Dragonwings The Home Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #1

[Father's] letters were certainly warm enough, filled with his worries about us and his longing to be back home. But a man cannot be a father in a letter. (1.33)

Moon Shadow does not feel Windrider's presence as a father in their home until he can see him in the flesh.

Quote #2

Suddenly, I felt as if I had come home. I can see the town of the Tang people even now in the late afternoon sun – not as it is now, full of souvenir shops and neon signs, but as it was then. The houses and the stores had all the right colors and shapes, for they had been built not by demons but by the Tang people. It looked much like the streets in Canton, the city in the Middle kingdom from which I had sailed. (2.31)

In the beginning of the novel, Moon Shadow identifies home according to its physical appearance and likeness to the only home he has ever known in the Middle Kingdom. Home is a collection of familiarities to him.

Quote #3

Upon my bed
Lies the bright moonlight
Like frost upon the earth.
Lifting my eyes,
I see the bright moon.
Closing my eyes,
I see home. (2.43-49)

The poem that Lefty has drawn of the famous Chinese poet Li Po shows us that Windrider is not the only man in the Company who longs for a sense of home. In this poem, home is a sense that can be accessed in the mind.