"Does one always have to pray for something? Prayer is more than just a request for favors. It's a form of communication."
Mei Lan introduces herself through hypnotherapy with CC. She tells Dr. Allen that she doesn't want to report on Ah Zhao after he asks her to, she only wants to pray. After finishing the novel, and looking back on this first meeting with Mei Lan, the ending is revealed right from the start. Mei Lan's story ends with a cliffhanger with her jumping from the wall to escape with Ah Zhao, but from these words we can conclude that they did not succeed and that she did become a Buddhist nun and poet as they speculate at the end.
"Just because people don't believe in something doesn't mean it isn't true."
This is from a conversation of Grandma Wu and Dr. Allen about the sessions and about the possibility of reincarnation which the sessions are pointing to. Dr. Allen is a Westerner, where reincarnation isn't an often believed form of afterlife. It questions the differences in what is believed by different people and the issue of what one group of people believes to be the truth as opposed to the others and vice versa.
"If you were a bird imprisoned in a cage, what's the one thing you would yearn for?"
Ah Zhao buys a few pigeons on the market just so that he can release them. The answer to his question is freedom and it reflects his own personal desire for freedom and his feeling of imprisonment. His imprisonment lies in his different background and different appearance from the rest which makes him an outcast, and his inability to do freely what he loves and be who he wants to be.
