“Even in my time, we knew that men were not incharge. Oh, they might bluster as if they were. But when it came down to it, we women bore much of the influence. Often, my father would make some grand pronouncement in the evening. And the next morning, he had changed his mind. After a while, I realized that it was my mother who had changed it, quietly, in the night.”

“When I read the words, “a woman has the power to…change her experience,” I knew overcoming my fear that my father would come into my room, even after he was dead, would be one of my biggest challenges. Because he had come in so many hundreds of times, I had been indelibly conditioned. I guess that’s why I call it the “work” of healing. It is grueling, nose-to-the-grindstone-work to change long held beliefs and accompanying emotions…but it can be done.”

“The summer of 1950 was the hottest in living memory, with high humidity and temperatures above 100 F. My mother had been washing every day, and she was attacked for this, too. Peasants, especially in the North where Mrs. Mi came from, washed very rarely, because of the shortage of water. In the guerrillas, men and women used to compete to see who had the most 'revolutionary insects' (lice). Cleanliness was regarded as un proletarian When the steamy summer turned into cool autumn my father's bodyguard weighed in with a new accusation: my mother was 'behaving like a Kuomintang official's grand lady' because she had used my father's leftover hot water. At the time, in order to save fuel, there was a rule that only officials above a certain rank were entitled to wash with hot water. My father fell into this group, but my mother did not. She had been strongly advised by the women in my father's family not to touch cold water when she came near to delivery time. After the bodyguard's criticism, my father would not let my mother use his water. My mother felt like screaming at him for not taking her side against the endless intrusions into the most irrelevant recesses of her life.”

“My friends and family had put the bedroom back together and I woke the next morning thinking, for one brief second, that it was just another beautiful early-spring day. As I sat up, though, my body began to weep even before my mind recognized the cause for grieving. The world would never be the same. Everything I would make from that day on would recall how it had changed. Everything I did for myself would be in the name of what we had been.”

“Morning would come before we knew it. It always did. But we still had the night, and for now, we were together, so I just closed my eyes and drank it all in.”

“I wanted to be at my parents’ house when electricity came. It was in 1940. We’d all go around flipping the switch, to make sure it hadn’t come on yet. We didn’t want to miss it. When they finally came on, the lights just barely glowed. I remember my mother smiling. When they came on full, tears started to run down her cheeks. After a while, she said: “Oh, if we only had it when you children were growing up.” We had lots of illness. Anyone who’s never been in a family without electricity—with illness—can’ t imagine the difference.”