. How I come by plane, come by boat. Come climbing over a fence. When I get here, I work. I work for the day I will finally work for myself. I work so hard that one day I end up forgetting the person I am. I forget my wife, my son. Now, too, I have lost my old mother tongue. And I forget the ancestral grave I have left on a hillside of a faraway land, the loneliest stones that each year go unblessed. Near morning, I print out what I have done in one long continuous sheet, the way he prefers to read the thick stack of names. He says it doesn't seem right all broken up. This is a family, he reminds me, grasping it with both hands."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"It is a line of quiet faces. I take them down in my head. Now, she calls each one as best as she can, taking care of every last pitch and accent, and I hear her speaking a dozen lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"My father, thinking that it might be good for business, urged me to show them how well I spoke English, to make a display of it, to casually recite "some Shakespeare words." I, his Princely Hal. Instead, and only in part to spite him, I grunted my best Korean to the other men. I saw that if I just kept speaking the language of our work the customers didn't seem to see me. I wasn't there. They didn't look at me. I was a comely shadow who didn't threaten them."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"Now you will simply speak to me. Bring an interpreter or phrase book. Everything is in private, we deal like family, among ourselves, without chits or contracts. This is why I must see your face, hear your voice, make certain that you live how you say. It doesn't matter what your color is, whether your breath reeks of garlic or pork fat or chilis. Just bring your wife or your husband, bring your children. If you want a down payment on a store, bring the owner of the store you work in now. Bring your daughter who wants to attend Columbia, bring her transcripts and civics essay and have her bring her violin. Bring X rays of your mother who needs a new hip. I want to see the fleshed shape of the need. I want to know the blood you've lost, or that someone has stolen, or tricked from you, the blood you desperately want back from the world."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"The original I destroyed. I prefer versions of things, copies that aren't so precious. I remember its hand, definitely Lelia's, considerable, vertical, architectural, but gone awry in parts, scrawling and windbent, in unschemed colors of ink and graphite and Crayola. I could tell the page had been crumpled up and flattened out. Folded and unfolded. It looked weathered, beaten about her purse and pockets. There were smudges of olive oil. Maybe chocolate. I imagined her scribbling something down in the middle of a recipe."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"They were of all kinds, these streaming and working and dealing, these various platoons of Koreans, Indians, Vietnamese, Haitians, Colombians, Nigerians, these brown and yellow whatevers, whoevers, countless unheard nobodies, each offering to the marketplace their gross of kimchee, lichee, plaintain, black bean, soy milk, coconut milk, ginger, grouper, ahi, yellow curry, cuchifrito, jalapeno, their everything, selling, anything to each other and to themselves, every day of the year, and every minute. /John Kwang's people."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"Through events both arbitrary and conceived it so happened that one of his faces fell away, and the another, and another, until he revealed to me a final level that would nor strip off. The last mask. And what I saw in him I had not thought to seek, but will search out now for the long remainder of my days."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"Ichiro's mother rose and, without a word, for no words would ever pass between them again, went out of the house which was a part of America."
"No-No Boy" - John Okada
"Impulsively, [Ichiro] took the little man's hand [Bobbie's dad's] in his own and held it briefly. Then he hurried out of the house which would never be his own."
"No-No Boy" - John Okada
"We joked a little more, I thought like regular American men, faking, dipping, juking. I found myself listening to us. For despite how well he spoke, how perfectly he moved through the sounds of his words, I kept listening for the errant tone, the flag, the minor mistake that would tell of his original race. Although I had seen hours of him on videotape, there was something that I still couldn't abide in his speech. I couldn't help but think there was a mysterious dubbing going on, the very idea I wouldn't give quarter to when I would speak to strangers, the checkout girl, the mechanic, the professor, their faces dulling awaiting my real speech, my truer talk and voice. When I was young I'd look in the mirror and address it, as if daring the boy there; I would say something dead and normal, like, "Pleased to make your acquaintance," and I could barely convince myself that it was I who was talking."
"Native Speaker" - Chang-Rae Lee
"Adultery is extravagance. Could people who hatch their own chicks and eat the embryos and the heads for delicacies and boil the feet in vinegar for party food, leaving only the gravel, eating even the gizzard lining--could such people engender a prodigal aunt?"
"No Name Woman" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"At its birth the two of them had felt the same raw pain of separation, a wound that only the family pressing tight could close. A child with no descent line would not soften her life but only trail after her, ghost-like, begging her to give it purpose. At dawn the villagers on their way to the fields would stand around the fence and look. Full of milk, the little ghost slept. When it awoke, she hardened her breasts against the milk that crying loosens. Toward morning she picked up the baby and walked to the well."
"No Name Woman" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?"
"No Name Woman" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"In the village structure, spirits shimmered among the live creatures, balanced and held in equilibrium by time and land. But one human being flaring up into violence could open up a black hole, a maelstrom that pulled in the sky. The frightened villagers, who depended on one another to maintain the real, went to my aunt to show her a personal, physical representation of the break she had made in the "roundness." ... If my aunt had betrayed the family at a time of large grain yields and peace, when many boys were born, and wings were being built on many houses, perhaps she might have escaped such severe punishment. ... The round moon cakes and round doorways, the round tables of graduated sizes that fit one roundness inside another, round windows and rice bowls—these talismans had lost their power to warn this family of the law: a family must be whole, faithfully keeping the descent line by having sons to feed the old and the dead, who in turn look after the family...This roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see its circumference: punish her at the birth of her baby."
"No Name Woman" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"It could very well have been, however, that my aunt did not take subtle enjoyment of her friend, but, a wild woman, kept rollicking company. Imagining her free with sex doesn't fit, though. I don't know any women like that, or men either. Unless I see her life branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help."
"No Name Woman" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"My aunt haunts me—her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her, though not origamied into houses and clothes. I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute."
"No Name Woman" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"She will add nothing unless powered by Necessity, a riverbank that guides her life."
"No Name Woman" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute."
"No Name Woman" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"The emigrants confused the gods by diverting their curses, misleading them with crooked streets and false names. They must try to confuse their offspring as well, who, I suppose, threaten them in similar ways—always trying to get things straight, always trying to name the unspeakable. The Chinese I know hide their names; sojourners take new names when their lives change and guard their real names with silence."
"No Name Woman" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"You must not tell anyone," my mother said, "what I am about to tell you."
"No Name Woman" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"How is one to talk to a woman, a mother who is also a stranger because the son does not know who or what she is? Tell me, Mother, who are you? What is it to be Japanese? There must have been a time when you were a little girl. You never told me about these things. Tell me now so I can begin to understand...Tell me everything and just a little it and a little bit more until their lives and yours and mine are fitted together, for they surely must be...Quick, now, quick, Mother, what was the name of your favorite school teachers? While he wrestled with the words which cried to be spoken, the mother glanced up and looked surprised as if to say: Oh, I thought you had gone.... He snatched it [the envelope] as it was about to slide over the edge. If he had been about to say something, the moment was gone. Wretchedly, he turned and stumbled into the kitchen."
"No-No Boy" - John Okada
"I got reasons," said the Japanese-American soldier soberly, and he was thinking about a lot of things but mostly about his friend who didn't volunteer for the army because his father had been picked up in the second screening and was in a different camp from the one he and his mother and two sisters were in. Later on, the army tried to draft his friend out of the relocation camp into the army and the friend had stood before the judge and said let my father out of the other camp and come back to my mother who is an old woman but misses him enough to want to sleep with him and I'll try on the uniform. The judge said he couldn't do that and the friend said he wouldn't be drafted and they sent him to the federal prison where he now was. "What the hell are we fighting for?" said the lieutenant from Nebraska. "I got reasons," said the Japanese-American soldier soberly and thought some more about his friend who was in another kind of uniform because they wouldn't let his father go to the same camps with his mother and sisters."
"No-No Boy" - John Okada
"It's the same world, the same big, shiny apple with streaks of rotten brown in it. Not rotten in the center where it counts, but rotten in spots underneath the skin and a good, sharp knife can still do a lot of good. I have been guilty of a serious error. I have paid for my crime as prescribed by law. I have been forgiven and it is only right for me to feel this way or else I would not be riding unnoticed and unmolested on a bus along a street in on a gloomy, rain-soaked day. Through the front of the bus, he saw the clock tower of the depot. He could have ridden a couple of stops further, but he rose and pulled the cord. He stepped out into the rain, turning the short collar of the raincoat snugly up around his neck. Here was the bus station, the same stretch of concrete walk on which he had stood with his suitcase that morning he had first come back to Seattle and home and yes, friends too. He was young still, but a little wiser. Perhaps he was a bit more settled in heart and mind. And the rain, it was appropriate. "After the rain, the sunshine," he murmured. It wouldn't be quite as easy as all that. It could rain forever for all he knew. Still, there had been a lot of goodness that he had not expected. There was room for all kinds of people. Possibly, even for one like him. I've got to keep thinking that. I will keep thinking that. It's only a thread, but how much it seems in a life where there might have been nothing. He walked up to the depot and turned up Jackson Street, and, while he waited for the light to change, the cluster of people at the bus stop hardly gave him a glance."
"No-No Boy" - John Okada
"Outside in the car, Ichiro sat undecided. He felt very much alone. He knew he would not see Kenji or Emi again."
"No-No Boy" - John Okada
"Two weeks after his twenty-fifth birthday, Ichiro got off a bus at Second and Main in Seattle. He had been gone four years, two in camp and two in prison. Walking down the street that autumn morning with a small, black suitcase, he felt like an intruder in a world to which he had no claim. It was just enough that he should feel this way, for, of his own free will, he had stood before the judge and said that he would not go in the army. At the time there was no other choice for him. That was when he was twenty-three, a man of twenty-three. Now, two years older, he was even more of a man. Christ, he thought to himself, just a ******* kid is all I was. Didn't know enough to wipe my own nose. What the hell have I done? What am I doing back here? Best thing I can do would be to kill some son of a bitch and head back to prison. He walked toward the railroad dept where the tower with the clocks on all four sides was. It was a dirty looking tower of ancient brick. It was a dirty city. Dirtier, certainly, than it had a right to be after only four years."
"No-No Boy" - John Okada
"I wish this old Ford would crash, right now, she thought, then immediately, no, no. I wish my father would laugh, but it was too late: already the vision had passed through her mind of the green pick-up crumpled in the dark against one of the might eucalyptus trees they were riding past, of the three contorted, bleeding bodies, one of them hers."
"Seventeen Syllables" - Hisaye Yamamoto
"The shed was up ahead, one more patch away, in the middle of the fields. Its bulk, looming in the dimness, took on a sinisterness that was funny when Rosie reminded herself that it was only a wooden frame with a canvas roof and three canvas walls that made a slapping noise on breezy days. (13)"
"Seventeen Syllables" - Hisaye Yamamoto
"When he took hold of her empty hand, she could find do words to protest; her vocabulary had become distressingly constricted and she thought desperately that all that remained intact now was yes and no and oh, and even these few sounds would not easily come out. (14)"
"Seventeen Syllables" - Hisaye Yamamoto
"Yes, yes, I understand. How utterly lovely," Rosie said, and her mother, either satisfied or seeing through the deception and resigned, went back to composing. / The truth was that Rosie was lazy; English lay ready on the tongue but Japanese had to be searched for and examined, and even then put forth tentatively (probably to meet with laughter). It was so much easier to say yes, yes, even when one meant no, no."
"Seventeen Syllables" - Hisaye Yamamoto
"Dear Father [my brother wrote]: America is a great country. Tall buildings. Wide good land. The people walking. But I feel sad. I am writing you this hour of my sentimental. Your son—Berto."
"The Story of a Letter" - Carlos Bulosan
"I packed my suitcase and took a bus to Santa Barbara. I did not find my brother there. I went to Bakersfield and wandered in the streets asking for my brother. I went to Chinatown and stood in line for the free chop-suey that was served in the gambling houses to the loafers and gamblers. I could not find my brother in either town. I went to the vineyards looking for him. I was convinced that he was not in the valley. I took a bus for Seattle."
"The Story of a Letter" - Carlos Bulosan
"The summer ended gloriously and our work on the farm was done. We gathered firewood and cut grass on the hillsides for our animals. The heavy rains came when we were patching up the walls of our house... We made a bamboo raft and floated slowly along the water. Father sat in the center of the raft and took the letter from his pocket. He looked at it for a long time, as though he were committing it to memory... A woman came and told us that the priest had died of overeating at a wedding. Father took our clothes off the grass and we put them on. We untied our raft and rowed against the slow currents back to our home."
"The Story of a Letter" - Carlos Bulosan
"My mother refused to adjust to life without him [my father]; instead she sank deeper into a world of darkness from which neither I, nor my brother, nor concerned relatives, nor psychiatric clinics on Rashbihari Avenue could save her. What pained me most was to see her so unguarded, to hear her burp after meals or expel gas in front of company without the slightest embarrassment."
"The Third and Final Continent" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"The astronauts had landed on the shores of the Sea of Tranquility, I had read traveling farther than anyone in the history of civilization... The voyage was hailed as man's most awesome achievement. I had seen full-page photographs in the Globe, of the astronauts in their inflated costumes..."
"The Third and Final Continent" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."
"The Third and Final Continent" - Jhumpa Lahiri
"But on a green ledge above the battlefield I saw the giant's wives crying. They climbed out of their palanquins to watch their husband fight me, and now they were holding each other weeping. They were two sisters, two tiny fairies against the sky, widows from now on. Their long undersleeves, which they had pulled up to wipe their tears, flew white mourning in the mountain wind. After a time, they got back into their sedan chairs, and their servants carried them away."
"White Tigers" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"I searched the house, hunting out people for trial. I came upon a locked room. When I broke down the door, I found women, cowering, whimpering women. I heard shrill insect noises and scurrying. They blinked weakly at me like pheasants that have been raised in the dark for soft meat. The servants who walked the ladies had abandoned them, and they could not escape on their little bound feet. Some crawled away from me, using their elbows to pull themselves along. These women would not be good for anything. ... I gave each woman a bagful of rice, which they sat on. They rolled the bags to the road. They wandered away like ghosts. Later, it would be said, they turned into the band of swordswomen who were a mercenary army. They did not wear men's clothes like me, but rode as women in black and red dresses. They bought up girl babies so that many poor families welcome their visitations. When slave girls and daughters-in-law ran away, people would say they joined these witch amazons. They killed men and boys. I myself never encountered such women and could not vouch for their reality."
"White Tigers" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"I stood on top of the last hill before Peiping and saw the roads below me flow like living rivers. Between roads the woods and plains moved too; the land was peopled—the Han people, the People of One Hundred Surnames, marching with one heart, our tatters flying. The depth and width of Joy were exactly known to me: the Chinese population. After much hardship a few of our millions had arrived together at the capital. We faced our emperor personally. We beheaded him, cleaned out the palace, and inaugurated the peasant who would begin the new order. In his rags he sat on the throne facing south, and we, a great red crowd bowed to him three times."
"White Tigers" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"In the stillness after battle I looked up at the mountain tops; perhaps the old man and woman were watching me and would enjoy my knowing it. They'd laugh to see a creature winking at them from the bottom of the water gourd. But on a green ledge above the battlefield I saw the giant's wives crying. They climbed out of their palanquins to watch their husband fight me, and now they were holding each other weeping. They were two sisters, two tiny fairies against the sky, widows from now on. Their long undersleeves, which they had pulled up to wipe their tears, flew white mourning in the mountain wind. After a time, they got back into their sedan chairs, and their servants carried them away."
"White Tigers" - Maxine Hong Kingston
"If she neglected to mention the test she had given God during the earthquake, it was probably because she was a little upset. She had believed for a moment that her mother was going to ask about the ring (which, alas, she had lost already, somewhere in the flumes along the canteloupe patch)."
"Yoneko's Earthquake" - Hisaye Yamamoto