Quotes from Justina Chen

And then I had to trust in the universal language of a smile. Jacob had told me to smile at all the starers, that ultimate act of disarming. As he said, it was the reason why so many doctors gave their time to perform cleft palate and cleft lip surgeries. Smiles biologically bonded mothers to their babies, kicked in their mothering instinct. Fix the smile, save the child. So I bet on it now. I smiled.

I let myself close my eyes instead of keeping watch. A few moments later, Jacob reached over and took my hand in his. I needn't have worried. The zing was still there. He rested our hands on his chest, his hand over mine, my hand over his heart.

While our mothers rode the escalators up to baggage claim, Jacob and I took the stairs, racing each other. "No fair," I said, as we started. "You've got longer legs." Jacob glanced over his shoulder at me, grabbed Mom's spillover purchases that I had stuffed into one of his extra carry-ons. "Take your excuses somewhere else, Trouble Magnet.

As expansive as the view was, my hometown had shrunk without anything changing but my perspective.

We didn't have to go all the way to China to see beauty. Or to have an adventure. They were both right here, literally in our backyard.

But she had a lot to think about, and only she could figure out what she wanted to do with this olive branch Dad was extending to her, whether she'd snap it like a twig or accept it and hope it'd flourish.

those before-and-after shots of women undergoing the knife and accepting poison to change themselves — the lines on their faces repaved like old roads, their bulbous noses whittled into aristocratic ridges.

That was my focal point? My North Star that I had been following so futilely? If I tried to strip her off of the board, it would ruin the collage. Ruin . . . or make real?

I had always felt a foreigner in this made-up Land of Beautiful, and it was a relief to see Extreme Beauty for what it really was: fake, make-believe, insubstantial.

Which one looked more real? Which side more beautiful?

Now, I crashed headlong into my Denial.

What was the worst he could do? Make me feel dumb? Inadequate? Dad had done his damnedest to do that, to steer me to Terra Nullis, that godforsaken empty land where one might survive but never flourish. To keep me in Terra Incognita and remain a girl as undiscovered as Unknown Land itself. He had failed.

I had waited a long time to say those words, and I thought it would be hard to use them, that the claim would be too big for me. Surprisingly, it wasn't. I had grown into the words.

What's wrong?" Jacob asked, already jogging down the steps, his hand stretched out to lighten my load if I needed it. "Hey, you okay?" No. I was a liar. And a cheater. And a coward. No different from his barista of a stepmother and his philanderer of a father.

I think we were both waiting for my jealousy to rear its ugly head. But it didn't even bother lifting its cheek off the floor.

Jacob narrowed his eyes at me, seeing me clearly without my two-faced mask, both sides made up — one with cosmetics, the other with lies.

How could you let the best thing that's happened to you go just like that?" "He was a good thing, Karin. A great thing. But not the best thing.

physical beauty was temporary. A vessel without soul. I didn't want to be a vessel anymore.

Naturally, he of the big ears heard every word.

We'd been gone for eleven days, and the first thing Dad had to say when he finally deigned to notice us from where he was sitting in the kitchen, reading his newspaper? "What are we having for dinner?

Here, sitting in Shanghai, a million light-years from Colville and my father, I got a glimpse of what my mom would have been like had she never met a certain cartographer. This was mom, unbounded, uncharted. A land that was still a little wild, a lot unknown, and painfully beautiful.

If you don't want them, I can find someone else who would." And then, as though shocked, as though she heard the echo of those words, the implications reverberated inside herself. She could find someone else.

God, had I been following the wrong set of coordinates my entire life, my eyes set on Beauty instead of True Beauty

It's okay," Mom said, instantly absolving him of any guilt. It was as if she had become so accustomed to disappointment, so inured to people reneging on their promises that she expected setbacks, heartbreak. Couldn't Merc see the panic in her eyes? Couldn't he see how she focused on me, expecting me to figure everything out?