Nicole Mones

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“He'd seen that the young ones died quickly. He'd heard the staff talk about it. When they were ready they let go. Not like adults. Adults took a long time. It was as if adults had built such a thick, petrified husk around them that this alone gave them the strength, the form to hold on. And by the transient revival that so often came to the dying, adults seemed to find a last little puff of life before the end. They had a term for it here at the hospital -- hui guang fan zhao, the reflected rays of the setting sun. Children were lacking in this. They went quickly. He watched as the DOWN light came on and the elevator door slid open.He had a fear that his life now was just an interlude of hui guang fan zhao, a brief moment before it all came back, worse. And for so long now he had been in this state by himself. He stared up at the digital floor numbers flashing, descending.”