檳榔嶼

- Love could lead you astray. Marriage was the safe place - a place where women could bury dreams and pretend, create a make-believe world and remain there forever.
- My mother believed that it was a woman's place to stand behind and by her man. It was her place to obey his will and to meet his every need. In return he would protect and provide. These beliefs were upheld by Scripture and church, by school and community, and by the women's magazines she liked so much.
  - My maternal grandmother and grandfather had separate room. Their rooms expressed separate and unique personalities. They taught me by example that it was possible to be married and still keep your own identity.
- Power - not love - seemed to be the underlying theme of daily life in both these households.
  - If marriage was to be this power struggle with one person on top and another on the bottom, I wanted no part of it. I lost interest in marriage at an early age, but this loss merely intensified my desire to search for and find a love that would be more vital than the will to power.
- My ideas about love also came from books and television. 
  - As a girl of the fifties I was taught that a woman's place was in the home. That her destiny was to be a good homemaker, to care for husband and family in sickness and in health without complaint. In her role as caregiver she was also responsible for everyone else's happiness. It was her job to create emotional well-being. She did that by meeting everyone's needs.
  - Despite her generosity and power, all her gifts were taken for granted. There were no rewards. Our dad, "the patriarch", always found fault.
  - I would not be a subordinated wife or a homemaker.
- My parents tried to pull me out of books. They shamed. They humiliated. They punished. Those books were ruining me, giving me too many ideas and too much mouth - all things that destroy a woman's ability to be a good homemaker.
  - In the presence of our father, our mother affirmed these beliefs. However, when he was gone, she encouraged reading. She talked about her schoolgirl days, her longing to be a writer. This split in her personality was the one space of private rebellion against patriarchy. It was the space where she revealed her deep disappointment in marriage. It had not proven to be a safe place where she was cherished, taken care of, protected, and loved.
- In those days the so-called great psychologists had confirmed that we could not escape. That it was normal for woman to be passive. She should be fulfilled with and through her man.
- Books helped me to separate marriage and love.
- The one lesson my father taught us about men that lasted was that real men were to be feared. We feared him. And therefore never truly had the opportunity to know him, either to give him love or to know his love.
- My generation of rebellious women, all of us now in our late forties and early fifties, did not want to be bitches. We wanted to be fully self-actualized, self-realized, whole. Our hope was that as we searched for love, we would find a partner, male or female, who would affirm this quest.
- I was rescued from madness by feminist movement. Women's liberation gave focus to my quest and my longings. It validated my desire to be self-realized. Yet it did not change my yearning to find love. It helped me to put the search for love in proper perspective. It helped me to see that women within patriarchy could not depend on the love of a good man to affirm our quest for selfhood.
- Ultimately, I could not count on finding love, I could count on my mind. I looked for love, but I found freedom.
  - Love generated in the quest for self-realization.
  - The proper place for love was as the solid foundation on which I would invent self and create a life.
  - Uniting the search for love with the quest to be free was the crucial step.
- Searching for love, I found the path to freedom. Learning how to be free was the first step in learning to know love.