Why are you attracted only to Chinese nonsense? - Amy Tan

We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.

When you lose your face..., it is like dropping your necklace down a well. The only way you can get it back is to fall in after it.

"It's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable...What was worse, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?
"So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren't allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.