Quotation

I knew the basics of our history as well as I knew the story of Adam and Eve: the Communists had marched from North Vietnam in 1975 to invade South Vietnam, driving us out, all the way across the Pacific to California. === “There’s a reason why saints are martyred. Nobody can stand them.” === He tried to forget what he’d discovered, how little other lives mattered to him when his own was at stake. === Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world besides our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts. === They were there in the kitchen with us, the ghosts of the refugees and the ghosts of the pirates, the ghost of the boat watching us with those eyes that never closed, even the ghost of the girl I once was, the only ghosts my mother feared. === “You died too,” he said. “You just don’t know it.”