“He wonders if, to something else, he’s also the equivalent of a prokaryote. Something mindless and small, the puny, unlikely beginnings of life, and whether one of these days he’ll be the one squished underneath a giant shoe.”

A short script inspired by the story “55 Miles to the Gas Pump” by Annie Proulx

"My city is one of great pride and great tragedy. We say we are guarded like gods, Purple Mountains to the east and Yangtze River to the west. They are a coiling dragon and crouching tiger... Yet Taiping rebels once desolated the city and smashed the Porcelain Pagoda into glittering shards. If there is one thing I should never forget, it is that Nanking was never a silent city."

“The next time I go to a beach I will grab a fistful of sand. The grains will scratch at my palm and run through my fingers like water and I will close my eyes and think, here is part of the universe in my hand; here is how I hold the stars.”

“In my family, sacrifice is something everybody knows but no one talks about.”

“We watched as the sky drank itself dark around the city. The noise did not quiet; in fact, it only seemed to crescendo. Someone below started to sing, a long, lilting ballad like the slow brush of fingers through hair. The lights of the Acropolis flickered on one by one, a luminous beacon of the past.”

“Like a baby bird pushed out of the nest, I too was forced into a near-death experience before I was ready. Except I wasn’t as cute or chirpy about it, and instead of a swooping, miraculous flight at the last second, I crashed. Hard. Many, many times.”