dad, come here and smell my diarrhea. it will die you.

you could hear the explosions on the mountains at night when you slept.

i knew there was trouble when the bodies started floating down the river.

my family hid in the forest for many months.

when i was caught they just kept pointing the gun at my head shouting "tell me why i shouldn't kill you right now. tell me why i shouldn't shoot you in the head. tell me why i should let you live."

there were hundreds of us in the prison and they didn't give us food or water. people were dying.

my father owned the sawmill and they didn't have anyone who could use the equipment so i got out of the prison to help them.

my family snuck into thailand.

i had to say that all of my relatives were dead so i would have a chance to come to the united states.

i said the only place i wanted to go was the united states and i didn't care where they sent us within the united states.

i was in san francisco for 10 days and then i came here (saint louis).

to feed my family i sold buckets of water for ten cents each.

we couldn't afford the meat so we just got the chicken bones and made soup from them.

i had to feed my family.

Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.

To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally under appreciated state known as existence.

Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single overarching impulse; to keep you you.

...

Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.