It’s my fault she is this way. I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know thes… - Amy Tan

Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.

It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want.

I learned to make things not matter, to put a seal on my hopes and place them on a high shelf, out of reach. And by telling myself that there was nothing inside those hopes anyway, I avoided the wounds of deep disappointment. The pain was no worse than the quick sting of a booster shot. And yet thinking about this makes me ache again. How is it that as a child I knew I should have been loved more? Is everyone born with a bottomless emotional resevoir?