as lover’s complaint was noted, perhaps, by the one who knew to find it, and for the rest of the room, only artistic caprice — the - Alexander Chee

Waiters and escorts both know that indiscretion is a career-ending move. You reveal a secret only if you are never going back again.

My grandfather knows about hauntings, it occurs to me now. Here was where he knew his sisters, here was what he remembered, every day, in his Imperial school, as the Japanese grammar spread inside him, as he learned the language of the people who took his sisters and destroyed them. All his thoughts come to him in Japanese first, his dreams in Japanese also... I think of how every single thing he says in Korean comes across a pause where the Japanese is stilled and the Korean brought forward. Each part of speech a rescue

A world he’d waited for to be born came into being with my return to him, and I was now the source of it. I