Liya’s letter threw her parents.

Once you’ve done it with him, he won’t abandon you. If he really loves you, if he’s a man with a heart, he’ll follow you wherever you go. If he doesn’t, he isn’t the man you want, is he?

He sat down in a corner and ordered half a pound of dumplings, which came in a white bowl with a blue rim. While he was eating, his memory was further revived and sharpened by the familiar taste of the stuffing, made of pork, leeks, cabbage, dried shrimp, ginger, sesame oil. Every bit of the memory became unmistakable now.

Buddha’s words are everywhere, in every sound of the universe.

To witness is to make the truth known, but we must remember that most victims have no voice of their own, and that in bearing witness to their stories we must not appropriate them.

I would even argue that, for many displaced people, nostalgia is also blended with fear – the fear of uncertainty and of facing the challenges posed by the larger world and the fear of the absence of the clarity and confidence provided by the past. In essence, nostalgia is associated mostly with the experience of a particular type of migrants, namely, exiles.

No, It’s hard to uproot yourself and really become yourself in another soil, but it’s also an opportunity, another kind of growth.

Where should he go? He wanted to find a building out of which he could jump and kill himself. How about the temple? No, it only had two stories. Too low. How about the elementary school? No, his ghost might frighten the children if he died there, and people would condemn him.

Life is a journey, and you can’t carry everything with you. Only the usable baggage.

You strive to have a good heart. But what is a heart? Just a chunk of flesh that a dog can eat.