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‘—rhododendrons—It rained every day—Crops were flattened all over—predators ate well that week, without having to work hard for their food—some men kill for fun. He never killed anything for fun—not interested in trophies. He only killed to protect his pheasants, which were then killed by other people for fun. He was a functional killer—not proud of it—did not think his work was anything to make an exhibition of.’

‘In—1862, China stood at the edge of the unknown. The upper ranks of government in Beijing and Nanjing were both in a state of metamorphosis, re-forming themselves for the next stage—whose end none could divine. So Zeng and the Shanghai gentry finally found common ground. Both sides were self-interested, but their immediate goals were the same. The price of rice went up 50 percent—it had been planned in advance.’

‘Everybody’s got a timepiece—Watch was an outward reflection of your personal time. Had nothing to do with being on time. Had to do with a sense of time. Sense of urgency. Sense of rhythm. Cadence. Sense of history. Like listening to oldies with Margarita—and it wouldn’t make wrongs go away. Time came back like a reminder. Time folded with memory. In a moment, everything could fold itself up, and time stand still.’

‘What kind of person enjoys possessing life in such a way, for no purpose other than to feel the thrill of owning someone so monstrously close to and far from a friend? People used to do this centuries ago. But now? Just a few nostalgic jerks would dare to be seen using animals as toys. It's a sinister loop, it’s their younger selves they want to adopt, abduct, protect, punish—they only feel half alive without one.’

‘I began to cry : ‘I’m a wealthy man! I want nothing from you, nor from your man, nor from anybody! I hope that bastard child of yours is stillborn! Go off with whoever you want! You’re just some nobody’s mistress, that’s all you are.’ Then I fired off a few shots. ‘Where’s Franco, who won’t come out and defend his woman?’ At that moment, I paled: Franco was coming through the cattle-gate—And he hugged me warmly.’

‘He performed for the rich, the famous—the infamous—When they put him in jail, he performed for his torturers. And when they tortured him, he performed for his fellow inmates. He died a thousand deaths, but they could never shut him up—the scream of his absence. In one installation, he wore wings—sat in a cage. It was shocking, but profitable. He could—feel the already-heating breezes flowing from the Sea of Cortez.’

‘—railroads—steamships—telegraphs—The press itself (originally built in Canton) was—printers—technology—The members were some of the most highly educated—who, one visitor noted, were among the least religiously zealous—he didn’t believe in those visions—there was more than one moral lens—one man’s national liberation was another man’s humanitarian disaster. He quoted—Nanjing was coming back to life—through the rain—’

‘Been standin’ here—long time—will continue to long after you & I are gone. These trees’re like my watches here, markin’ time—knows the time for everything. Knows to put out flowers & fruit when the time’s right—Suppose we could all learn something from a palm tree that knows—better than us. The freeway—a great root system—an organic living entity—writhing concrete—& nothing less than the greatest orchestra on Earth’

‘The “hundred birds formation,” in which a large division would disintegrate into small clusters—each roaming freely like birds in a flock or stars in a galaxy so that it was impossible to tell the size of their force or where to attack them. Though the Taiping visions—may have motivated some—the appeal also rested heavily on more earthly issues of—stability and taxation—by Chinese rather than by Manchus—in Nanjing.’

‘—scholars most closely identified w/ Xuehaitang—had very shallow Cantonese roots—in-migrants—from the Hakka region—"Litchi Songs," were written in quatrains—incorporated—local dialects. A Cantonese scholar would not likely have written such a poem before 1810s—In 1822—appointed—He Nanyu, a Huizhou native—poets appropriated (native of Sichuan exiled to Guangdong) Su’s poem for the literary canon of—Cantonese litchi—’

‘José J. Tablada: ‘Rivera’s death was the jungle’s revenge—arrow poisoned with curare—flew across the continent—wound him in New York. The jungle does not forgive.’ But a novel only exists in its reading, in its readers: it is new readers—decade after decade—who breathe life into it. Rivera did not come out unscathed—we readers do not come out unscathed. Now—may the jungle forgive us. (Foreword/Juan Gabriel Vásquez)’

‘—practically emptied of all its wealthiest inhabitants—all those with the means to leave Beijing hired carriers to take them north—out of the range of the coming assault. The gates of the city were then shut and barred—the price of food skyrocketed. A Pekingese dog was discovered—a British officer took him back to England as a present for Queen Victoria. She was a great lover of dogs—“Looty,” as he would be named—’

‘Hakkas were not always completely assimilated into Han Chinese society—in spite of this clear awareness of Hakkas as outsiders—in the early 19th century, literati from the Hakka area in northeastern Guangdong—mountainous region—Jiaying Hakkas also maintained a presence—Qiu wrote an essay celebrating the construc­tion, between 1807 and 1810, of a clan shrine—catering to members—throughout Guangdong province—’

‘Con-man, car thief, drug dealer—all-round opportunist, he dabbled in a broad range of delinquent activities without developing a particular specialty—pretending to be a River Plate fan—the story comes to a predictable, not to say gratuitously violent, end: the traitor is hacked to pieces in the restaurant bathroom. And when we find him, what are you going to do? Ah, Bolaño my friend—first you have to recognise him.’

‘Li—joined the Taiping not for religious reasons—grown up in mountainous Guangxi—dirt poor, scrabbling out a bare existence with hillside farming—a charcoal maker—a tactical genius in the raw. The cause of Chinese liberation from the Manchus resonated not just with the followers of the Taiping but also with those who watched from outside—the port of Shanghai was—a thread connecting—history—the weather finally broke—’

‘Four-Eyes was always bringing up her grandpa, whom he said had brought down their entire clan. He made her family sound like they’d plummeted to depths from which they could never be rescued, and she hated how he was always going on about landlords this and landlords that, just like everyone else. One by one the Educated Youths departed. Expert might only have lost one finger, but he felt ashamed of his disability—’

‘Frederick Douglass—Drawing on racist stereotypes, Charlotte & Branwell—depict him as a drunken profligate, lusting after white women. In Branwell’s —Quamina—the character moves to Britain, a financier, his wealth largely derived from having become an owner of enslaved people. Was Heathcliff a revision of / a reaction to her siblings’ characters, a sort of critique? A powerhouse for the textile industry, Manchester—’

‘The shogun’s—diplomacy had its desired effect—Elgin remembered—as “the nicest people possible. None of the stiffness and bigotry of the Chinese.” The return to China, however, filled him with “a sort of terror.” Once the Taiping commanders figured out what his small fleet represented, they began sending communications—speaking the dialect of Canton—a stirring of ghosts—Nanjing was the grandest—cities in its heyday—’

‘If you know your Asians,—You say, that’s Vietnamese—underweight. Korean—rounder face. Chinese is taller—Turns out you’ll be wrong—Dude speaks Spanish. Comprende? Turns out he’s from Singapore. You say, okay, Indonesian. Malaysian. Wrong again—Hey, it’s not his real name—Chinese from Singapore with a Vietnam name speaking like a Mexican living in Koreatown. “Summer solstice today—that means the sun is right there—”’

‘Tangos—Buenos Aires—chaotic fable set among bottles of vodka—the cruelest poems—In September 1976—bursting with love—in her Alfa Romeo—she crashed into a gas station. The explosion—considerable. He was a football player & a Futurist. A long silence ensued—Death took him by surprise—as he listened to a record by Tito Vásquez—Everything seemed to bode well—According to some—that was the only way to save the country—’

‘—blood oranges, mandarins—Mexican limes—foliage spreading a rich blanket across the land. In the days when the orange was a blossom of soft petals, its fragrance surprised her. She had passed beneath the orange several times, drawn to its sweet scent before she had discovered it. The perfume could only be emanating from that curious flower—it was as if she knew this scent intimately—salty winds blew—like a lullaby.’

‘—Baiyun Mountains—mostly relatives from their clan—mountainous regions of the neighbouring province of Guangxi—the movement grew—spread. ‘How is Confucius able to teach, after being dead so long? Why do you force me to worship him?’ The—natives burned down the homes of—Hakkas who rose up from the heart of the country to overthrow the Manchus. The executions in Canton—major turning point in the fortunes of Hong Kong’

‘—against—the two-hundred-year-old Qing dynasty of the Manchus—The Qing Empire was deeply integrated into the world’s economy through trade—thousands of foreigners living in—Shanghai. Many—were conscientious—well-meaning. Some were not. But as is so often the case, even the monsters among them believed, at some level, that they acted only in the interests of humanity. Hong Kong, late spring, 1852—among the Hakkas—’

‘—pan-fried buns—spicy soup—then straight to the greenhouse. When X first arrived in this town, he was sent to a place called Cottonflower Village—They were city folk who—couldn’t tell rice paddies from chives. They looked like they might eviscerate themselves with—sickles, and kept slicing into their own feet with their hoes—this useless bunch—they were like over-fertilised wheat, sprouting quickly but pointlessly.’

‘Everything that happens is seen through the consciousness of—the characters. It is through their eyes that we see—through them that we are made aware of the profound issues involved in the life-and-death struggles in which they are engaged, issues which are important not merely for China, but for the entire world. We say—artists—more than others—sensitive to the moods of society—cannot remain aloof & indifferent—’

‘Seeing how—he looks, Xu plucks a tomato from its vine, rinses it off, and hands it to him. “Eat this—You need energy, or you’ll catch a cold.” Squatting on the ground with a sigh, he eats nine tomatoes in a row. His guts revolt, and he spews up all nine. The red gunk spattered on the ground—Xu digs a trench and buries his puke among the tomatoes. Van Gogh was an anomaly—If Van Gogh would step up, then so must he.’

‘—her hands in the soil, felt its dampness, its crumble, & knew its nourishing properties. She—remembered the bog burst she witnessed when a child: the underland bursting forth, flowing fast downhill, the dark earth & what it contained exposed to the light. Earthquakes further proved the dynamism of the land, that it was not a lost space forever still. Ancient logs & even whole trees sometimes emerged from the bog—’

‘And my father’s people came from even farther south—brought his family across mountains & through the jungles to get here. But that was a long time ago—old-timers knew how to endure—my mother’s people were weavers, & my father’s people built the looms. They couldn’t talk to each other at first. They talked through their weaving and fell in love—she herself had never bothered to learn Chinese. Maybe she should have.’

‘Dodger Stadium commemorates in no way the Chicano neighbourhoods whose residents were forcibly evicted—properties were buried under landfill for—parking lots—razed—buried under famous freeways. Displacement—dispossession—dislocation continues—under the guise of gentrification. This book holds in solar heat like a piece of granite—you’re in for seven kinds of L.A. narratives—an origami flower of razor-sharp titanium’