Nan-ning

My flight was going to Wu-han and Nan-ning and thence to Hanoi, which caused a certain interest; it is not every day that British passports go to North Vietnam. My immigration official was suitably inscrutable; he took the thing as no great drama (which it certainly was to me), rather did he appear to regard the trip as a quaint eccentricity.

1965, James Cameron, “On the Way”, in Here is Your Enemy, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, pages 16–17

One hot summer day in the Chinese city of Nan-ning, I wandered through a park of lotus leaves and exotic flowers to a pagoda where ancient women sat, drowsily, happily playing mahjongg amidst the scent of flowers, and that excellent sound of clicking tiles enchanted me; I was far from home, but that long slow summer afternoon with the mah-jongg sounds brought me back to my own continent and specifically to Mexicali, whose summer tranquillity never ends.

2005, William T. Vollmann, “They Came Out Like Ants!”, in Dave Eggers, editor, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 (Literature), Houghton Mifflin Company, →ISBN, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 298