Read I Love a Broad Margin to My Life Online
Authors: Maxine Hong Kingston
I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (15 page)
Li
is the acting out of veneration and love, not only for parents, for one’s sovereign, for one’s people, but also for “Heaven-and-earth.” … One learns by
Li
to take one’s place gratefully in the cosmos and in history.
—
THOMAS MERTON
liang
—pretty
lick
—strength
loon
—chaos
los derechos de criadas
—the rights of maids
lu
—road
mai
—rice that is growing (rice that is cooked is “fawn”)
mai’a mālei
—fish guardian from Makapu’u to Hanauma on O’ahu; “malei” for short
mele
—song, anthem, chant, poem, poetry
mew; mow
—“cat,” in various dialects
mew (different ideogram from above
)—temple
mien
—face
minamina
—regret a loss
ming
—bright
mm
—no, not
mo
—a sound at the end of a sentence signifying a question
moy
—younger sister, plum
ngum cha
—drink tea
Nosotros no cruzamos la frontera; la frontera nos cruza
.—“We do not cross the border; the border crosses us.” (A slogan of the immigrants’ rights movement)
paniolo
—cowboy (after España, Spain)
Pásame la botella
.—“Pass me the bottle.”
pila ho’okani
—instrumental music
po
—grandmother
sammosa
—forgetfulness; loss of awareness
sangha
—the sacred community that lives in peace and harmony
Say Yup
—language spoken in Four Districts, Guangzhou
seh doc
—to bear; to afford; to be able to withstand
sing dawn fai lock
—“Happy New Year” in Chinese (literally: holy birthday happiness joy)
sipapu
—a small hole in the floor of the kiva symbolizing the portal through which the ancestors came
su doc
—think virtue
suey yeah
—midnight snack
sun
—morning, body, believe, letter
tet nguyen dâ
—“Happy New Year” in Vietnamese (literally: feast of the first morning)
thala
—ultimate star
ting
—pavilion, sacred vessel, stop, listen
walk mountain
—pay respects to the dead
waw; wei
—interjections like “wow”
wu wei
—non-doing
Contentment and well-being at once become possible the moment you cease to act with them in view, and if you practice non-doing (
wu wei
), you will have both happiness and well-being.
—
THOMAS MERTON
Xizang
—Tibet
zaijian
—
au revoir, auf Wiedersehen
Many thanks to the authors of the following sources, which are excerpted or referred to in the text:
Irving Berlin, “Sittin’ in the Sun (Countin’ My Money).”
Dalai Lama,
How to Expand Love: Widening the Circle of Loving Relationships
, translated by Jeffrey Hopkins, Atria Books, 2006.
Gilgamesh
, translated by David Ferry, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992.
Omar Khayyam,
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
, translated by Edward Fitzgerald, 1858.
Thomas Merton,
The Way of Chuang Tzu
, New Directions, 1965.
John Mulligan,
Shopping Cart Soldiers
, Curbstone Press, 1997.
Rumi, “Songs of the Reed,”
The Essential Rumi
, translated by Coleman Barks, Castle Books, 1997.
Maghiel van Crevel,
Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem, and Money
, Brill Academic Publishers, 2008.
Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass
, Sherman and Co., Philadelphia, 1900.
Yang Lian, “Poets and Poems in Exile: On Yang Lian, Wang Jiaxin, and Bei Dao,” translated by Maghiel van Crevel.
Maxine Hong Kingston, the author of
The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, The Fifth Book of Peace
, and other works, has earned numerous awards, among them the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal, and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. For many years a Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at U.C. Berkeley, she lives in California.
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
China Men
Hawai‘i One Summer
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
To Be the Poet
The Fifth Book of Peace
As Editor:
The Literature of California: Native American Beginnings to 1945
Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace
