“The poet’s work whispered in my ears with a subtle hint: there was an exceptional bond between Xinyu and me in that bigger universe beyond the ploughed fields. We were more than just classmates. Our thoughts and views were rooted in much deeper and richer soil.”

“The young man attacked that damp and gray melancholy with poetry. Neruda revealed to us that growing up in a land that is always rainy and cold, childhood is long and static. Even the stars were wet in Neruda’s world.”

“When it was time to introduce Rachel’s dad to Hung’s dad, they realized that they had a problem. Rachel’s dad was fluent in Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, Polish and German (the last of which he refused to speak), and Ba Anh was fluent in Vietnamese, English, French, Italian, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. They did not have a language in common.”