Chinatown Quotes

“You must be dumber than you think I think you are.”
― Robert Towne

“You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating them
like sutras Xuan Zhang fetched from India, testing ways
return might be possible against these homesick inventions,
trace the traveller's alien steps across borders, and in between
discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns
grew out of not knowing whether to return or to stay, and then became home.”
― Boey Kim Cheng, Clear Brightness

“Yes, yes," Gee Sook said. "Look how Jung stands like a man today.”
― Wayson Choy, The Jade Peony

“There are a few years where you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“While we played, Meiying often sat by herself on the bench, huddled against the chill, looking at the library books on her lap, the pages glowing under the street lamp. The pages would sometimes turn in the wind, but she did not notice.”
― Wayson Choy, The Jade Peony

“I found Chinatown both impossibly sophisticated and unbearably out of vogue. Chinese restaurants were a guilty pleasure of mine. I loved how they evoked the living world- either the Walden-like sense of individualism of the Ocean or Happy Garden, or something more candid ("Yummies!"). Back home they had been a preserve of birthdays and special celebrations: a lazy Susan packed with ribs and Peking duck, rhapsodically spun to the sound of Fleetwood Mac or the Police, with banana fritters drenched in syrup and a round of flowering tea to finish. It felt as cosmopolitan a dining experience as I would ever encounter. Contextualized amid the big-city landscape of politicized microbreweries and sushi, a hearty table of MSG and marinated pork felt at best crass, at worst obscurely racist. But there was something about the gloop and the sugar that I couldn't resist. And Chinatown was peculiarly untouched by my contemporaries, so I could happily nibble at plates of salt and chili squid or crispy Szechuan beef while leafing through pages of a magazine in peace.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“Everyone in Chinatown seems to have a B side to his or her character---an untold story---Ernest reasoned as he lit a cigarette and remembered that one of his favorite songs was a Hank Williams flip-side record, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." That song had seemed to do pretty well. Then again, some say Hank Williams died of a broken heart.”
― Jamie Ford, Love and Other Consolation Prizes

“Anna lifted her chin, “Forgive my interruption, Mr. President, but I am Assistant Matron Anna Blanc, and I’ve come about the singsong girls.” She remembered herself and bowed. No one bowed back. They simply stared at her. After a moment, Tom Foo Yuen said, in his tar-thick accent, “You are a brave, strange woman, Matron Blanc.” Anna had heard that before.”
― Jennifer Kincheloe, The Woman in the Camphor Trunk

“Some people have a great fashion of calling things they do not like yellow. You exclude the yellow man. You fear the yellow peril. I edit a white paper turned out by yellow men, and many white men turn out yellow papers.”
― Julia Flynn Siler, The White Devil's Daughters: The Fight Against Slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown

“The girls used to play together in Portsmouth Square, surrounded by Chinese grannies sipping their milk tea and playing board games. They'd snack on soft buns filled with sweet coconut, and when it rained, they'd dunk into the curio shops or the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, their senses dazzled by the delicious, sugary aroma.”
― Susan Wiggs, The Lost and Found Bookshop