Quotes
"Fame would strike someone, usually the kind that healthy-minded people would not wish upon themselves, such as being kidnapped and kept prisoner for years, humiliated in a sex scandal, or surviving something particularly fatal. These survivors needed someone to help write their memoirs, and their agents might eventually come across me." —from "Black-Eyed Women"
"Looking back, however, I could see that we had passed our youth in a haunted country. Our father had been drafted, and we feared that he would never return. Before he left, he had dug a bomb shelter next to our home, a sandbagged bunker whose roof was braced by timber. Even though it was hot and airless, dank with the odor of the earth and alive with the movement of worms, we often went there to play as little children. When we were older, we went to study and tell stories. I was the best student in my school, excellent enough for my teacher to teach me English after-hours, lessons I shared with my brother. He, in turn, told me tall tales, folklore, and rumors. When airplanes shrieked overhead and we huddled with my mother in the bunker, he whispered ghost stories in my ear to distract me. Except, he insisted, they were not ghost stories. They were historical accounts from reliable sources, the ancient crones who chewed betel nut and spat its red juice while squatting on their haunches in the market, tending coal stoves or overseeing baskets of wares… I shivered with delight in the gloom, hearing those black-eyed women with my own ears, and it seemed to me that I would never tell stories like those." —from "Black-Eyed Women"
"Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world besides our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts." —from "Black-Eyed Women"
"In truth he had no other refuge but Parrish's hospitality, just as there was nowhere else for him to go at the end of the day in Saigon but a crowded room of single men and boys, restless of reed mats as they tried to sleep while breathing air humidified with the odor of bodies worked hard… Liem's eyes were closed by then, but he couldn't help seeing the faces of men he knew casually or had watched in the tea bar, even though of his own roommates. In the darkness, he heard the rustle of mosquito netting as the others masturbated also. The next morning, everyone looked at each other blankly, and nobody spoke of what had occurred the previous evening, as if it were an atrocity in the jungle better left buried." —from "The Other Man"
"My parents kept some of their profits in the bank, donated a portion to the church, and wired another percentage to the relatives in vietnam, who periodically mailed us thin letters thick with trouble, summed up for me by my mother to the tune of no food and no money, no school and no hope. Their relative experiences and their own had taught my parents to believe that no country was immune to disaster, and so they secreted another percentage of the profits at home, just in case some horrendous calamity wiped out the American banking system." —from "War Years"
"Overhead the moon was shining through a tear in a curtain of clouds, a perfect round bulb of white light reminding Arthur of the first thing he had seen upon awakening from his operation, a luminous orb floating in the darkness that he dimly understood to be heaven's beacon, telling him that he...
(This entire section contains 1313 words.)
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had crossed over to God's side. The orb grew steadily, its edges becoming hazy until it was a whiteness that filled his vision, a screen from behind which something metallic rattled and indistinct words were murmured. Someone was saying his name, a person, and not, as he first thought, God, for arthur was alive, a fact he knew both from the spear of pain thrust through his side, pinning his body to the bed, and from the voice he recognized as Norma's, calling him back to where he belonged." —from "Arthur Arellano"
"He repeated his story so often even she allowed herself to believe it, until the afternoon of the seventh day, when they saw, in the distance, the rocky landing strip of a foreign coast. Nesting upon it were the huts of a fashing village, seemingly composed of twigs and grass, brooded over by a fringe of mangroves. At the sight of land, she had thrown herself into the professor's arms, knocking his glasses askew, and sobbed openly for the first time in front of her startled children." —from "I'd Love You to Want Me"
"By that evening, fever had seized Carver. The dream he hadn't recounted to Legaspi came back to him in his hospital room, where he floated on his back in a black stream, his face emerging every now and again to catch glimpses of his fellow patients in the three other beds, silver-haired, again men, tended by crowds of relatives who chattered loudly and carried bowls and things wrapped in towels. He smelled rice porridge, a medicine whose scent was bitter, the wet dog odor of very old people. When he was submerged in the black water, images flitted by like strange illuminated fish from the canyons of the ocean." —from "The Americans"
"I was thirty-three, but my father didn't think anyone was a man until he fathered children. He'd had five with my mother. All three sons had grown taller than him, but most people, including me, tended to forget his height. People only noticed that he was a broad-chested man with muscular forearms that were still as thick as they were when I hung from them as a kid. His body remained trim enough to fit into the vintage camouflage paratrooper's uniform that he's worn during the war." —from "Someone Else Besides You"
"Next to the paperweights was a lacquered jewelry box etched with mother-of-pearl, which I assumed she'd bought in Vietnam. We'd talked often about visiting, but I'd never really wanted to go. I wasn't even born there, my mother having given birth to me at a refugee camp in Guam, where my father named me after the American advisor who'd gifted him with the compass watch. I didn't understand what drew Sam to Vietnam, except maybe a need to find closure of her own. Perhaps she'd found it. She seemed happy when she brought out two envelopes of photos from her trip and told us the stories behind them." —from "Someone Else Besides You"
"It was a most peculiar thing to do, or so everyone said on hearing the story of how Phuong's father had named his second set of children after his first. Phuong was the eldest of these younger children, and for all of her twenty-three years she had believed that her father's other children were much more blessed. Evidence of their good fortune was written in the terse letters sent home annually by the mother of Phuong's namesake, the first Mrs. Ly, who enumerated each of her children's accomplishments, height, and weight in bullet points." —from "Fatherland"
"The photograph flared when she touched it with fire, Vivien's features melting before her own, their faces vanishing in flame. After the last embers from this photograph and the others had died, Phuong rose and scattered their ashes. She was about to turn and enter the house when a gust of wind surged down the alley, catching the ashes and blowing them away. A flurry rose above the neighboring roofs, and she couldn't help but pause to admire for a moment the clear and depthless sky into which the ashes vanished, an inverted blue bowl of the finest crystal, covering the whole of Saigon as far as her eyes could see." —from "Fatherland"
