In this passage adapted from a novel, a Canadian woman recalls for her childhood during the 1960s. Originally from China , the family travelled to Irvine , Ontario , Canada , where the parents opened a restaurant, the Dragon Café.

As a young girl I never really thought about my parents’ lives in Irvine , how small their world must have seemed, never extending beyond the Dragon Café. Every day my parents did the same jobs in the restaurant. I watched the same customers come for meals, for morning coffee, for afternoon soft drinks and French fries. For my parents one day was like the next. They settled into an uneasy and distant relationship with each other. Their love, their tenderness, they gave to me.

But my life was changing. I became taller and bigger, my second teeth grew in white and straight. At school I began to learn about my adopted country. I spoke English like a native, without a trace of an accent. I played, though, and dreamed in the language of our Irvine neighbors. A few years later and I would no longer remember a time when I didn't speak their words and read their books. But my father and Uncle Yat still spoke the same halting English. My mother spoke only a few words. I began to translate conversations they had with the customers, switching between English and Chinese. Whenever I stepped outside the restaurant it seemed I was entering a world unknown to my family: school, church, friends' houses, the town beyond Main Street , I found it hard to imagine a year without winter any more, a home other than Irvine .

 For my mother, though, home would always be China . In Irvine she lived among strangers, unable to speak their language. Whenever she talked about happy times, they were during her childhood in that distant land. A wistful smile would soften her face as she told me about sleeping and playing with her sister in the attic above her parents' bedroom. She once showed me a piece of jade-green silk cloth that was frayed and worn around the edge. In the center was a white lotus floating in varying shades of blue water, the embroidery(刺绣) so fine that when I held it at arm's length the petals looked real. I had been helping her store away my summer clothes in the brown leather suitcase from Hong Kong when I noticed a piece of shiny material spread it on her lap. “My mother embroidered this herself. I was going to have it made into a cushion, but then my life changed and over here there seems to be no place for lovely things. It's all I have that reminds me of her,” she said. “Maybe, Sun-Jen, one day you will do something with it.” I admired the cloth some more, then she carefully folded it and stored it back in her suitcase.

There was little left from her old life. She said it was so long ago that sometimes it felt as if it had never happened. But she described her life with such clarity and vividness that I knew all those memories lived on inside her. There was so little in this new country that gave her pleasure. The good things she found were related in some way to China : an aria from a Chinese opera, a letter from a relative back home or from Aunt Hai-Lan in Toronto , written in Chinese, a familiar-looking script that I couldn't read and that had nothing to do with my life in Canada .

There were times when I felt guilty about my own happiness in Irvine . We had come to Canada because of me, but I was the only one who had found a home.

 I looked at my beautiful Christmas tree and sighed. It was time. The New Year was a week old and my tree still stood in the corner of our room with its collection of memories proudly displayed in a shower of colorful lights. I'd procrastinated long enough.

  I got up, went to the garage and dragged all the boxes into the room. I prepared the boxes and carefully placed the decorations of the tree in their protective packaging, pausing every few minutes to admire a favorite. "Hey, little Santa!" I held the Santa from my childhood, "Thanks for being my friend for almost fifty years." He was a little ragged but still gives me a flood of wonderful memories. "Until next year, my dear friend."

  There was a collection of handmade ones. My children made in the their first years of school, more than twenty years ago. Made by tiny hands, they are far from perfect in design, but every year they go on my memory tree—memories of young giggles on Christmas morning and a smiling face when they handed them to me when I came home from work. "Look what we made, Daddy!" "Oh! It is beautiful. Let's find a special spot on the tree for it." Every year since, they are displayed.

  A few hours after I started, the filled boxes were back in the garage. The room was vacuumed and I sat staring at a barren corner. The room seemed so empty. It took me two days of work to assemble and decorate my tree, but only a few hours to take it apart.

   My tree is like a good marriage or a great friendship. Like the tree, they take a long time to assemble and decorate with memories, but can be torn down quickly. All it takes is an unkind word or a thoughtless act, and what once stood proudly in the glow of love comes falling down.

   Every year I have to put my tree away, but not my marriage or friendships. I take great care of those. They get to glow in the corner of my life for as long as I live. I get to analyze my tree and find memories for a few weeks every year. I can do the same with the loves in my life every day. When I held the Santa, a flood of wonderful memories returned. The same happens when I hold my wife or see the smile of a friend across the room.

   Take great care of your friendships and your marriage. Once they come down, they aren't as easy to put back together as a Christmas tree, if at all. Stand them in that special spot in the corner of your heart and admire their glow.

It could not have been any harder to leave one of the children behind when we moved away. I know that parting with our dog was one of the most painful decisions I have ever had to make. This is Zachary’s story.

Ann and the children and I moved from our rural home in Virginia in 1987 so that I could retrain for a new career. It meant leaving behind our best friend, Zachary, a six-year-old Black Lab. This was for his good; he would be miserably locked up in suburban Birmingham while we were away from home every day. We all agreed that he should remain free to roam and explore the countryside. We found friends of friends, far across the county, over a mountain, beyond the interstate. They would be glad to give him a new home. He trembled beside me as I drove him there. And I left him tearfully, watching him on his new front porch, disappearing in the distance of the rear view mirror. I tried to convince myself that old Zach did not really care who cared for him. He would be fine and we would soon outgrow our mutual loss.

A year later, in our new home in a Birmingham suburb, we got a call from the people who bought our farmhouse back near Wytheville. Ann took the phone; the color drained from her face as the kids and I watched the conversation unfold. Our callers told Ann, “There’s a strange dog showing up here a couple days ago. He’s right thin and his paws don’t look so good. He just seems sort of lost and confused. The neighbors down the road say they think he’s your old dog.”

“It’s Zachary and he found his way home. He’s looking for us. Fred, you have to go get him.” Ann said through tears of joy and remorse. I knew she was right. We had to go. But bringing Zachary there to Birmingham made no more sense than it would have a year earlier. Even so, the next day, driven by forces beyond reason, my daughter and I drove ten hours to our old farmhouse.

One day, when I was working as a psychologist in England , an adolescent boy showed up in my office. It was David. He kept walking up and down restlessly, his face pale, and his hands shaking slightly. His head teacher had referred him some. "This boy has lost his family," he wrote. "He is understandably very sad and refuses to talk to others, and I'm very worried about him. Can you help?"I looked at David and showed him to a chair. How could I help him? There are problems psychology doesn't have the answer to, and which no words can describe. Sometimes the best thing one can do is to listen openly and sympathetically.

The first two times we met, David didn't say a word. He sat there, only looking up to look at the children's drawings on the wall behind me. I suggested we play a game of chess. He nodded. After that he played chess with me every Wednesday afternoon --- in complete silence and without looking at me. It's not easy to cheat in chess, but I admit I made sure David won once or twice.

    Usually, he arrived earlier than agreed, took the chess board and pieces from the shelf and began setting them up before I even got a chance to sit down. It seemed as if he enjoyed my company. But why did he never look at me? "Perhaps he simply needs someone to share his pain with," I thought. "Perhaps he senses that I respect his suffering." Some months later, when we were playing chess, he looked up at me suddenly. "It's your turn," he said.

 After that day, David started talking. He got friends in school and joined a bicycle club. He wrote to me a few times, about his biking with some friends, and about his plan to get into university. Now he had really started to live his own life.

Maybe I gave David something. But I also learned that one - without any

words - can reach out to another person. All it takes is a hug, a shoulder to cry on, a

friendly touch, and an ear that listens.

How often do you let other people like a bad driver, a rude waiter, or an angry boss, change your mood?

Sixteen years ago I learned a lesson. I got in a taxi, and we took off for Grand Central Station. We were driving in the right lane when all of a sudden, a black car jumped out of a parking space right in front of us. My taxi driver used his brakes, the tires made a loud noise, and at the very last moment our car stopped just3cmfrom the back of the other car.

I couldn’t believe it. But then I couldn’t believe what happened next. The driver of the other car, the guy who almost caused a big accident, turned his head around and he started shouting at us. I couldn’t believe it!

My taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy. So, I said, “Why did you just do that? This guy could have killed us!” And this is when my taxi driver told me what I now call, “The Law of the Garbage Truck”. He said, “Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of anger and disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they look for a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you.”

So I started thinking how often I let Garbage Trucks run right over me and how often I take their garbage and spread it to other people.

I began to see Garbage Trucks. I see the load people are carrying. I see them coming to dump it. And like my taxi driver, I don’t take it personally. I just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on.

Parents and kids today dress alike, listen to the same music, and are friends. Is this a good thing? Sometimes, when Mr. Ballmer and his 16-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, listen to rock music together and talk about interests both enjoy, such as pop culture, he remembers his more distant relationship with his parents when he was a teenager.

“I would never have said to my mom, ‘Hey, the new Weezer album is really great. How do you like it?’” says Ballmer. “There was just a complete gap in taste.”

Music was not the only gulf. From clothing and hairstyles to activities and expectations, earlier generations of parents and children often appeared to move in separate orbits.

Today, the generation gap has not disappeared, but it is getting narrow in many families. Conversations on subjects such as sex and drugs would not have taken place a generation ago. Now they are comfortable and common. And parent—child activities, from shopping to sports, involve a feeling of trust and friendship that can continue int0 adulthood.

No wonder greeting cards today carry the message, “To my mother, my best friend.”

But family experts warn that the new equality can also result in less respect for parents. “There’s still a lot of strictness and authority on the part of parents out there, but there is a change happening,” says Kerrie, a psychology professor at Lebanon Valley College. “In the middle of that change, there is a lot of confusion among parents.”

Family researchers offer a variety of reasons for these evolving roles and attitudes. They see the 1960s as a turning point. Great cultural changes led to more open communication and a more democratic process that encourages everyone to have a say.

“My parents were on the ‘before’ side of that change, but today’s parents, the 40-year-olds, were on the ‘after’ side,” explains Mr. Ballmer. “It’s not something easily accomplished by parents these days, because life is more difficult to understand or deal with, but sharing interests does make it more fun to be a parent now.”

C

I was waiting in line to register a letter in the post office at Thirty-third Street and Eighth Avenue in New York. I noticed that the clerk appeared to be bored with the job—weighing envelopes, handing out stamps, and issuing receipts—the same dull work year after year.

So I said to myself, “I am going to try to makethat clerk like me. Obviously, to make him like me, I must say something nice, not about myself, but about him.” So I asked myself, “What is there about him that I can honestly admire?” That is sometimes a hard question to answer, especially with strangers. However, in this case, it happened to be easy. I instantly saw something I admired very much. So while he was weighing my envelope, I remarked with enthusiasm, “I certainly wish I had your hair.”

He looked up and his face was full of smiles. “Well, it isn’t as good as it used to be,” he said modestly. We carried on a pleasant conversation and the last thing he said to me was, “Many people have admired my hair.”

I’ll bet that person went out to lunch that day walking on air. I’ll bet he went home that night and told his wife about it. I’ll bet he looked in the mirror and said, “It is a beautiful head of hair.”

There is one all—important law of human conduct. If we obey that law, we shall almost never get into trouble. In fact, that law, if obeyed, will bring us countless friends and constant happiness. But the very instant we break the law, we shall get into endless trouble.                

The law is this: Always make the other person feel important.

I am a writer. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language—the way it can evoke(唤起) an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with.

Born into a Chinese family that had recently arrived in California, I’ve been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as “broken” English. But feel embarrassed to say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken”, as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness. I’ve heard other terms used, “limited English,” for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions(认识)of the limited English speaker.

I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother’s “limited” English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.

I started writing fiction in 1985. And for reasons I won’t get into today, I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as “broken”, and what I imagine to be her translation of her Chinese, her internal(内在的) language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure: I wanted to catch what language ability tests can never show; her intention, her feelings, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.

Money is the root of all evil and new study claims there may be some truth behind the saying. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, US, announced on February 27 that rich people are more likely to do unethical(不道德的) things, such as lie or cheat, than poorer people.

   The scientists did a series of eight experiments. They published their findings online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

   They carried out the first two experiments from the sidewalk near Berkeley. They noted that drivers of newer and more expensive cars were more likely to cut in on other cars and pedestrians at crosswalks. Nearly 45 percent of people driving expensive cars ignored a pedestrian compared with only 30 percent of people driving more modest cars.

   In another experiment, a group of college students was asked if they would do unethical things in various everyday situations. Examples included taking printer paper from work and not telling a salesperson when he or she gave back more change. Students from higher-class families were more likely to act dishonestly.

   According to the scientists, rich people often think money can get them out of trouble. This makes them less afraid take risks. It also means they care less about other people's feelings.

   Finally, in simply makes them greedier. "Higher wealth status seems to make you want even more, and that increased want leads you to bend the rules or break the rules to serve your self-interest," said Paul Piff, leading scientist of the study.

   Piff pointed out that the findings don't mean that all rich people are untrustworthy or that all poor people are honest. He said the experiments were to show how people living in different social situations express their instincts and values in different ways.