All three of them could reenact the licorice gun scene in Adam’s Rib, knew every insult in Woman of the Year, and used the research questions in Desk Set as passwords. The films had been stacked in the dusty crawl space under the stairs and were marked PROPERTY OF BREEZY MANOR. Andrew pictured Breezy as a sexy sixties dollybird sort of lady until Saina told him that a manor was a house and that it was probably what the last owners had called their house. — 50: 714-717
Little Xu Mei, who worked in the university president’s office, had a single pearl-headed pin that she wore on the lapel of every shirt and dress. Barbra had been passing by the office when the pin broke loose and the pearl rolled into some unseen crack, never to be found again. She still remembered the tears and the consolation, the way that Xu Mei never stopped searching for that one tiny pearl. The Communists had it all wrong. It wasn’t the rich who were imprisoned by their possessions, it was the poor. — 237: 3477-3480