People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship.

Chinese Women looked like great sea snails- the corded wood, babies, and laundry they carried were the whorls on their backs.

Every word that falls from the mouth is a coin lost. Silently. They gave and accepted food with both hands.

Hunger also changes the world-when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.

Daughters-in-law lived with their husbands' parents, not their own; a synonym for marriage in Chinese is "taking a daughter-in-law."

My aunt could not have been the lone romantic who gave up everything for sex. Women in the old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil.

She kept the man's name to herself throughout her labor and dying; she did not accuse him that he be punished with her. To save her inseminator's name she gave silent birth.

Attraction eludes control so stubbornly that whole societies designed to organize relationships among people cannot keep order, not even when they bind people to one another from childhood and raise them together.

In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.

To be envious, in Chinese, is 'to guzzle vinegar'.