Terry Tsai

“Buddhists say that thoughts are like drops of water on the brain; when you reinforce the same thought, it will etch a new stream into your consciousness, like water eroding the side of a mountain.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Utsunomiya is an ordinary city of half a million, an hour north of Tokyo on the Tōhoku Shinkansen line. It has no particular tourist attractions, and any foreign tourists heading that direction are probably more interested in the beautiful mountain town of Nikko. A few years ago, Utsunomiya’s city booster types, as boosters do, went looking around for something about the city to promote. Poring over official statistics, they found that Utsunomiyans eat more gyōza per capita than people of any other city in Japan. “Aha!” said the boosters. “Let it be known far and wide that we are the City of Dumplings.”
― Matthew Amster-Burton, Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo

“But not everyone finds the terra-cotta warriors charming. “Chinese people would never put that in a restaurant,” Jim told me, pointing at the statues. “It’s not lucky. It’s something you put in burial site! But in America, they think it’s a Chinese thing.” From a Chinese perspective, P. F. Chang’s is decorated with death.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“The economic and political backlash culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in stages between 1882 and 1902, which restricted Chinese immigration and prevented Chinese arrivals from becoming naturalized citizens. It would be the only law in American history to exclude a group by race or ethnicity.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food