Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.
When people say "the body," frequently they mean the literal body, the physical body.
That desire to reach further is also where I ended my memoir, in 1994 in California, perhaps ironically, looking out to the Pacific and back to Asia, toward the not-yet-written.
Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer - as it first formed for me.
These commonplace categories - wife, mother, housewife, teacher - are in fact teleological referents. They gesture to profound states of being that animate, absorb and saturate the subject, like indelible dyes spilled repeatedly over a plain fabric. No matter if the fabric is sturdy or delicate, translucent or opaque, those dyes will stain. They will color the days and years and life.
When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer. "
Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we do to each other.
We have a revolutionary history to honor and uphold. Which was what Nelson Mandela did. He reminded us of that which we need to be reminded, over and over again, about our own best selves.
Iraq is in a civil war. There is no road in that country that is safe.
Just as theater has to be where people live, actors have to go out in the marketplace - not be cut off by a lens. Either an artist grows or he stagnates.