Status Updates From Beautiful Country

"The rest of my weekend passed just like that—doing what I wanted, shutting the door to my room when I felt like it, carrying no concerns other than what book I would start next. And though worry about Ma Ma and guilt for being so selfish popped up every now and then, they got buried under the sentences and pages and chapters and the new ease in my body."

ahhhhhhhh im melting!!

"Try as I did—and boy, did I try that weekend—I could not get around finding her boring. It made me start to wonder whether Ma Ma had missed something in her equation: that maybe, even more than dignity, beauty demanded substance."

"We exchanged another smile and I marveled how, in all the stories of the gold-paved Mei Guo and the dangerous Mei Guo, no one in China knew about the lights of America, about how they were so delightful that they could stop us in the middle of the street, in the middle of our lives and our worries, in the middle of strangers living stranger lives, all just to fill us with music and hope."