Quotation

A window and narrow horizontal slits at the top of the high walls provided ventilation, the air pushed about by a ceiling fan that rotated as slowly as a chicken on a spit. === “You’re not a native,” Carver said. “You’re an American.” “That’s a problem I’m trying to correct.” === “We’re a mixed bag.” “They don’t know what to make of us?” Michiko said. “I’m used to it, but you’re not.” “Try being a Japanese wife at a Michigan air base in 1973.” “Touché,” Claire said. “Try being a black man in Japan,” Carver said. “Or Thailand.” === But seen up close, from this height, the countryside was so poor that the poverty was neither picturesque nor pastoral: tin-roofed shacks with dirt floors, a man pulling up the leg of his shorts to urinate on a wall, laborers wearing slippers as they pushed wheelbarrows full of bricks. === “I said I have a Vietnamese soul. It’s a figure of speech. It’s an expression."