Everything breaks down but desire. And because we are old, doctors try to shame that out of us. Young punks! Lose one’s youth, and doctors take it as axiomatic that you’ve lost your mind, your balls.

The diaries also revealed a deeply sensitive, intelligent woman, one who had hoped to start a college for Hawaiian women, affording them the ‘same education as men.’ She had planned to open a bank for women, enabling them to handle their own financial affairs. She recognized the need for more female lawyers and physicians, the need for women’s rights over their bodies, and their destinies. And lastly, though she had a fondness for men, she felt women ’basically didn’t need them.

We must live. Or what have we suffered for? Will these years have been for nothing?

They were among the few surviving comfort women -- an estimated 90 percent had been killed while imprisoned. During that emotional lecture I thought of the girl who had disappeared in Shanghai and wanted to explore the possibility that this might have been her fate.

This was the wisdom of a woman with little education. It gave me carte blanche in a house with no books.

We don't have enough Hawaiian voices. I go to the universities, schools, even grade schools and I beg them to write down their family stories. We're such an oral society that if we don't they will disappear.

I rushed to him and applied the Heimlich maneuver. After he recovered, he thanked me and introduced himself as Robert Chu.

He went back to record the meltdown of Chernobyl, and his friends say he just disappeared. This man was trying to record the disaster, but it was still the Soviet Union, and I'm sure many of them did not want him doing this.

I keep forgetting were Pono's girls. Maybe we're not suppose to be happy.' 'Then we'll pretend to be,' Rachel said. ' We'll make it a habit, no matter what.' That's all we can do, Jess thought. Live in readiness for whatever comes.

Yes. Japan will overrun us," the scholar said. "But we will turn them into Chinese. Give us five hundred years. You wait.