“I have never understood why it is called losing a child. No parent is that careless. We all know exactly where our sons and daughters are; we just don't necessarily want them to be there”

“I don't want her to either, which is exactly what I've been saying. Still, there's a part of me that hates that our family businesses- the very things that have kept Joy fed, clothed, and housed- are so embarrassing to her...We raised our children to be Americans, but what we wanted were proper Chinese sons and daughters.”

“Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.”

“But it really all boils down to this - we don't know them, for all our sincerity, our good intentions. We don't know, because we were never one of them.”

“All families have their secrets, most people would never know them, but they know there are spaces, gaps where the answers should be, where someone should have sat, where someone used to be. A name that is never uttered, or uttered just once and never again. We all have our secrets.”

“These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.”