Then, quiet (qù) became another person living inside our house. [...] Quiet (闃) moved into our minds and stormed like an ocean inside my mother and me.
-- Marie (Part 1, Chapter 1)

Importance: This quote describes the feeling that invades Marie's home after her father's death. Here, Marie personifies the idea of quiet, describing it as "another person" who enters their house. This highlights the invasive, disturbing, and dramatic nature of the silence in their home; rather than a simple state of being, quiet is an artificial and external force which takes up space in their home. Marie also uses the pinyin qù and the character 闃 to evoke the complex relationship she has with her parents' languages. Here, Kai's death is the cause of a complicated quiet which cannot be adequately expressed in only one language; Marie needs a second language which she cannot fully understand to express the all-encompassing, multi-generational, and geographically widespread nature of the quiet...