"One time it was only one little word. Wen Fu had asked the cook to prepare a dish he liked, pork with a kind of sweet cabbage. I liked this dish, too. But that summer the cabbage was bad, the flavor of the bad water it drank. When Wen Fu asked me how I liked the dish, I was honest. "Bitter," I said. The next night, he ordered the cook to make that same dish for me, nothing else.

"He smiled and asked me again, "Now how do you like it?" I answered the same way as before. Night after night, it was the same question, the same answer, the same dish the next day. I had to eat that bitter cabbage or nothing. But I didn't give up. I waited for Wen Fu to grow tired of this cabbage game. And after two weeks' time, my stomach proved stronger than his temper.

"Maybe this seems like a foolish thing, to be so stubborn over a bad-tasting cabbage. I could have lied and said, "Tonight the food is delicious." But if I didn't fight, wouldn't that be admitting my life was finished?"

- excerpt, The Kitchen God's Wife, Amy Tan