You fucker, you wrecked my car!

The Li were absentee landlords. They lived in Chengtu, the capital of Szechwan, and hardly ever saw their land, which was cultivated by tenants and administered by a manager who brought the rent to his employers in the city.

Bonnet drama, conversely, removes us tidily from any such responsibility to a world of rules and rituals, where everyone knows their place...

[…] the enormous profits thus wrung from convict labor are a constant incentive to the contractors to exact from their unhappy victims tasks altogether beyond their strength […]