"I thought about my father, about his love for Sparrow and Zhuli. How many notes are there in Bach's Goldberg Variations? In Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony? How many words are each of us granted over the course of a lifetime? That night, I began writing down my memories of Ai-ming. I wrote slowly at first, and then the story quickened. I hoped that writing would allow me, finally, to keep the promise I had made to Ma."

'Good, satisfying sex makes perfect sense to even the most illiterate person. You and me, we're just used to seeing it as an advanced invention because we learned about it after we learned the other basics -- reading, writing, learning how to use a computer, all of that. To the widows, sex comes before all of that knowledge.'

'I didn't hear a word of that because I'm thinking about my grandmother making sex-roti,' Jason said with a grimace.