I had always assumed we had ...

I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn\'t really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more. But listening to Auntie Lin tonight reminds me once agian: My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other\'s meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more. No doubt she told Auntie Lin I was going back to school to get a doctorate.
I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn't really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more. But listening to Auntie Lin tonight reminds me once agian: My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more. No doubt she told Auntie Lin I was going back to school to get a doctorate.
 Amy Tan

Quotes from the same author

I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.
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 Amy Tan
But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people - men, women and children who had never lost hope, but had lost their lives instead.
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 Amy Tan
Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
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 Amy Tan
Mothers have the huge influence, and I feel like they're always teaching us from the day we're born what to be afraid of, what to be cautious of, what we should like and what we should look like. Then we spend half of our life trying to be not like them, and then we reach another part of our lives where we see these things we can't get rid of.
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 Amy Tan
My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.
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 Amy Tan