"I'd only just learned the term "gallows humor" a few months earlier, from a book we'd been assigned in American Literature about the Civil War. At the time, it wasn't a type of humor I thought I would ever be in a position to experience. But now, as hearing Chen belt out Roddy Piper's battle cry from They Live in Chinese struck me as one of the funniest things I'd ever heard in my life, I understood the concept perfectly."