Elizabeth Wong > Quotes

“Our only worth is the words we create. We give these words to our children, they give them to their children, and with time, these words that we have gifted our descendants will be all that is left of us. A man who jumps off a cliff, and realises, too late, that he cannot fly. What happens to his cries for help? A mother looks for her lost son and cries out his name. But the child cannot hear, for he is far away, and he will die soon. What happens to her cries? When a grandmother prays to her god for rain, but there is no god and her prayers are unheard, what happens to her prayers? No one hears them; they will not be carried along by families and friends. They are like abandoned dogs with no master. Orphans with no family. They come here, to this lake, the Lake of Unheard Words, where they settle among millions of other words that are unheard.”
― Elizabeth Wong

“Ngs. His eyes followed down the rows and rows of Ngs. Ng Ming Ming. Ng Wai Ling. Many Ngs, hundreds upon hundreds of rows of people, all with the family name Ng, derived from a common ancestor once upon a time. They swam in their Ng-ness, largely unaware that each of them was somehow bound together, that they shared blood and perhaps much more: common languages, common traditions and dreams of their ancestors. Each family of Ngs was a disparate branch that reached away from each other, the tips of their branches scraped at the sky and the sun, up, as high as they could go, hundreds and hundreds of them, all different and all the same, and forgetting that in the past and still in the present, they were attached to the great sturdy trunk of their ancestors that bore their weight and held them secure. They would not know this. They would choose to forget; they would believe themselves to be alone, their words and thoughts lost in the streets and among the houses, where no one knew them, not even their third nephew or great-aunt. In their hearts they carried a sadness for all the distant cousins they did not know, and the family histories they had forgotten. They had no name for this sadness; indeed, they did not even realise they were sad, and yet the sadness clung to them for their whole lives, like a deepening shadow.”
― Elizabeth Wong, We Could Not See The Stars: A Literary Speculative Novel