“Music was a language of its own, and soon it would become his third language, a half-diminished seventh to a major seventh to a minor seventh as pinchy-sweet as flipping between Chinese tones. American English was loose major fifths; Fuzhounese… — Lisa Ko Copy Share Image
“In Ridgeborough, when Deming Guo was no longer a name that was said aloud, he used to picture the Other Deming and Other Mama,… — Lisa Ko Copy Share Image
“Daniel was malleable, everyone and no one, a collector of moods, a careful observer of the right thing to say. He watched other people’s… — Lisa Ko Copy Share Image
“If he could just talk to his mother in person, maybe he could figure out who he should be.” — Lisa Ko Copy Share Image
“The other instructors, even his mother, laughed at him for making work harder for himself and not teaching the workbook. But his students were… — Lisa Ko Copy Share Image
“The boat rocked in the waves, and as I saw the lights of Kowloon come through the fog, I held the railing, breathless. How wrong I had been to assume this feeling had been lost forever. This lightheaded uncertainty, all my fear and joy - I could return here, punching the sky. Because I had found her: Polly Guo. Wherever… — Lisa Ko Copy Share
“Daniel was malleable, everyone and no one, a collector of moods, a careful observer of the right thing to say.” — Lisa Ko Copy Share Image
“Always be prepared, she liked to say. Never rely on anyone else to give you things you could get yourself. She despised laziness, softness, people who were weak. She had few friends, but was true to the ones she had. She could hold a fierce grudge, would walk an extra three blocks to another grocery store because, two years ago,… — Lisa Ko Copy Share
“Deming and his mother loved everything bagels, the sheer balls of it, the New York audacity that a bagel could proclaim to be everything,… — Lisa Ko Copy Share Image
“It was that kind of mindfuck: to be too visible and invisible at the same time, in the ways it mattered the most.” — Lisa Ko Copy Share Image
“My father used to say women yapped too much, that some women would be better off not talking at all. So I’d grown up… — Lisa Ko Copy Share Image
