Quotes & Sayings About Chinatown

You wouldn't think such a place as San Francisco could exist. The wonderful sunlight there, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at your shoes. Beautiful Chinatown. Every race in the world. The sardine fleets sailing out. The little cable-cars whizzing down The City hills. And all the people are open and friendly. — Dylan Thomas

Religion in Chinatown, as in most places, is based less on a cogent theology and more on a collection of random fears, superstitions, prejudices, forgotten customs, vestigial animism, and social control. Mrs. Ling, while a professed Buddhist of the Pure Land tradition, also kept waving cat charms, lucky coins, and put great faith in the good fortune of the color red ... and was very much in favor of any tradition, superstition, or ritual that involved fireworks ... — Christopher Moore

I became addicted to the movie-going experience in the 1970s, when I attended multiple screenings of films such as 'Chinatown', 'Jaws', 'Star Wars' and the original 'Rocky'. — Richard Roeper

I enjoy walking through Nolita and Chinatown, watching the people and the buildings, browsing through shops and stopping at little cafes for a cup of coffee or glass of wine. — Aslaug Magnusdottir

During the 1960s, one neighborhood in San Francisco had the lowest income, the highest unemployment rate, the highest proportion of families with incomes under four thousand dollars a year, the least educational attainment, the highest tuberculosis rate, and the highest proportion of substandard housing ... That neighborhood was called Chinatown. Yet, in 1965, there were only five persons of Chinese ancestry committed to prison in the entire state of California. — James Q. Wilson

As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s, I sometimes met insults when I ventured outside of Chinatown or my neighborhood. I have even been spat on and threatened with a knife. I could have let my anger fester until it became hate. However, I realized they were isolated incidents, and I simply got on with my life. — Laurence Yep

I try to always have flowers in the house. I have a florist in Chinatown, and they deliver orchids every two weeks. I like living with living things. — Phillip Lim

From my perspective, Chinatown was not a place to be feared at all; rather, it was a place to be revered, a place that needed to be protected from outsiders. — Allen Gee

When you're held underwater, you think only of air. I remember how I felt about Shanghai in the days after our lives changed - how streets that had once seemed exciting suddenly stank of nightsoil, how beautiful women suddenly were nothing more than girls with three holes, how all the money and prosperity suddenly rendered everything forlon, dissolute and futile. The way I see Los Angeles and Chinatown during these difficult and frightening days couldn't be more different. — Lisa See

I love mysteries. To fall into a mystery and its danger ... everything becomes so intense in those moments. When most mysteries are solved, I feel tremendously let down. So I want things to feel solved up to a point, but there's got to be a certain percentage left over to keep the dream going. It's like at the end of Chinatown: The guy says, 'Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.' You understand it, but you don't understand it, and it keeps that mystery alive. That's the most beautiful thing. — David Lynch

Forty feet long sixty feet high hotel
Covered with old gray for buzzing flies
Eye like mango flowing orange pus
Ears Durga people vomiting in their sleep
Got huge legs a dozen buses move inside Calcutta
Swallowing mouthfuls of dead rats
Mangy dogs bark out of a thousand breasts
Garbage pouring from its ass behind alleys
Always pissing yellow Hooghly water
Bellybutton melted Chinatown brown puddles
Coughing lungs Sound going down the sewer
Nose smell a big gray Bidi
Heart bumping and crashing over tramcar tracks
Covered with a hat of cloudy iron
Suffering water buffalo head lowered
To pull the huge cart of year uphill — Allen Ginsberg

My mother imparted her daily truths so she could help my older brothers and me rise above our circumstances. We lived in San Francisco's Chinatown. Like most of the other Chinese children who played in the back alleys of restaurants and curio shops, I didn't think we were poor. My bowl was always full, three five-course meals every day, beginning with a soup full of mysterious things I didn't want to know the names of. — Amy Tan

Chinatown is tremendously interesting ... It's a part of the city that hasn't really been explored in crime literature or in any general literature. It's as though Chinatown didn't exist. People write about New York without mentioning Chinatown at all. — S.J. Rozan

As he left Chinatown behind, Alan thought of the woman he'd seen on the wharf the other day, the golden splendor of her gown, her glossy hair and the turbulent emotion in her eyes. He wondered what she was doing right now and if she'd found happiness in her new home. — Bonnie Dee

Having spent many years working in New York's Chinatown restaurants early in my career, I have the utmost respect for the history and connection New Yorkers have with Chinese cuisine. — Andrew Cherng

I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown. — Woody Allen

I got in my car and followed [Marlon Brando] down to Chinatown, and got about twelve shots. Brando called me over and said, What else do you want that you don't have already? And I said, I'd like a picture without the sunglasses. He said no and punched me right in the jaw, It was so fast I didn't see it coming. Blood was gushing out of my mouth. I drove to Bellevue. The jawbone and five teeth were broken ... To this day he has scars on his knuckles from my teeth. — Ron Galella

Prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them ... without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it ' ... There was something arresting about the matter-of-fact wisdom here, the instinctive understanding of the physiological disruptions ... I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat. — Joan Didion

As filthy as any night was, a New York City morning is always clean. The eyes get washed.
Flowers in white deli buckets are replenished. The population bathes, in marble mausoleums of Upper East Side showers, or in Greenwich Village tubs, or in the sink of a Chinatown one-bedroom crammed with fifteen people. Some bar opens and the first song on the jukebox is Johnny Thunders, while bums pick up cigarette butts to see what's left to smoke. The smell of espresso and hot croissants. The weather vane squeaks in the sun. Pigeons are reborn out of the mouths of blue windows. — Jardine Libaire

Let me guess," said Clary. "On the inside it's an abandoned police station; from the outside, mundanes only see a condemned apartment building, or a vacant lot, or ... "
"Actually it looks like a Chinese restaurant from the outside," Luke said. "Takeout only, no table service."
"A Chinese restaurant?" Clary echoed in disbelief.
He shrugged. "Well, we are in Chinatown. This was the Second Precinct building once."
"People must think it's weird that there's no phone number to call for orders."
Luke grinned. "There is. We just don't answer it much. Sometimes, if they're bored, some of the cubs will deliver someone some mu shu pork."
"You're kidding."
"Not at all. The tips come in handy. — Cassandra Clare

Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned. — Neal Stephenson

That was the old Ellen Gulden, the girl who would walk over her mother in golf shoes, who scared students away from writing seminars, who started work on Monday after graduating from Harvard with honors on a Thursday, who loved the moments in the office when she would look out at the impenetrable black of the East River, starred with the reflected lights of Queens, with only the cleaning crew for company, and think of her various superiors out at dinner parties and restaurants and her various similars out at downtown clubs or cheap but authentic places in Chinatown and say to herself, 'I'm getting ahead.' That Ellen Gulden, the one her boss suspected of using the dying-mother ploy to get more money or a better job title, would have covered every inch of [this datebook] with the frantic scribble of unexamined ambition. — Anna Quindlen

The trouble with that movie is that you had to see Chinatown the day before you saw The Two Jakes. — Eli Wallach

I arrived in New York in 1986, when I was 28. The market here was nothing. In the Union Square farmers' market, it was a couple of potatoes, everything from California. So the only place I was comfortable shopping was in Chinatown, because it all came from Hong Kong. — Jean-Georges Vongerichten

Everyone thinks that 'Chinatown' is the best screenplay. I'm not sure it is. — Patricia Marx

Southeast Asia food uses many different types of spices which are quite new to me, like the curry leaves which I saw at the Kreta Ayer wet market in Chinatown. With such spices used in cooking, this usually imparts a strong aroma to Southeast Asian food, which appeals to the senses. — Joel Robuchon

You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating them
like sutras Xuan Zhang fetched from India, testing ways
return might be possible against these homesick inventions,
trace the traveller's alien steps across borders, and in between
discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns
grew out of not knowing whether to return or to stay, and then became home. — Boey Kim Cheng

Understanding slope strip shop he knows in Chinatown but Poor Tony turns white as a shit and said by no means and put up an arguement and everything like that and we just left the type there in his vehicle off Mem Dr we broke the jaw for insentive not to eat no cheese and C insisted and was not 2Bdenied and took off one ear which there was a mess and everything like that and then C throws the ear away after in a dumster so yrstrulys' like so what was the exact pernt to that like. — David Foster Wallace

You must be dumber than you think I think you are. — Robert Towne

Yes, yes," Gee Sook said. "Look how Jung stands like a man today. — Wayson Choy

I'm not in business to be loved, but I am in business. — Robert Towne

Polanski's 'Chinatown' is a film that I have purposefully and consciously imitated, but 'Vertigo' is one that has got into my bloodstream. Every time I reappraise things that I've done, the influence is there, time and time again. — Allen Coulter

I was born in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1948 but grew up in a black neighborhood. During elementary and middle school, I commuted to a bilingual school in Chinatown. So I did not confront white American culture until high school. — Laurence Yep

Where do you find a stomach on a Thursday afternoon in Reno? "Chinatown?" suggests someone. "Costco?" "Butcher Boys." Tracy pulls his phone from a pocket. "Hello, I'm from the university" - the catchall preamble for unorthodox inquiries. — Mary Roach

While we played, Meiying often sat by herself on the bench, huddled against the chill, looking at the library books on her lap, the pages glowing under the street lamp. The pages would sometimes turn in the wind, but she did not notice. — Wayson Choy

The Chinese food that's been served here, in this Chinatown, for as long as he can remember. But this Chinatown is changing. Jew has heard that the owners of Hon's want to retire, too. "Which is understandable," he says. "They're pretty old. But it makes me sad. Who's gonna take the torch of these places that have been here for so long? — Anonymous

We had to have white people front like the chef and owners. It was not OK for my dad to sell steak, but white people cooking Asian get more attention than the people in Chinatown who actually know what the fuck they're doing. — Eddie Huang

A part of me understands the need to keep order, but another part worries that we are being led to fear the wrong things. It's just like Chinatown and all the laws passed to contain us. We were never the enemy. The enemy was our country's own fear. — Stacey Lee

When I lived in New York and went to Chinatown, I learned that these flavors and their meanings were actually a foundation of ancient Chinese medicine.
Salty translated to fear and the frantic energy that tries to compensate for or hide it.
Sweet was the first flavor we recognized from our mother's milk, and to which we turned when we were worried and unsure or depressed.
Sour usually meant anger and frustration.
Bitter signified matters of the heart, from simply feeling unloved to the almost overwhelming loss of a great love. Most spices, along with coffee and chocolate, had some bitterness in their flavor profile. Even sugar, when it cooked too long, turned bitter. But to me, spice was for grief, because it lingered longest. — Judith Fertig

Flash grenades - a weapon used in China. Ingrid shivered as Cy's comments suddenly made sense. Chinatown was so close. She was so close to the Chinese, to Lee and Jiao. So close, and so oblivious. Despite — Beth Cato

I guess 'The Player' was a pretty good L.A. movie. And 'Chinatown.' Was there ever a better L.A. movie about a certain period in L.A.? That was terrific. — Albert Brooks

Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water. — Robert Towne