“Maidina put it this way: “Babe, I’m seeing someone whose body is in the same country as mine.” I don’t want to come across like a masochistic linguaphile, but this sounds even more brutal and fantastic in Uighur-accented Mandarin. To this day, I have never met anyone who speaks the way she does, and I don’t know where she learned to talk like that, part Clark Gable part Chinese epic verse part neighborhood fuccboi. Back then, I was winded. Her girl was a Han Chinese tennis player whose name translated to Red Dream Mountain.”
“The last thing she bought me was a chalice full of pomegranate juice at a roadside bazaar, freshly squeezed by a crinkly-eyed Uighur granny in a headscarf. You stood at the stall till you finished your drink and returned the chalice, which would be reused. Across from us, I saw a sheep being slaughtered, knife held close to its throat. It happened so quickly I didn’t even know what I was looking at till I saw fresh blood, the color of my pomegranate juice, pooling on the ground.”
-NOT GONNA GET US, AMANDA LEE KOE
“In the year leading up to calling off my wedding, I often cried or yelled or reasoned or pleaded with my fiancé to tell me that he loved me. To be nice to me. To notice things about how I was living.”
“That I wanted someone to articulate that they loved me, that they saw me, was a personal failing and I tried to overcome it.”
“The next day it was just him and me and Lindsay on the water. We were cruising fast and loud. “You drive,” Jeff shouted over the motor. Lindsay grinned and nodded. I had never driven a boat before. “What do I do?” I shouted. Jeff shrugged. I took the wheel. We cruised past small islands, families of pink roseate spoonbills, garbage tankers swarmed by seagulls, fields of grass and wolfberries, and I realized it was not that remarkable for a person to understand what another person needed.”
-THE CRANE WIFE, CJ HAUSER
Paris is the capital of France.
Tokyo is the capital of Japan.