“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.… — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
“The Old Man, like the French, believed that black was the only appropriate color to display and wear in order to show grief. I know Má, black is the color of our hair, the color of our irides with the… — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
“Anh Minh believed that if he could save three minutes here, five minutes there, then one day he could tally them all up and… — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
“But that, I am afraid, was my mistake from the very beginning, the fatal flaw in my design. I thought that I could suffocate… — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
“When they are like this, I remember what the man on the bridge had told me: "The French are all right in France." What… — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
“I know you are in your best áo dài. You bought it when you were just eighteen. Gray is not a color for a… — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
“The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never… — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
“Language is a house with a host of doors, and I am too often uninvited and without the keys.” — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
“I am forced to admit that I am, to them, nothing but a series of destinations with no meaningful expanses in between. ” — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
“She laughed that sharp, quick laugh that smart girls all had, until they found out that the sound of brilliance flashing made boys nervous.… — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
“After a week's worth of failed fairy tales—stories that made my eyelids flutter open and not shut—my father tried telling me stories that belonged… — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
Alcohol, I had learned, was an eloquent if somewhat inaccurate interpreter. I had placed my trust that December night in glass after glass of… — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
“Obey,' like 'worship,' is a strong word. Her mother and father had told her so, and she believed them. They gave her life, they… — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
“There is no forgiveness in ancestor worship, only retribution and eternal debt.” — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
“As a father, he was generous. More or less. The "less" was because he never gave me what I wanted. He gave me only… — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
Words, do not have twins in every language. Sometimes they only have distant cousins, and sometimes they pretend that they are not even related. — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
Although we strap time to our wrists, stuff it into our pockets, hang it on our walls, a perpetually moving picture for every room… — Monique Truong Copy Share Image
