parenthood

My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it.

Filial love, if the father is not deserving of it, is an absurdity, an impossibility. Love cannot be born of nothing, God alone can create something out of nothing.

It was like watching a bad off-off-Broadway play where you’re the only one in the audience and both the lead characters are played by your old-ass parents.

Hated? About my parents? I never made the list, and it took me years to understand why the suggestion made me so deeply uncomfortable: if I hated things about them, did it mean they hated things about me?

To unpack the source of my adolescent unhappiness would be to write about my mother, which I have struggled with in this book: How deep can I dig into myself without talking about my mother? Does an Asian American narrative always have to return to the mother? When I met the poet Hoa Nguyen, the first question she asked me was, “Tell me about your

Jack felt a wave of nearly desperate love for the boy. The emotion showed on his face as a stony grimness.

I fantasized about having a mother who was also raised on Sesame Street, Happy Meals, and John Hughes movies. Maybe she could ask me white mom questions like “How are you feeling?” or say white mom things like “I love you to the moon and back.” We would share the same first language. She could help me pick out a dress that I actually liked, instead

His own father had been the foulest-talking man Jack had ever run on.

One time a different woman built my body inside her body. Then my body left hers.