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“I’m staying in a wretched little flat in Bela Vista, the same seaside cluster of buildings where people took their one-way vacations twenty years ago. Rent one of these apartments for the weekend, enjoy one last sunset, drink a few beers, and then burn charcoal in one of the rooms. This form of suicide is one of Asia’s worst clichés, much like jumping from a high window or a slow death from drink. Even the reasons can sound trite if you’re not the one enduring them: a crash in the property market, so much homework you only get three hours of sleep a night, parents unwilling to settle for anything less than Oxbridge and a doctorate.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“We were poorer then, during the four decades before and after the second war, even though wealth lined some of the lanes, avenues, streets, and roads of TST. We came to TST because of that wealth and the men who haunted the district, trolling for love, gluttonous with desire. But we were happier then because any money is better than being impoverished. After all, we were young and pretty enough, smart and hungry enough, sad and desperate enough to go away and stay away in TST, far from the shanties or villages or homes of our birth. Those homes where love was absent and our desire for more translated into lust for a future that could be our own. We came in droves during war and peacetime, hunting out a perch to land on for what passed as a lifetime.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir

“If it’s not a “hell, yes!” it’s a “no.”
― Fumio Sasaki, Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism

“Men don’t lie to whores. I once had a lover who had been MI5. He was gentle, though, and sometimes cried after he fucked me. The man who killed me was rough and never cried. He kept two fierce Alsatians in his bathtub. That’s the trouble with Hong Kong flats—too small for dogs, especially large ones, but some people insist on having them. This man, an English police inspector, he was vice. Those dogs were hungry the night they ripped me apart and almost tore his left hand off in the process. He still has the scar. The photo in the newspaper caught it when he put up his hand to cover his face the day he was arrested, although that happened years later, long after I was gone. Jail ended his career, but he just went to the mercenaries. There’s always a place in the world for the rough ones. About my death, though, that was an accident. He lost control of his hounds and they savaged my jugular and feasted on my flesh until he muzzled them. Afterward he hid my corpse because what else could he do? First, however, he cleanly sliced off my hands and feet to be found with no canine teeth marks, separated from the rest of me.”
― Jason Y. Ng, Hong Kong Noir