Shawna Yang Ryan > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“No Taiwanese” was the first rule, which Zhee Hyan, my second brother, had learned slowly and painfully. Under the government’s plan to unify the people with a national language, every syllable of Taiwanese spoken at school brought punishment from the teacher. Taiwanese was for home; Mandarin was for the world. My brother’s hands turned purple with beatings until he finally learned to reflexively clench his mouth before a Taiwanese word slipped out.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“She walked as if she had nothing in mind but her destination—or something beyond it—staring ahead with Mama’s elongated black eyes, glossy with a kind of circumspect longing.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“When I got older, I still thought I could write life. I didn't understand, as my mother had just realized that evening, that it is the other way around. And yet, here I am, still trying.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“Being Taiwanese in Japan was like being a guitar-playing monkey: their fluent Japanese elicited awe from the people they met, yet they were considered not-quite-whole people.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“Two distant points now touching, the word and the page a bridge and amends.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“A few weeks later, my mother found a letter nailed to the gate. The grim black ink declared our misfortune to every passerby: we were to be the neighborhood’s third eviction. The soldiers now claimed that our beautiful house—with its blond tatami and white paper screens and dark halls—was to be requisitioned. My family had two days.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“Past, present, and future too swirl together, distinguishable but not delineated by any sort of grammar beyond the one our hearts impose.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“Later, chatting with me about her own recent delivery, a friend told me how the doctor had informed her that she was considered a “good candidate” for post-delivery bonding. They had let the still-bloody baby warm himself on her bare chest. I was too ashamed to admit that no one had said such a thing to me.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“The event had not even existed until I’d heard the story. It happened this way for each of us, one by one, across the island, a structure suddenly exploding onto the placid empty plain of our history.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“It was the highest praise I could expect, and I felt grateful though I longed for him to say he loved me too.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“What is home? I wanted to ask. Haven’t I already come home?”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“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.” He smashed”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“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

“While our friends were rioting, handcuffed and starving, in the yard, we were the ones banging on open cell doors, bellies full, crying for our freedom.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“Thousands of husbands disappeared in those weeks. Sons as young as twelve. Brothers. Friends. What better way to remake society, my mother thought, than to eliminate the teachers and principals, the students, the lawyers and doctors—truly, anybody who had an opinion and a voice? Beyond the river, execution grounds, field after field irrigated with blood, waited to be discovered. Buildings would crush the bones.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“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

“It’s December 15, 1978, when he makes the announcement. His smile is cautious—this is good news, but he knows that his statement, in eight minutes, will delegitimize a government and turn a half century of history into a joke. That is why his people waited until the last possible moment to tell the Republic of China that today is the day.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“It’s charity.” Baba reluctantly lifted his eyes from the jumble of scrolls piled on a shadowed shelf. “What is?” “The liquor. The men meet their fates half giddy. They barely know what is happening. Didn’t the Japanese do the same?” “They didn’t have firing squads.” My father couldn’t keep the sneer out of his voice.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“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

“What’s the point?” I asked even though I didn’t expect an answer. He shook his head. “I don’t know. Power.” He took a drag on the cigarette. “To what end?”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“I love the delicacy of Asian women,” one wife commented to me. “So petite, so graceful.” Self-conscious with the language, I could only nod and smile while I railed against her silently in a string of words that were anything but delicate. Cow! Tell me next how my culture has given me the skills to be an amazing house cleaner. An obedient wife. Ask me how many of my friends were prostitutes for GIs. They were kind—too kind—as if I were helpless as a bald little newborn mole and they had to show how careful they could be with me, a testament to their generous and socially liberal natures.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“The first time I called home, after my arrival in San Francisco, I broke down in tears and wasted five whole minutes—a fortune—just crying. Now when I called, their voices were hollow and distant. I wondered how much of what I said they could imagine. They passed the phone back and forth, demanding to talk to the girls, who squirmed and said nothing, perplexed by these grandparents whom they had never met. Taiwan was very far away.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“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

“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

“The shadow-leaves danced on the wall. A chair leg stuttered across the floor downstairs and then silence.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island