Quotes from Monique Truong

I close my eyes, a useless flutter. I open them, and I see you half a world away. I hear fever parting your lips. I feel your shivering, colorless geckos running down your spine. I smell the night sweat that has bathed you clean.

Má, please do not cry. I know I could have bought bread with it, a room for the night. I could have bought acts of love with it, but I could have never bought back the years of your life. Sorrow, even when tempered by sweat and toil into a whisper weight of gold, is still sorrow. Worthless to us both in the end, Má. Better that a stranger circles the globe with it than your youngest son.

She laughed that sharp, quick laugh that smart girls all had, until they found out that the sound of brilliance flashing made boys nervous. Most of these girls, Kelly included, then adopted that slow, bubbling giggle that put boys at ease.

My father's unhappiness was a piece of fine mesh in his throat which all of his words had to push past with some care.

We were forgiving each other for who we were, for how we came into this world, for how we changed or didn't change for each other.

We all need a story of where we came from and how we got here. Otherwise, how could we ever put down our tender roots and stay.

I did not give you my permission, Madame, to treat me in this way. I am here to feed you, not to serve as your fodder. I demand more money for such services, Madame. You pay me only for my time. My story, Madame, is mine. I alone am qualified to tell it, to embelish, or to withhold.

Every day, Anh Hoâng was shoved into the ground by the weight of the vanity cases of French wives. They, with their government clerk husbands, were touring their colony, forgetting who they were, forgetting that they had to cross oceans to move up a class.

Anh Minh believed that if he could save three minutes here, five minutes there, then one day he could tally them all up and have enough to start life all over again.

From the soft mouth of the woman who gave her life, my mother received the words that would keep her, still and unmoving, underneath the Old Man. The words swam with her in the dark and kept her from reaching up with a knife and cutting his neck like that of a chicken. Her mother told her to swallow her anger, and she gulped it down until her belly became distended with it. Worse, her mother knew that it would.

As if in grief, the bamboos were pressed to the ground. But within a matter of minutes, they nodded and waved. They shook off the rain and reoriented themselves toward the sky. My mother was impressed, indeed. Now that , she thought, is strength. Perseverance and flexibility are not opposites. Survival requires certain compromises. Endurance is defined by the last one standing. These were the lessons, I imagine, that she must have learned. My mother resolved to be the last one standing.

While you have been waking up to the aroma of coffee brewing, dressing to the hushed rhythm of other people's labor, I have been in the kitchen since I was six and in your kitchen since six this morning. In my life as a minor domestic, a bit character in your daily dramas, I have prepared thousands of omelets. You have attempted three, each effort wasted, a discarded half-moon with burnt-butter craters, a simple dish that in a stark and economical way separates you and me.

Religion, Pat had said to me and then I had repeated it to Charlotte, was for people who needed to believe that death was better than life.

Dill tasted of fresh dill, a bright grassy entryway leading into a room where something faintly medicinal had recently been stored. This happy coincidence of meaning and flavor, however, didn't leave the word neutralized and without power. The word could still disrupt, dismay, or delight. In this instance, Dill was a promise ring. Inside its one syllable was a summer that would bring, along with the fireflies and the scuppernongs, a boy who would kiss me when my brother, Jem, wasn't looking.

In my dream, I am saying all of this in French, though I know that this is impossible. But in my dream, cruelty greases my tongue and I am undeniably fluent.

I drew out the Ham, lingered on the me, and softened the clip of the rick. I repeated the word, and with every slow joining of its three syllables, the fizzy taste of sweet licorice with a mild chaser of wood smoke flooded my mouth. A phantom swig of Dr. Pepper.

When I heard or said the word Kelly, I tasted canned peaches, delicious and candy-sweet. This, however, was the first time I had ever heard anyone say Powell. The word was a raw onion, a playground bully with sharp elbows shoving all flavors aside. Luckily for our friendship, little girls didn't often call each other by their full names.

Baby honey Harper celery . The honey, a percolating bubble full of flowers and citrus, bursts wide open when the sea pf celery- the only vegetable I know that comes pre-salted- washes in. An unexpectedly pleasurable combination of flavors that made me wobbly in the knees.

A story, after all, is best when shared, a gift in the truest sense of the word.

Years of alcohol can do that to a person, make him dead but not departed, make him indelible to those who have had the misfortune of sharing his name.

There is no forgiveness in ancestor worship, only retribution and eternal debt.

The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, impudent ones to feed them.

I was certain t find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea.

Alcohol, I had learned, was an eloquent if somewhat inaccurate interpreter. I had placed my trust that December night in glass after glass of it, eager not for drink but for a bit of talk.