Top highlights from Joan Is Okay
THERE IS NO REAL fight against death because death will always win. But death can be handled well or poorly.
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Home could be many things. It could be both a comfort and a pain. It could exile you for a little while but then demand that you return.
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No formal antonym for catastrophizing exists, but why did it seem that more people had this trait than not? Isn't it more evolutionary favorable to catastrophize? Does fortune truly favor the bold?
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A woman who twirls her hair while speaking is a woman never to be taken seriously
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The famed MRS degree, because in practice, a female brain is worth nothing. Four lobes of the cerebrum, and I have sometimes imagined one of mine labeled RAGE.
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Some bonds are so forged in fire, some experiences are so permeated with feeling, that it is impossible to not see them with love.
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Hurt can be paid forward and often is, to make your own feel less.
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I wasn't a genius in the end, but a girl could still hope.
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I hated this. Hated the sense that I got from Fang that there was some magical beanstalk I had to climb. Nothing good comes from climbing beanstalks, didn't he know that? There are giants up there. But Fang did know. The whole point was to climb to the giants and become a giant yourself.
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The joy of having been standardized was that you didn't need to think beyond a certain area. Like a death handled well, a box had been put around you, and within it you could feel safe.
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Only Asians outside of Asia chose names for themselves that took into account the convenience of others or smoothed out their foreign names to be less offensive to the ear.
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Americans he found to be so outwardly happy all the time and superficially positive. To be indiscriminately happy seemed to him as much of a curse as to be indiscriminately sad.
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Funny to me now how motherhood could work. That having a child made you a real woman who was no longer a child, but then once your own children became adults, you reverted back to the child.
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The surgical ICU had its surgeons and anesthesiologists, doctors who wrote the shortest and most indecipherable notes. The notes reminded me of haikus, and because I wasnt a literary person, I called my time in this unit difficult poetry.
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Teaching was relentless dj vu but grounding.
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If learning required mistakes, then teaching required watching different people make the same mistakes. Teaching was relentless dj vu but grounding. It cemented the idea that we are all the same--height and weight did not matter, and the possibility of failure (or success) for anyone was never too far off.
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How else could you be providing great service to strangers if you didn't take that time away from people who were not?
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Was never agreeing to something agreement?
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The average Joe in America is expected to move 11.3 times in his life. Who knows about Average Jane.
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Her fear that I would not mature paired with her hope that I would someday have power. Because she didn't have any power and being an immigrant mother was a half-life.
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What a virus has never done is scare other deadly illnesses off.
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The deeper I fell into English, the further I drifted from my parents.Further, fartherFarther, father.
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But what could be said of this seemingly frivolous act, a small paper gift that makes the girl happy, which then makes her father happy, which then spurs a, perhaps, normally stoic dad to express how much he cares about the daughter in ways that she can't yet comprehend.
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I'd come to realize long ago that my parents didn't fit parental norms and whether that was a result of their own personalities genetics, or the slow grind of immigration, who could say.
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A daughter of immigrants is the daughter of guests, is a part-time guest herself, and the best kind of guest goes with the flow. She stays in a guesthouse.
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Proud to be an American, a feeling that I lacked but also a phrase that I didn't think applied to me.
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Quotas haven't gone away, nor have the large groups of us willing to race against time and one another, but never call ourselves a race.
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Little you can do about which era or group you're set into here, was another direct line that I could draw. An immigrant family controls nothing, and so raises two average children obsessed with gaining it back, albeit in different ways.
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The price of success is steep and I've never been able to distinguish it from the feeling of sacrifice. If I could hold success in my hand, it would be a beating heart.
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What look?', I would ask. That look that I owe you something. That I've wronged you in some way. A pessimist. A constant speculator. Had she'd known what American was like, she might not have immigrated.
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Much of any culture can be linked back to eating and food, food and care, eating and language. To eat one's feelings, to eat dust, words, to eat your own heart out, to eat someone else alive, to eat your cake and have it too, things that are adorable (puppies, babies) that are said to be good enough to eat, to have someone else eat out of the palm of your hand, to be chewed out, a dog-eat-dog world. Chinese isn't any different from English in this way. Ch for "eat," and ch s, to only eat vegetables, but also, colloquially, to be a pushover. Ch c, to eat vinegar or be jealous. Ch l, to eat effort, as for a task that is very strenuous. To eat surprise, to be amazed, ch j ng. To be completely full or ch bo fn, and thus to have nothing better to do. To eat punishment or get the worst of it, ch ku. And, most important, to eat hardship, suffering, and pain, ch k, a defining Chinese quality, to be able to bear a great deal without showing a crack.
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Had she not been an immigrant, she might have enjoyed being a mom. 'Raising you took half my life,' she would say. 'You're living proof of where that half of my life went.' Chemists know this already. All elements on the periodic table decay. And in one half life, half the original element, called the parent nucleus, decays to a different element, for the daughter nucleus. No son nucleus, of course. No son could ever be a by-product of radioactive decay.
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