October 26, 2015 - 15:48
"Double-click and the child is yours. Double-click and the baby is aborted. But it wasn't so easy. For Yummy, perhaps, but not for Cass. It wasn't easy and it wasn't fair. She was sick of watching the the haphazard way Yummy parented her children, hauling them around, the way she talked to them and the language she used. It was so clear they were unhappy" (204).
"But after the squash now and then, and he approved of her economy. But after the potato operation grew to a scale where he needed hired help and her labor was no longer necessary, and then I was born, and then I left, somewhere during this time and thereafter, Momoko's garden began to change. She began to branch out, and soon there was an extravagance of blooms, in sizes and colors and shapes Lloyd had never seen. And vegetables whose names he did not know. And fruits with strange pips. You can imagine his unease, growing denser every year, in tandem with the garden's lush perimeters. Pressed, he could not say why. Of course, no one was pressing him to do or say much of anything, especially Momoko" (111-112).
"The reason you clone rather than plant from seed is because potatoes, like human children, are wildly heterozygous. Lloyd taught me that word when I was eight. It simply means that if you try to propogate a domesticated potato using seed, sexually, chances are it will not grow to true type. Instead it will regress, displaying a haphazard variety of characteristics. reminiscent of its uncultivated potato progenitors- it may prove superior to the parent plant or may be wildly inferior. At eight, gazing up at my father's face, I didn't know which was worse" (57).