To be faithful, he wrote, a person had to be concerned less about himself and more about caring for his neighbor.

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil,” he would later write. “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”2.

That first phrase-please bless me, Father, for I have sinned-was so humbling and so total, Matt always felt a kind of absolution as soon as he said it.

Auntie says that in the city, people gather and pay money to see beautiful women and handsome men put on a show. The people in the show are called movie stars.

Ama wipes her hands on her apron, looks up at our old roof with new eyes, and lifts the baby from his basket. She twirls him in the air, her skirts flying around her ankles the way the clouds swirl around the mountain cap – her laughter fresh and strange and musical to my ears.

When I have run out of words to copy, I look out the window at this strange place called India. Inside the train, the people around me are snoring. I don’t understand how they can close their eyes when there is so much to see.

All the time you fighting, you think only of how to survive. All the time you survive, you wonder why you don’t die. But now my life can be something different. Now, in America, I don’t have to fight. I don’t have to survive. I can chose a new thing: to live.

Long time I been on my own, but now really I’m alone. I survive the killing, the starving, all the hate of the Khmer Rouge, but I think maybe now I will die of this, of broken heart.

Inside my head I carry: my baby goat, my baby brother, my ama’s face, our family’s future. My bundle is light. My burden is heavy.

This affliction – hope – is so cruel and stubborn, I believe it will kill me.