“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
“Never had there been a time when sound, color, and feeling hadn’t been intertwined, when a dirty, rolling bass line hadn’t induced violets that suffused him with thick contentment, when the shades of certain chords sliding up to one another… — 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… — 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.” — 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,… — Lisa Ko Copy Share Image
“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
