Real Americans: A novel

All this while, instead of seeking more time, I could have been paying attention. I notice it now, my present: my grandson’s kind face, his warm hand in mine, and the smell and sensation—here the words, in any language, fail—of being alive. Chinese is a language that exists in the present tense. In this way, it is unlike English, a language in whic

A wise person once said, “I want to be less afraid of friends’ judgment and more enthralled by their perspectives.”

Aren’t we lucky? Our DNA encodes for innumerable possible people, and yet it’s you and I who are here—winners in a stupefying lottery. We came at the exact right moment, a blip in the hundred million centuries of the universe: the Earth inhabitable, not yet engulfed by the sun, but not only molten magma, inhospitable to life. The planet cooled and

Once she had believed that connection meant sameness, consensus, harmony. Having everything in common. And now she understood that the opposite was true: that connection was more valuable—more remarkable—for the fact of differences. Friendship didn’t require blunting the richness of yourself to find common ground. Sometimes it was that, but it was

As people we interrupted one another’s lives—that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.

Her life was small, and rich, and entirely hers.

She had never been comfortable, as a younger person. There was so much expectation placed on the young, who were uniformly full of potential, who could change the world, until they did or didn’t. Nobody expected anything remarkable from a woman her age. But she had never wanted to be remarkable.

But most people in America, those who are fed and clothed and housed, can choose what to care about. From your comfortable position you can decide if you want to know about people in Syria or Myanmar, with the flip of a television switch.

My mother never described herself as an outsider, she just was one—that was obvious to me. From the perimeter, she could see what was invisible to everyone in the middle.