Land of Big Numbers

As a child she was always reading: Even at meals she would sit and scan the back of the juice box. She must have read it a million times: aspartame and xanthan gum and red no. 9. It wasn't a conscious thing; she just seemed to feel uncomfortable when her eyes weren't fastened to a page.

She laughed a lot, and easily. It wasn't until we actually became friends that I realized she was often very sad. America is like that, I must say, free and easy until you know better.

He did not look like a man who could stomach life's indignities, whether it was a closed door or an uncomfortable, vertigo-inducing passage through a birth canal.

Most of us have heard by now that the government is supposedly developing a new variety of the qiguo, superior in flavor, more stable in its effects. They say it will be sweeter, that its trees will bear fruit in all seasons. Especially as the winter sets in, we are impatient to try it.

The waiter brought us fish, rice, and cubes of tofu cooked with chilies, bristling with dashes of green onion. A cluster of unopened chrysanthemums sat between us, curled like tiny fists in a small vase.

When working at the bottling plant, she'd felt herself turning into something nearly savage, fingers stiff, mind numb, chest a cage. There'd been cats in their village who'd hiss and spit at anyone who came near them, and Xiaolei thought she could understand why. Sometimes if she wanted to leave her room, she first found herself listening from inside for any hall noises and waiting until they subsided before exiting; the sound of another door rasping open would prompt her to pause. If she spotted people her age clustered in the courtyard--a few girls had made friendly overtures--she'd turn and make a hasty retreat, as if suddenly remembering something. It wasn't surprising, she told herself: all wild animals fear human contact.

Before I met Lisette, America wasn't what I'd imagined; it's only natural, I expect. Everyone was friendly, but bafflingly so, as though each person had a series of invisible hedges around them that I didn't know how to penetrate.

A great wasteland of sorrow was opening up in him, unfolding dozens of tiny shacks, terrible squatters setting up residence, banging their miniature liquor bottles against his chest, a hundred feet trampling his organs.

They were fond of each other, and that was more than you could say about most marriages.

One Saturday six weeks later we spent the afternoon in my bedroom, naked in the bright sunlight, inspecting each other curiously, without desire, as though we were museum curators cataloging idiosyncrasies: the raised mole here, a pale depression of stretch marks there.