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p. 38, a powerful ending
She leans toward Kurt Cobain like she wants to throw her arms around him and hold him, like she's forgotten that her arms don't work and there's no him to embrace.
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p. 62
Inside the wallet are a Costco membership card, some cash and a handwritten list of Internet casinos with ID numbers and passwords. There is a California driver's license with an address in L.A. that Nonc could map with his DIAD, and there's an ancient laminated doctor's note stating that he is a mute. Nonc picks up a key chain, a large one with all manner of car keys, Toyota, Ford, Hyundai. One of the keys is for a boat, a Grady-White, which are the best. And there's a packet of white hankies, which his father used to clean his trach tube. All this stuff is just sitting on Nonc's lap. He feels like he's rifling through it, like his dad might walk in at any moment and catch him. He feels like his father died long ago, and these are relics. He brushes it all onto the couch, the keys, the cash, the LSU ball cap. He stands and takes a last look around. He tries to separate the different owners of all this stuff, tries to put them together. He tries to close the door behind him, but it is broken.
Can't help imagine what I will leave behind in my wallet. 
p. 81
Nonc knows that someday, after Marnie takes the boy back and he grows older, he won't remember these moments, the way they showered early at the Red Cross, foraged for their morning pizza, roamed the countryside together in a brown panel van. It's probably a good thing, Nonc tells himself. Developmentally, it's got to be good for him. He strokes the boy's hair.
You can tell that he loves the boy a lot. 
Seems I just realized there're two sets of father and son in this story. 
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p. 117
Interesting fact: The kanji for irrational, I learned, is a combination of the elements woman and death.
So which characters is it? 嫉?
(Daphne said it should be 妄!)
& p. 131
Interesting fact: The kanji for figure is a combination of the elements next and woman.
This one I know. 姿.
p. 123
Interesting facts: Chuck Norris tackles seventeen bad guys at once in Missing in Action III. Clint Eastwood takes up the gun again in Unforgiven. George Clooney is hauntingly vulnerable in The Descendants. Do you know why? Dead wives. 
Hilarious. Reminds me of the Nolan films. 
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p. 160
[The curator] indicates all the students in the cafe with us. "Look at how they stare at these phones. That is our biggest competition. On the tours, half of them are updating their Facebook pages, texting their friends, tweeting and so on. Some YouTube the entire tour but never seem to experience it. To think what the Stasi went through to spy on us. Even they couldn't dream of a world in which citizens voluntarily carried tracking devices, conducted self-surveillance and reported on themselves, morning, noon and night."
How ironic.
p. 180
A prison is not a pretty place, this we know. Perhaps it would be easier on a wife and daughter if a man were a farmer or a folksinger. But someone must run the facilities, someone must undertake the unpleasant tasks. It's not like, with a father who'd been imprisoned by the Soviets, I could advance in the Party. It's not like, with a mother who'd nursed Germans and GIs alike, I was welcome at any universities, which I'd dreamed of attending. And Nina forgets that she went to the best schools because of my service.
'Unpleasant'. What an understatement. 
It may not be fair to simply criticize an individual who had to take up unpleasant tasks—probably they didn't have much choice. The ultimate question would still be, what's wrong with a country that forces people to choose between harming each other or being harmed. 
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p. 251
Soon his attention returned to Seoul's bewildering nature. Here were women in plastic surgery masks and little dogs wearing dresses. Passing a fitness center, DJ stared at rows of men running on treadmills. What force was driving them? What were they running from? Next came a cat cafe and a parlor where teenage girls danced with machines. At an empty shopping plaza, he watched an escalator endlessly cycle, the steps appearing, rising and disappearing as it carried no one up to nowhere.
Like this part a lot. Remniscent of what I always saw and felt in Central. 
p. 269
Soon they were leaning against the dasher boards, watching the skaters carve the ice. The music was loud, so you couldn't hear the best part—the blades scissoring the curves.
'Scissoring'. Noted.
pp. 278-279
Mina laughed at this. "And what do you think I should sing about?"
"How about a woman searching for her husband? She never gives up. In fact, she plays her accordion at every subway stop in Seoul."
"You think that would make a good song?"
"Are you kidding?" Dj asked. "It would get you on one of those contest shows. A beautiful woman makes a daring escape and then scours a new country, playing North Korean tunes in search of the man she loves. There wouldn't be a dry eye in the house."
Mina started playing again. "I only said I had to find my husband," she said. "I never claimed to love him."

I never claimed to love him. Dj heard those words through an entire dishwashing shift. The water was scalding hot. It penetrated his hands, gave him focus. And the racks of dishes never ended. DJ didn't have to think about them—the dirty plates came, clouds of steam rose, and there were Mina's words. 
Read the conversation several times and loved the paragraph that follows. A sutble way of describing someone falling in love.
p. 281
[A veteran DJ met in the male dormitory said:] "When I was over there, everything was bobby-trapped. Man, all I wanted was to get out. We weren't in combat or anything. That was the Americans. But anything you came across might blow up—a car, a Dumpster, a pile of trash. And shit blew, trust me, I saw it. I had to take pills to sleep. The funny thing is, now I can't stop thinking about that place. When I close my eyes, Iraq is all I see."
It's all about people who suffer for what they've been through.
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p. 304
Stephanie is my Pleiades, my Polaris, my Hokule'a and Southern Cross.
How romantic! 
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And the following are from 'A Reader's Guide'. I guess it's because I loved this book a lot that I found his answers helpful to understanding the stories as well as to writing. Got to know more about his rationale: how a story came into form, how personal material being put into a piece of fiction will (probably) influence your own life, etc. 
The author mentioned a few names: 'I do believe there has been a resurgence in short stories, and that there are great practitioners—whether it's Lorrie Moore, George Saunders, Karen Russell ...'
And when asked about whether he ever planned to work one of these stories out into another novel, he replied, 'My process for writing is the same regardless of form: I abandon my children, I become a horrible husband and a half-assed teacher. That's what it all has in common. There's definitely something a little maximal about my writing, just because one of the great joys is building a world out of nothing. That's the largest pleasure for me, and it takes a lot of page space to do. To make a Stasi prison so that I can see every hall and cell and the looks on people's faces, to feel the electricity humming through the wires. Or to know every street on a hurricane-ravaged town. Or to see every flashing light in the city of Seoul from the point of view of two defectors. I just have to build that world. I could kind of go on forever.'
The interviewer said: 'I'm reminded of two things the narrator of "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine," in attempts of self-exoneration, says: "some one must undertake the unpleasant tasks" and "the truth is that duty calls upon us to perform tasks we'd rather not." Do those sentiments resonate with you at all, as a writer, and perhaps serve to explain why you'd willingly go into them ind of a pedophile? Was it a kind of duty to go there as a writer?
He answered: "I have many answers to this question, because the story doesn't have a simple source. I do feel like several years ago my writing took a turn toward creating portraits of people you just don't hear from, including people who can't or won't speak for themselves. I tell my students all the time that the odds you'll be a good storyteller and you'll have an important story to tell are quite rare. Those are long odds, So if you are good at storytelling, you have a duty to tell the stories of others. After I went to that Stasi prison, I asked if anyone could recommend a good Stasi memoir, and not one person could. You know, if I could've just read a book, I probably wound't have written the story. ..."
And when talking about 'Interesting Facts', which includes quite a number of autobiographical elements, he said: 'My motivations [to write this story] are more simple and less noble. The way my mind makes sense of things is through narrative. ... There was all this stuff going on, and my mind just turned it all into narrative. I know it might sound trite to say, The story picks you. But it's true. ... I think [the story serves to help compartmentalize that chaos]. And a story forces meaning on something, it's a meaning-making machine. And the story is going to come up with an answer. It's a dangerous thing to play with, a story, when you put personal material in there, because you might not like the answer.'
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20210604 An unexpected day off