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Green Island QUOTES

Green Island QUOTES

1 " I understand,” she says, and then she quotes Du Fu: “The country is broken, but the mountains and rivers remain.” Her eyes flash; he catches sight of the fire in this modest woman. “We are the mountains and rivers,” he says, impressed. “No matter what the country is called. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

2 " Was it possible this one would be a son too? She hoped so, but not because she favored men. Her husband modeled the seriousness, the stoicism, that she hoped her sons would inherit, but she had nothing to teach a daughter. She could teach her to dream—say, to be a painter, as she herself had been trained—and then teach her to let it go. Teach her to cloister herself in dark hallways, admiring how the light fell through the rice-paper doors while knowing that there was no point in putting it on canvas. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

3 " We are curious creatures, we Taiwanese. Orphans. Eventually, orphans must choose their own names and write their own stories. The beauty of orphanhood is the blank slate. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

4 " Maybe this is what it meant to be a citizen of a place - bonded to each other by the histories thrust upon us. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

5 " Once you realize all our assumptions about power are created by the powerful, you understand it must be changed. You rethink power. Not the power that is desire, or dominance. The power that is strength. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

6 " I tipped my head back to squeeze out my dripping hair and saw the moon haloed by a cloud. Emily and Stephanie would be asleep by now. I felt linked through the years to Baba by this moon, which had witnessed it all. Had he stood here too, under its gaze, thinking of his sleeping children? I longed to say to him: Baba, I understand. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

7 " We’d known enough girls jilted by Americans promising marriage and plane tickets. Two girls in my neighborhood had babies by men who had returned to the United States and left false addresses. The faces of their mixed-race kids declared their humiliation to everyone. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

8 " His clothes were fashionable, but decidedly American—the colors and cuts slightly off. I felt a twinge of pity. I wondered if he felt like a stranger here in Taiwan, the place that should have been home. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

9 " Look,” I said to the girls, and they offered a polite coo of awe. I thought of the discrete memories of my childhood—vivid moments rising above the vagueness of long stretches of unremembered time—and I wondered if they would recall this day, and the five of us together. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

10 " I realized that this was what Mama had meant by love. A shared experience, a shared history, a shared trauma: this is what made us a family. No one else could understand it. I knew that for as long as Wei and I were married, even if my head was turned by another, the other man and I would not share this one critical thing—this one summer—and that would be enough to unmake any potential love affair. I thought of all the moments growing up when I had disliked my family—my resentment of my father, my disgust at my mother, my anger at my siblings. Of all the families in the world, why was I born into this family? I’d thought. As if just dumb fate had brought us together. Now I understood there was something stronger than fate. Choice. It was ugly and quotidian and lacked romance, and that was exactly what gave it its strength. So, like my mother, I chose to stay. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

11 " I stood in the line for US citizens, my blue passport in hand, once again aware of the strangeness of returning to my country as the citizen of another. The customs official, a man in his thirties "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

12 " I think you expect I will say that Western is modern, and that our culture is old-fashioned. But I don’t believe that. I don’t believe the West equals modernity. The idea is colonialist. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

13 " Hope springs eternal—a truism for jilted lovers and for the children of dying parents. We convince ourselves the inevitable isn’t, and when it is upon us, we rail and plead. Or deny. Busy with preparation and travel, I had pushed away my worry; now that I was here, at midmorning in Taipei, when less than a day before I’d been in the chilly Bay Area, my new reality struck me. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

14 " Now I understood there was something stronger than fate. Choice. It was ugly and quotidian and lacked romance, and that was exactly what gave it its strength. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

15 " A line of dark-eyed women dribbled out the door, continued past the sundries shop next door, and folded around the corner. They waited politely despite every impulse to rush the police station, leap over the desks, and tear at the files. After each unsuccessful query, they whispered down the line that the man in question could not be found, but each woman still believed her husband would be the exception. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

16 " What is home? I wanted to ask. Haven’t I already come home? "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

17 " My father’s face was not among them. No memorial was built for the men who had survived by selling their souls. The thousands who had disappeared over the years, stained as criminals, who emerged back into the light as neighborhood pariahs for nothing more than the desire to claim an island as their own. No memorial for the men more complicated than martyrs—or for the families who’d had to relearn the hardships of the everyday. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

18 " Maybe this is what it meant to be a citizen of a place—bonded to each other by the histories thrust upon us. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

19 " Two distant points now touching, the word and the page a bridge and amends. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island

20 " for Jia Bao’s storyline, I drew on the experiences of Peng Ming-Min, Henry Liu, and Chen Wen-cheng to understand the various legal and extralegal mechanisms the KMT government used to control its challengers, particularly from abroad. "

― Shawna Yang Ryan , Green Island