“And it occurred to me then how it took hours, sometimes day, for the surface of a river to freeze over—to hold in its skin the perfect and crystalline world—and how that world could be shattered by a small stone dropped like a single syllable.”
In this quotation, Le compares a river to a person. As winter comes, the river meticulously freezes over until ice covers its expanse. This is like a person in a relationship finally achieving some kind of intimacy and vulnerability. Alas, the ice can be broken by a single stone, just as someone can be seriously hurt after becoming vulnerable with somebody else.
“You couldn't think of after, you only thought of now, and come to think of it, you didn't do that either—you were left with pools of memory, each stranded from the next by time pulling forward like a tide.”
Like a stubborn child, memory has a way of butting its way into the conscience. Through the character of Jamie, Le reminisces about time wasted on the past. To him, each memory is part of a person, isolated because of the fixating effect of time. Dwelling on the past, he continues to beat himself up for being so concerned about the past before when he should have been living in the moment. Le uses water imagery, which is common for him, and is a particularly strong motif in "Halflead Bay."
“How necessary it was to stay on the surface of things. Because beneath the surface was either dread or delirium.”
Here, Le talks about anxiety through the character Mai reflecting on her own traumatic situation as well as the trauma her father has faced. Mai says that focusing on surface-level concerns preserves the psyche from harm. If one can keep things light and fluffy, then one will never have to face up to reality or make the choice to abscond from reality.
"The thing is not to write what no one else could have written, but to write what only you could have written."
It is clear that Nam Le has spent a great deal of time thinking about what types of story one should write. This quote is purposefully convoluted; at first glance, it may even seem like a paradox. By reading carefully, the reader can pick apart that the quote means an author should focus on what they feel called to write and not think about what others want them to write. Nam says that he found this quote written in one of his old notebooks, and he seems to poke fun at it, demonstrating his near-constant state of self-criticism.
"He would read it, with his book-learned English, and he would recognize himself in a new way. He would recognize me. He would see how powerful was his experience, how valuable his suffering-how I had made it speak for more than itself."
This quote shows that Nam's dreams and aspirations with regard to his writing are quite big. He doesn't just want to write a story that's truthful or popular: rather, he wants the people he writes about—his father, in particular—to be moved by them. Of course, this quote creates situational irony just a few pages later when Nam realizes that his father has burned up his only copy of the story. It is unclear to the reader why his father burned the story; it could be because the father found fault in it, or it could be because the father's suffering was so acutely present.
"The ocean seethed and sighed in the dark. So this was where you ended up, sick in sleep. Your night a beach and all sorts of junk washing up on shore."
This quote occurs when Jamie can't sleep the night before his fight with Dory. Le often uses setting and weather to give clues to his protagonists' emotions. In this case, Jamie likens his sleeplessness to the ocean at night and the thoughts reeling through his mind to junk washing up on the shore. This lends a romantic or poetic feel to what Jamie is experiencing, even though, from an objective point of view, it is a feud between high school boys over a girl.
"Three months ago, she'd been a senior associate at Pearson, Peelle and Sloss—one of the top-tier law firms in Portland. She'd had a private office with a river view, a private understanding with management with regard to her next promotion, a reservoir of professional goodwill accrued, it sometimes seemed, by virtue of having not yet majorly screwed up. She'd paid off half of a two-bedroom apartment in the Pearl District, exercised almost daily to keep her body in good shape. And—back then—pathetically, she knew—she'd had Paul."
This quote, which occurs early in "Tehran Calling," provides a tongue-in-cheek description of female success in the United States. Sarah ticks through a list of her accomplishments, from having a respected job with upward mobility, to being on her way to owning a house, to having the time and diligence to keep herself in shape. She notes with chagrin that she feels it is pathetic to include having Paul on the list—perhaps because it is not particularly feminist to focus on a man as much as one's career success, or perhaps because contrasting him with her other accomplishments shows that he was not up to her standards. In any case, this depiction of what Sarah sees as her accomplishments sets up a contrast with the accomplishments and difficulties faced by Parvin and the other women Sarah meets in Iran.
"Noise collected and chafed, it seemed, in the folds of fabric next to her ears."
Sarah, a U.S.-born woman, is not used to having to wear a head covering in public. This quote shows her discomfort with the sights and sounds of Tehran as well as her discomfort with wearing a head covering. Le uses a combination of sensory inputs by writing that the noises "chafed," a descriptor usually used for physical sensations, to show how overwhelmed Sarah is by the experience.
"I never thought to be a soldier's wife,
You were not born to foreign lands preside;
Why do the streams and hills our love divide?
Why are we destined for this faithless life?"
Mai hears someone singing this song and things it is Quyen, but then she realizes it is her young son, Truong. The song contains many of the themes from the story "The Boat," such as loneliness and journeys. In the song, a romantic relationship is separated by a war, which requires a soldier to leave for a far-off land. Similarly, Mai is leaving her family for a far-off land due to war and the issues it has caused for her country. The fact that two of the four lines in this section of the song are questions show how Mai has many questions about why she must leave and what will happen next.
"My body feels alien to me. I don't know it at all, I want nothing to do with it, I disown it. There's something inside me and it's dying—not me."
In this quote, which appears in the story "Meeting Elise" while Henry waits for Elise and her fiance to meet him at a restaurant, Le encapsulates the feeling of a chronically ill person who experiences a type of dissociation or dysmorphia with their body. Henry's feelings toward his body will be echoed by Jamie's mother in "Halflead Bay," though that story is not told from the mother's perspective, so we do not hear exactly how she feels. Henry's estrangement from his body parallels his estrangement from his daughter; the word "disown" underscores this parallel. This quote contributes to the dark and confused tone of the scene as Henry gets progressively drunker.
