Dust Child
Once Phong's tears had dried and everything became quiet, he learned the weight and depth of sorrow. He understood the true meaning of loneliness; it ate at his core the way termites ground away at their meager furniture.
During his years with Sister Nhã, he'd realised that plants and nature always offered him comfort, and were in fact kinder than most people.
He wasn't sure, but he yearned for a partner with whom he could share his love for reading. For him, a conversation about books represented the most intimate discourse. It revealed a person's values, beliefs, fears, and hopes. Experiencing the same books enabled people to travel on similar journeys and brought them closer together.
Back at the apartment, she sat staring at her stomach. She realised that her involvement with Dan, just like his country's involvement in Việt Nam, was a mistake. Both caused irreparable damage, leaving the Vietnamese to clean up the mess.
She had tried to live an honest life, but the war had given her no choice.
When you depart from your first anchor - your mother's womb - you will be pulled away by unexpected currents. If you can fill your boat with enough hope, enough self-belief, enough compassion, and enough curiosity, you will be ready to weather the storms of life.
Darling
The point is, I am not what Davey would call a social creature. I mean, I know lots of people, but I don't really like any of them enough. I like them for an hour, or maybe for lunch, but then I get bored...companionable boredom. I think that's when you can be completely happy. I don't actually know anyone like that who I'm not related to.
Bontings, to us, were the absolute apogee of greatness and lovability, the sorts of people you wished you could carry about in your pocket and place on your bedside table at night.
Despite my criminally dull early life, I will be fascinating when I talk.
The Wedding Party
If this little seedling could strain so hard to burst through a crack in the stone, why should she, a young tree who had already blossomed, be content to wither under the assault of frost?
How We Disappeared
I'd asked her once if the cleft hurt and she shook her head. A minute later, she changed her mind, saying yes, whenever she saw her reflection.
After all that had happened last week, I saw him for who he was- no more than a child, like me, subject to the whims of the adults around us, to the world.
The Bell Jar
From the tip of every branch like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked - but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground by my feet.
Beasts of a Little Land
She vacillated between experiencing emotions passionately, and restraining herself from sentimentality; the former was her nature and the latter was her principle.
They didn’t tell each other much, and yet understood each other so well. So many words could be exchanged between people without any real desire to know one another. But with the right person, one could speak much or not at all, and feel completely connected.
Perhaps this was why her mother had warned against the corruptive power of education - even language seduced her. She fluttered with the knowledge that certain words in a certain order changed and remade her constantly, no one else could even sense a difference.
I'm a Fan
I fit myself into spaces that already exist and contort myself to fit into a shape that has been allocated to me.
Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise
Yi-Ting, you’re only eighteen years old. You have options. You can pretend nobody in this world takes pleasure in raping girls, or that no little girls have ever been raped. You can pretend Si-Chi never existed, or that you’ve never shared a pacifier and a piano with anyone else. You can pretend nobody has ever shared the same appetite and stream of thought with you, and that you can live a peaceful, middle-class life, pretending there’s no cancer eating away at the world’s psyche, pretending that nowhere else in the world has metal bars, and that everyone behind those bars was reaching their terminal stage. You can pretend the world is one with only macarons, pour-over coffee, and imported stationery. But you can also choose to experience what Si-Chi has suffered. Learn the efforts she has made to fight her pain, from the time you spent together as newborns to the time you read from her diary. You must go to college, enroll yourself in graduate school, fall in love, get married, have kids, all in Si-Chi’s place. Maybe you can get expelled, divorced, or miscarry, but Si-Chi won’t be able to experience even the most vulgar, dull, and stereotypical life. Do you get it? You must experience everything and remember all her ideas, thoughts, sentiments, feelings, memories, and fantasies; even her love, hatred, fear, loss of balance, barrenness, gentleness and desire. You must hug Si-Chi’s pain tightly, and you can become her. Then, live in her place. Live all the parts of your life fully for Si-Chi, who can no longer experience any of it.
Even thought you’re only eighteen years old, even though you have a choice, if your fury is always present, that’s not because you’re not charitable, kind and empathetic enough. Everything has its reasons; even rape and contaminating others has its own psychology and sociological excuses. In this world, being raped and humiliated doesn’t need reason. You have a choice; think of it like synonyms - you can let it go, step over it, and walk out of it. But you can also remember that it’s not that you weren’t forgiving enough, but that no one should ever be treated that way.
Tolerance isn’t a virtue, and taking tolerance as a virtue is a way this pretentious world tries to maintain its depraved sense of discipline. Rage is a virtue.