Christopher Waller

“The exquisite watch towers, the gold and green memorial archways, the vermillion city gates, and the pavilion at Jiangshan Park were silent, as if listening to a sound they might never hear again. The wind blew, like a mournful sigh, snaking through the palace towers and the halls, as if wanting to relate tales of days past… The bridge was practically deserted. Dull moonlight shone down, cold and desolate, on expanses of ice on both sides. Dim outlines of distant pavilions cast dark shadows… with only their yellow roof tiles glimmering faintly. A white pagoda reaching into the hazy clouds cast a desolate chill on everything, causing the three lakes to reveal their northern bleakness… As he was crossing the bridge, Xiangzi shivered from the icy expanse below and refused to go any farther. Normally, when he was pulling his rickshaw across the bridge, he concentrated on his feet, afraid of a misstep, as if the sights around him did not exist. Now he was free to look, but the scenery frightened him. The cold, gray ice, the rustling trees, and the deathly pale pagoda were so forlorn… Even the white stones of the bridge at his feet seemed abnormally bleak and so white that even the street lamps were subdued and dreary. He did not want to move, he did not want to look, and he definitely did not want to be with her.”
― Lao She, Rickshaw Boy

“There was Wang Qiyao in her autumn coat, her hair blown about by the wind as she tightly clutched her lambskin purse. Her eyes were fixed ahead, as if she was searching for something… this chance encounter filled him with despair. It was a scene emblematic of a chaotic world, one snapshot in a life that was flying past.”
― Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

“The theater was pitch black, save for the column of rotating light emanating from the hole in the projection room to create an illusory world”
― Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

“The old fellow gazed out at the empty tent, painted a soft green by the carbide lamps, and at the tables, now missing their tablecloths, and felt utterly desolate, imagining that this is what his funeral would be like: the tent would become a place of mourning, but there would be no dutiful sons or grandsons in mourning attire kneeling before his coffin, nothing but a few casual acquaintances playing mahjong through the night”
― Lao She, Rickshaw Boy