Quotes from Nicole Mones

In the 1970s and early '80s, Shanghai was quiet, cautious, a ghost of a once-great city - and yet physically, little was changed from its glittering heyday. When visiting, I enjoyed reading books on local history and used my time off to scope out the former haunts of gangsters and jazzmen.

You know how someone - something - surprises you. You wake up a little bit. That's done through Chinese cuisine - for example, through dishes of artifice. That's a whole sub-tradition in Chinese cuisine. To create a dish that comes to the table looking like one thing but actually is something else.

You can't portray wartime Shanghai without writing about the Holocaust - about 25,000 Jews survived the Nazi death machine by taking refuge there.

Food is the main engine that drives connectedness, relationship in Chinese society.

Great food needed more than chefs; it needed gourmet diners.

They say that the cuisines of different Chinese provinces arose originally to serve different kinds of constituencies. Beijing was the cuisine of officials. In Shanghai, that was the cuisine of wealthy merchants and industrialists. In Szechwan, the food of the common people. Many great Szechwan dishes originated in street stalls.

Both the nationalists and the communists disapproved of jazz and feared it. They thought it would weaken people's resolve to fight off the invasion. And most Americans know, China did ban all Western music for about 30 years, starting in 1949. This is where it started.

Chinese food tries to engage the mind, not just the palate. To provoke the intellect.

In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music - an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible.

Even though Japan and Germany were not formal allies at the time that Japan conquered Shanghai in 1937, still, Frenchtown was an area that Japan could take complete control of - and they did. And it was the locus of nightlife.

Did you ever want something so deeply you were scared to let yourself have it? Like a desire so great you know you will never forgive yourself if you fail. So you hang back. And then you wake up one day and you realize if you don't do it now, it will move out of reach forever.

But in the end he didn't love her enough to fight for her.

If there was one thing she knew by then, by age twenty-two, it was that she had to get far away and stay away. Here in his world she was trapped in an intolerable corner, which seemed to grow tighter and tighter each year. And now no place in America felt right.

An inch of gold can't buy an inch of time

So this is one of those times when life is just handing you something, telling you what to do, which way to go. So enjoy it. It'll be fun. I guarantee. I can't guarantee we'll find the goddamn thing, but it'll be interesting. Then if we do find it - if we do- the payoff's huge.

That as a human being I'm not necessarily static, but... evolving. That I'm supposed to grow and develop, just like the physical world, the planet, the universe.

Great food needed more than chefs; it needed gourmet diners.

Did you really love her? Did you really enter her heart and mind? Or did the two of you always remain outside each other?

Everything except the freedom to be what she wanted to be - whatever that was. She had to break away. Whether he liked it or not. She had to.

I don't believe fundamentally in anything but the awakening of spirit, hope, and freedom.

Everything looks different. The houses are all these wild colors. The light is strange. It smells primeval. You're on Mars." "You are talking about driving?" Lin attempted to clarify. "About wanderlust," she answered.

Breaking some respected boundaries means a torrent of new life.

He looked at her. There was something about her. When he was with her he felt happy, excited; when he was apart from her he found himself wanting to be with her again.

She, too, could become someone else. Eventually. Or she'd told herself all these years.