Nine months of intensive Fuzhounese lessons got me only so far in listening comprehension of the local chitchat in Longyan. Once I opened my mouth and needed to communicate predominantly in the national dialect of Mandarin (with a smattering of simple Fuzhounese), phenotype be damned—my foreignness was marked.

When they'd arrived the night before in the pitch black after Lights Out, Gwen had taken one breath of the barracks' odor—that fluid, murky smell of a buildingful of women at close quarters—and dread had spread inside her.

Annual geraniums and tobacco relatives like petunias, calibrachoas and nicotianas suffer most, but other flowers including osteospermums, mallows and chrysanthemums may also be attacked.

Summary justice is bad justice.