If she has cried, she has not done so in front of me. She has done so in the shower where it is hard to tell.

In spoken Chinese, everything is gender neutral. There is no she or he. The more I think about this now, the more I like this about the language. Man or woman? Does it matter? A person.

In Chinese, there is another phrase about love. It is not used for passionate love but the love between family members. In translation, it means I hurt for you.

Fear of following the other person despite that person being good and reasonable and kind? What phobia is that? Stupidity?

Why does she deserve this kind of loyalty? She doesn’t. But she does because she is my mother.

A proverb: My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.

The goal of a science PhD is to have an original idea. Those who cannot are often called technicians. A technician is able to follow a protocol but not able to think beyond it. The best PhD students make the jump from technician to scientist in less than a few years. The worst never make that jump. Some advisors realize this early on and advise these students to leave science soon. Other advisors allow them to reach that point themselves.

As a child, I get new clothes so rarely that when I do, I put off wearing them. It then happens that when the big day comes, the clothes no longer fit.

All comedies end in marriage. All tragedies end in death. But what about everything else in between? Life happens in the middle, I heard someone very smart say.

Play with your dolls for not more than half an hour, no more than fifteen minutes, no more than a second, a millisecond. If you learned math as fast as you ran outside to play, then you might be a genius. But you do not and you are not. You’re a hole where knowledge goes to sleep.