Quotes from Shawna Yang Ryan

No memorial was built for the men who had survived by selling their souls. The thousands who had disappeared over the years, stained as criminals, who emerged back into the light as neighborhood pariahs for nothing more than the desire to claim an island as their own. No memorial for the men more complicated than martyrs – or for the families who'd had to relearn the hardships of the everyday.

What's the point?" I asked even though I didn't expect an answer. He shook his head. "I don't know. Power." He took a drag on the cigarette. "To what end?

Once you realize all our assumptions about power are created by the powerful, you understand it must be changed. You rethink power. Not the power that is desire, or dominance. The power that is strength." He smashed

While our friends were rioting, handcuffed and starving, in the yard, we were the ones banging on open cell doors, bellies full, crying for our freedom.

It was the highest praise I could expect, and I felt grateful though I longed for him to say he loved me too.

The event had not even existed until I'd heard the story. It happened this way for each of us, one by one, across the island, a structure suddenly exploding onto the placid empty plain of our history.

The shadow-leaves danced on the wall. A chair leg stuttered across the floor downstairs and then silence.

It's December 15, 1978, when he makes the announcement. His smile is cautious—this is good news, but he knows that his statement, in eight minutes, will delegitimize a government and turn a half century of history into a joke. That is why his people waited until the last possible moment to tell the Republic of China that today is the day.

If we say he was a dictator, then we will have to admit that we were duped.

Later, chatting with me about her own recent delivery, a friend told me how the doctor had informed her that she was considered a "good candidate" for post-delivery bonding. They had let the still-bloody baby warm himself on her bare chest. I was too ashamed to admit that no one had said such a thing to me.

When I got older, I still thought I could write life. I didn't understand, as my mother had just realized that evening, that it is the other way around. And yet, here I am, still trying.

Past, present, and future too swirl together, distinguishable but not delineated by any sort of grammar beyond the one our hearts impose.

No Taiwanese" was the first rule, which Zhee Hyan, my second brother, had learned slowly and painfully. Under the government's plan to unify the people with a national language, every syllable of Taiwanese spoken at school brought punishment from the teacher. Taiwanese was for home; Mandarin was for the world. My brother's hands turned purple with beatings until he finally learned to reflexively clench his mouth before a Taiwanese word slipped out.