The Kitchen God's Wife Quotes
"Almost every page of the old wife’s tale is lit up with the magic of a world in which birds can sound like women crying and sweaters are knit in the memory of spider webs."
"She is an incredibly rich character, whose flaws are as understandable as her strengths."
"Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument."
"All these meaningless gestures, old misunderstandings, and painful secrets, why do we keep them up?"
"No need to pretend with me. I’m not scared. I’m not a young woman anymore. Almost seventy-three."
"Everyone wants to keep this news from me, okay. They want to be nice before I die, okay. I can pretend too that I don’t know."
"Don’t worry for me. I am not telling you this so you have to worry. I only want to tell you so you understand why I can no longer keep your secret."
"How can I fly to heaven when this is weighing me down?"
"If you cannot tell her, then I must tell her myself—before the Chinese New Year."
"Maybe she has secrets too. Your mother, oh yes, plenty of secrets!"
"She bought enough tea for another lifetime. Three pounds! Can you imagine?"
"She told me, ‘Syau ning, you take this tea now so I can see how happy you are to receive it while I am still alive. Some things can’t wait until I’m dead.’"
"‘That family, Lin,’ she began, ‘hnh! Wants to climb into our family on Weili’s wedding skirt.’"
"I began to look at everything in my life two ways, the way it happened, the way it did not."
"Late at night, when my husband and children were sleeping, I would think to myself, Of course, I do not regret marrying Jimmy Louie."
"But how could I ever reveal this?—that a member of my family meant to cheat his customers."
"So you can imagine my anger when Helen told me in her kitchen, right after that fish dinner, that she has decided to let all my secrets out."
"And maybe if I told her, This is not true. I loved you the most, more than Samuel, more than all the children I had before you."
"My mother’s hair was a color you could feel more than see—very, very black, as black and shiny as water at the very bottom of a deep well."
"She always found a reason why I should learn."
"When you put them on, people will think your words are worth more. But you should never think this way, never."
"How can I forget the color of my mother’s hair? Why should I stop hoping I will see it again?"
"The past is gone, nothing to be done, just forget it. That’s what I tried to believe. But I cannot think this way."
"In my heart, there is a little room. And in that room is a little girl, still six years old. She is always waiting, an achy hoping, hoping beyond reason."
"If you always tell him you are sorry now, you will always be sorry later."
"In any case, by the time I arrived I was sick to my stomach, because of that motorboat ride, because of my grief."
"But how could I complain? I was supposed to be grateful."
"Unhappiness was coming my way, and I did nothing to keep that speck from blowing in my eye."
"Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterward."
"If you don’t take a chance, someone else will give you his luck."
"Take even one sweet, and lose your whole life to bitterness."
"Eat forbidden candy and your stomach pops out."
"I had a good heart, just like you. I was innocent, just like you."
"I never took those gifts from Wen Fu. Peanut did."
"In China back then, you were always responsible to somebody else."
"Nobody ever said to me, 'Be good, little girl, and I will give you a piece of candy.'"
"My father waved his hand again. 'This is what she wants,' he said to my aunties, then sighed. 'How can we stop her?'"
"How lucky am I. I had nothing but good thoughts in my head. I was sure that my life had changed, was getting better every moment, that my happiness would never stop."
"I found out later: San Ma had bought a dowry five times bigger and better for Sz Ma’s daughters."
"For many years after that, when times were bad, I would take out a pair of those chopsticks and hold them in my hand. I would feel the weight of the silver resting in my palm, solid and unbreakable, just like my hopes."
"When I was young, I wanted to believe in something good. And when that good thing started to go away, I still wanted to grab it, make it stay."
"If you marry a no-good husband, you have a no-good marriage, no avoiding this."
"Old-fashioned or not, Old Aunt will never agree to a white wedding dress."
"I see your face now, embarrassed. Your mother is not so naive."
"Why do people say these things? How does anyone know who you are supposed to believe? And why do we always believe the bad things first?"
"When my husband took off his clothes, I screamed. Wouldn’t you scream if you saw that your husband’s ji-ji looked nothing like that of your little boy cousins?"
"Why am I angry? Because she wanted to tell you my story, throw everything into the open before she died."
"Sometimes I wonder why she’s still my friend, how it is that we can do a business together. Maybe it’s because we fought so much in those early days. Maybe it’s because we had no one else to turn to. So we always had to find reasons to be friends. Maybe those reasons are still there."
"I remember those nights. We played using only the moonlight and the glow from the nearby window, batting the feather ball back and forth over the net, laughing as we tried to hit each other."
"And sometimes when things were worse than that, when I wondered what I had done to deserve such a terrible life, I would remember our walks at night, the story Gan told me. And although I never knew what the eight bad fates were, I knew the ninth. I was the ninth."
"But that feeling lasted only one more moment. Wen Fu was touching the back of my leg, pulling up my dress. How can he be thinking this? I protested softly, but this only made him hurry more. He was trying to part my legs."
"So I used my dowry money to buy the furniture we needed as we moved from place to place. I didn’t have to. I used my money to buy food better than what the air force provided. I didn’t have to."
"Of course, the next morning we heard what really happened. The man who always saved a chair by the ceiling fan for my husband, he died. The young one that my husband shouted at for playing tricks on him, he died too."
"Do you know why that is? Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?"
"What a terrible thing I had done, dropping my scissors."
"So you see, I made a bad deal, like a deal with the devil. And for what?"
"Sometimes I wish I never gave her that cloth."
"She cried for so long, until she no longer had enough breath to cry out loud."
"How could I have known such an evil man existed on this earth!"
"Don’t be like me. You see how helpless I am. Don’t be like me."
"Can you imagine—a baby who learned to be that scared before she even knew how to crawl away?"
"I kept thinking the war would soon be over, then Yiku would get better."
"Each time she saw her father come into the room, she fell back down again, same as when she was a baby."
"When everyone had finished the meal, I was still feeding Yiku some leftover pieces of vegetables."
"Look at the money. The enemy can control the country just by controlling the money."
"This is my quick life, no worse, no better than a long one. I accept this, no blame."
"Good for you, little one. You've escaped. Good for you."
"It is that feeling of protecting someone so trusting, and getting back a little of your own innocence."
"I stayed in the hospital five days and Wen Fu came to visit only twice, telling me each time he was very busy with his new job."
"Don’t cry, don’t cry. I’m going downstairs to get you something to eat."
"He sat down and looked at the divorce paper. 'I did not write this,' he said quietly. 'I am not asking for a divorce.'"
"If you can’t change your fate, change your attitude."
"I picked her up, and I knew I didn’t have to lie to her anymore."
"I was hungry for them. I was thinking of cooking them that night with some hot peppers, the kind soaked a long, long time in oil until they turn black."
"When the sirens stopped, we started to walk back."
"Because now, all those people who didn’t die had made up their minds—to buy an extra piece of meat, or a pair of shoes, or something they thought was no longer a luxury for a life that might end with the next siren."
"That night, we celebrated the first bombing with a big meal and lots of rich-smelling tea."
"No sense saving your life only to come back to a burnt-down house."
"Sometimes we went toward the north gate, sometimes to the east gate."
"And in that careless way, I stopped worrying."
"A chance to taste something rare or new was like your saying 'Eat, drink, be merry.'"
"She hoped our husbands would return from Chungking soon."
"So many people were poor and could not afford even the most ordinary kind of food."
"Hulan helped Wen Fu find me. Of course, she was very sorry later on."
"The lettuce heart, for example, was thick like a turnip, crunchy but sweet, easy to cook."
"I saw all this for the first time, and I was not happy to see it. I was bitter—that I had never felt this kind of beauty until now, too late."
"It’s true that Hulan and I had had many fights, many disagreements those past eight years. But now we were sad to let each other go."
"What I give you is nothing also, just a color to look at, so you can remember a foolish woman and her son."
"I think it must have been one hundred red beans exactly."
"Our family was so very poor back then. I had to count that small mound of beans every morning, dividing them between my sister and me, one for her, one for me, one for her, one for me. So you see, I only wished there had been one hundred."
"Looking at someone else's misery so you would no longer have to think about your own problems."
"How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?"
"This is not being grateful, this is an excuse!"
"I was wondering how Peanut had done this—left her marriage. I was wondering when I could ask her how I could do the same."
"How can I tell your father that I did not love him from the moment we met? Not in Kunming, not at that dance. I did not know such an instant feeling existed, so how could I feel it?"
"I would rather sleep on the concrete floor of a jail than go to that man's house!"
"Americans give gifts on birthdays, Chinese do not."
"If someone offers to take your burden, you need to know he is serious, not just being polite and kind."
"You are not just choosing one thing over another. You are choosing what you want."
"That afternoon, we had such a good talk. We sat on the bed and told each other secrets, in the same way as when we were girls, only this time we did not have to whisper."