" I try to teach Magda some things. Since we’re not men and can’t afford. I take my books to her and sit her in a corner in a nice room that smells of rice with milk and cinnamon and teach her things. She does okay in math. She knows multiplication. At first it was, like, 1 × 1, 1 × 2, and it was never past the two, everything equaled two. 5 × 7, 9 × 8, everything was 2. But now she gets it. She gets history. She likes simpler things, made up stories, poems, but she is awful with language. And she can’t spell to save her life. "

― Miroslav Penkov , East of the West: A Country in Stories