Joan Is Okay

THERE IS NO REAL fight against death because death will always win. But death can be handled well or poorly.

Much of any culture can be linked back to eating and food, food and care, eating and language. To eat one's feelings, to eat dust, words, to eat your own heart out, to eat someone else alive, to eat your cake and have it too, things that are adorable (puppies, babies) that are said to be good enough to eat, to have someone else eat out of the palm of your hand, to be chewed out, a dog-eat-dog world. Chinese isn't any different from English in this way. Chī for "eat," and chī sù, to only eat vegetables, but also, colloquially, to be a pushover. Chī cù, to eat vinegar or be jealous. Chī lì, to eat effort, as for a task that is very strenuous. To eat surprise, to be amazed, chī jī ng. To be completely full or chī bǎo fàn, and thus to have nothing better to do. To eat punishment or get the worst of it, chī kuī. And, most important, to eat hardship, suffering, and pain, chī kǔ, a defining Chinese quality, to be able to bear a great deal without showing a crack.

The price of success is steep and I've never been able to distinguish it from the feeling of sacrifice. If I could hold success in my hand, it would be a beating heart.

Had she not been an immigrant, she might have enjoyed being a mom. 'Raising you took half my life,' she would say. 'You're living proof of where that half of my life went.' Chemists know this already. All elements on the periodic table decay. And in one half life, half the original element, called the parent nucleus, decays to a different element, for the daughter nucleus. No son nucleus, of course. No son could ever be a by-product of radioactive decay.

The famed MRS degree, because in practice, a female brain is worth nothing. Four lobes of the cerebrum, and I have sometimes imagined one of mine labeled RAGE.

Home could be many things. It could be both a comfort and a pain. It could exile you for a little while but then demand that you return.

Americans he found to be so outwardly happy all the time and superficially positive. To be indiscriminately happy seemed to him as much of a curse as to be indiscriminately sad.

The joy of having been standardized was that you didn't need to think beyond a certain area. Like a death handled well, a box had been put around you, and within it you could feel safe.

A woman who twirls her hair while speaking is a woman never to be taken seriously

A daughter of immigrants is the daughter of guests, is a part-time guest herself, and the best kind of guest goes with the flow. She stays in a guesthouse.

Hurt can be paid forward and often is, to make your own feel less.

Some bonds are so forged in fire, some experiences are so permeated with feeling, that it is impossible to not see them with love.

I hated this. Hated the sense that I got from Fang that there was some magical beanstalk I had to climb. Nothing good comes from climbing beanstalks, didn't he know that? There are giants up there. But Fang did know. The whole point was to climb to the giants and become a giant yourself.

No formal antonym for catastrophizing exists, but why did it seem that more people had this trait than not? Isn't it more evolutionary favorable to catastrophize? Does fortune truly favor the bold?

I wasn't a genius in the end, but a girl could still hope.

A woman needs something else that is hers alone. Children leave. children are not always yours.

Probably that day was one of the times my mother reminded me that a woman needed power, and power came from money, so a woman needed money.

Little you can do about which era or group you're set into here, was another direct line that I could draw. An immigrant family controls nothing, and so raises two average children obsessed with gaining it back, albeit in different ways.

Quotas haven't gone away, nor have the large groups of us willing to race against time and one another, but never call ourselves a race.

Her fear that I would not mature paired with her hope that I would someday have power. Because she didn't have any power and being an immigrant mother was a half-life.

Funny to me now how motherhood could work. That having a child made you a real woman who was no longer a child, but then once your own children became adults, you reverted back to the child.

Only Asians outside of Asia chose names for themselves that took into account the convenience of others or smoothed out their foreign names to be less offensive to the ear.

If learning required mistakes, then teaching required watching different people make the same mistakes. Teaching was relentless déjà vu but grounding. It cemented the idea that we are all the same--height and weight did not matter, and the possibility of failure (or success) for anyone was never too far off.

The surgical ICU had its surgeons and anesthesiologists, doctors who wrote the shortest and most indecipherable notes. The notes reminded me of haikus, and because I wasn’t a literary person, I called my time in this unit difficult poetry.

Big words aside, the language of medicine has its own short-hand and lingo. Yes, the training could flatten you but it also led you into an exclusive club. None of the jargon mattered to patients. Give it to me simply, they and their families would request. Are you talking about the head or the heart? I'm talking about the heart

Was it harder to be a woman? Or an immigrant? Or a Chinese person outside of China? And why did being a good any of the above require you to edit yourself down so you could become someone else?

Why try to explain yourself to someone who had no capacity to listen?

Whenever I heard news of deportation, or the line that people must enter the legal way, fear of my own removal would start to reflux. Then I had to remind myself that I was born here, that this land was as much mine as it was theirs. But were these facts written on my face? Was my being born here and my parents’ legal arrival carved into our facial features or the color of our skin? And even if I hadn’t been born here, had I been one of those kids brought over by her parents at age two, five, twelve, then naturalized, what made them and their families and any less American if they were the most American of all things— fresh off the boat, and search of better days?

Home is where you fit in and take up space.

Proud to be an American, a feeling that I lacked but also a phrase that I didn't think applied to me.