But for the other man, who would be watching the night fall around the orange halo of the street lamps with neither longing nor dread, what did the future offer but the comfort of knowing that he would, when it was time for his daughter to carry out her plan of revenge, coöperate with a gentle willingness?

They called themselves saviours of burning houses, though none of the six women, their ages ranging from mid-fifties to early seventies, had had much experience outside the worlds of their employment before they retired: small cubicles behind barred windows for the two bank tellers; large offices shared by too many people for the three secretaries; and a front room in a six-storey university building, where for many years Mrs Lu had guarded the door to a girls' dorm.

“Don’t let her out of your sight,” Luo said. “She has our child in her.”

“It’s not like she’ll run away,” Yilan said. “She needs the money.”

The girl bent down to pick up the condoms and clutched the pack in her fist. Some day, when she became an old woman, she would show the pink pack to her children, a souvenir of her hopeful youth. She was aware of the old man's gaze, just an arm's reach away, and of the two women behind the counters. She wondered how much they understood love, and love despite fatality of humankind.

The reporter from Shanghai was less beautiful than Mrs. Jin had imagined—fashionable for sure, but dresses and jewels and makeup would not help her at Mrs. Jin's age. Her eyes were wide apart, which gave her a distracted look; her hair was not thick enough, and by fifty she would have to consider a wig. “Some women were born with fewer gifts from heaven,” Mrs. Jin said with a smile. “Susu is just one such woman.”

“The thought of the boy, who is so small and occupies almost no space at all in the world yet who is still in other people’s way and has to be got rid off, saddens Granny Lin. She starts to look for the boy among the crowd.”

“His story, as the story of every one of us, started long before we were born. For dynasties, our town provided the imperial families their most reliable servants. Eunuchs they are called, though out of reverence we call them Great Papas. None of us is a direct descendant of a Great Papa, but traveling upstream in the river of our blood, we find uncles, brothers, and cousins who gave up their maleness so that our names would not vanish in history.”

“We could have made a wiser choice than Lao Da. We would have let the dead be buried and gone on living, finding a new wife to bear a new son, working our backs bent to feed the wife and the children. There would be the pain, naturally, of waking up to the humiliation of being a soft persimmon, but humiliation does not kill a man. Nothing beats clinging to this life. Death ferries us nowhere.”

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“Three minutes longer and Beibei could be spared of all the struggles and humiliations death has in store for every living creature, Mrs. Su thinks, but at the first sign of blushing in Beibei’s pale face, she removes the towel. Beibei breathes heavily. It amazes and saddens Mrs. Su that Beibei’s life is so tenacious that it has outlived the love that once made it.”

“A man like Boshen should have had an ordinary life, boring and comfortable, yet his craze for Yang made him a more interesting man than he deserved to be. But that must have been what was Yang’s value—he made people fall in love with him, and the love led them astray, willingly, from their otherwise tedious paths.”

“Don’t say you know a lot because you know nothing,” Mrs. Pang shakes her head. “Things change a lot. Within a blink a mountain flattens and a river dries up. Nobody knows who he will be tomorrow.”

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"From the bag of eggs she picked up two and placed them in my hands. 'A woman's hair needs care and nourishment,' Mrs. Huang said, and told my mother to use the egg whites to shampoo my hair."

" But my impression of Americans as proud-bodied beauties with gleaming smiles was shattered soon after I landed. Baywatch, it turned out, was as distant from reality as the stories in my childhood newspaper."

"That was the end of my desire for a tangy life. I realized that every dream came down to this bland, ordinary existence, where a prince would one day become a man who boiled orange peels for his family."

“I was privileged to glimpse another world in a candy wrapper. But in the remote mountains of China, the view was different.”

“The God of Lightning does not hit the man who eats, my grandfather often said when we were young. The lesson? Eating was a virtue. Grandpa could go on for hours citing Confucius and his disciples on the merit of eating. Sometimes, to make us appreciate food more, he told my sister and me hunger stories...”

“The bullet entered her brain after the kidneys were taken out. The brain was the sinning organ. The kidneys were amnestied, airlifted to a hospital in the province capital, and transplanted into an older man’s body. The man was the father of a member of the province Revolutionary Committee.

The kidneys outlived her, for how many years I do not know.”

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“The war in question was called the Peaceful Transformation. Walking in formation from the auditorium back to the barracks, we sang a Soviet marching song, in which the best young men and women of the Soviet Union, led by the star of victory, marched towards the front, the blessings of their mothers drowned by the bugles playing battle tunes. We sang also a Warsaw Marching Song, beautifully refrained by “Go Warsaw, let’s go forward bravely”, but Poland, like Soviet Union and other eastern European allies, had already fallen in the war of Peaceful Transformation.”

“They called me Carp at school because I had a big head. I was not the only child who had a big head, but the only one stuck with the name of the most stupid fish, which had landed on people’s dinner plates more than any other fish I had known. Other children had other nicknames—Ping-Pong Ball, Eggplant, Light Bulb, all better than mine when they were not my nicknames.”

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