A man who is used to acting in one way never changes; he must come to ruin when the times, in changing, no longer are in harmony with his ways.
When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer. "
That desire to reach further is also where I ended my memoir, in 1994 in California, perhaps ironically, looking out to the Pacific and back to Asia, toward the not-yet-written.
Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer - as it first formed for me.
These commonplace categories - wife, mother, housewife, teacher - are in fact teleological referents. They gesture to profound states of being that animate, absorb and saturate the subject, like indelible dyes spilled repeatedly over a plain fabric. No matter if the fabric is sturdy or delicate, translucent or opaque, those dyes will stain. They will color the days and years and life.
Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.
Particularly in relationship to my father - there's something that daughters, girl children, do almost instinctually in their relationships with their father, so that physically, those boundaries must be respected and never crossed.
I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other.
The left hemisphere is very interested in language; it communicates in words, it has a past, a present, and a future; it has a time component and it's all about details. The right hemisphere is more about the right now-right here experience where everything is an enormous collage of all the sensory systems flooding into our brains.
But if you move fast, you can have your freedom.
Do not shout at me, Mr. Quill," said John [Adams]. "Justice may be blind, but she is not deaf.