“Soon enough, my cousin feels alive again. His voice rings in my ear, and his face floats in the paper just beyond his words where he swam in the kind of feelings and thoughts most people spend their lives trying to mask from others or from themselves.”
“But I need to know more. I need to know what happened to my cousin. Maybe only for the sake of knowing- but maybe because I need to hear that it wasn’t my fault.”
“Chin-Kee, my cousin. He’s been visiting me once a year since the eighth grade. He comes for a week or two and follows me to school, talking his stupid talk and eating his stupid food. Embarrassing the crap out of me. By the time he leaves, no one things of me as Danny anymore. I’m Chin-Kee’s cousin.”
“Each morning as the sun rose from the east, Ping and his mother and his father and sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles and his forty-two cousins all marched, one by one, down a little bridge to the shore of the Yangtze river.”
“Jancsi began to realize that this dirty, skinny little girl in the plain blue dress was his cousin. He felt cheated- that was bad enough- but she called Father ‘funny’ and said he was a girl- that was really too much!”
“Hush, hush!” I whispered; “people can have many cousins and of all sorts, Miss Cathy, without being any the worse for it; only they needn’t keep their company, if they be disagreeable and bad.