Terry Tsai

“Before Americans loved Chinese food, you see, they loathed it. Because, in part, they feared the Chinamen on their shores. Then along came chop suey, and that changed everything.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“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

“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

“It’s nice that human society has reached a level of sophistication and development that we don’t have to spend our time bent over in fields encouraging food to appear from the ground. However, now that we’ve all become yoga teachers, graphic designers, and writers, it’s easy to forget how spectacularly bereft we are of actual life skills, how flimsy our qualifications are in the things that really count: life and death things.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places