1979, Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler:
Every time the little gate creaks--I'm in the shed with the tanks at the end of the garden--I wonder from which of my pasts the person is arriving, seeking me out even here: maybe it is only the past of yesterday and of this same suburb, the squat Arab garbage collector who in October begins his rounds for tips, house by house, with a Happy New Year card, because he says that his colleagues keep all the December tips for themselves and he never gets a penny; but it could also be the more distant pasts pursuing old Ruedi, finding the little gate in the Impasse: smugglers from Valais, mercenaries from Katanga, croupiers from the Veradero casino and the days of Fulgencio Batista.
Cabbage Moh, a Cantonese smuggler and drug dealer from triad-controlled Shumchun on the Hong Kong border, sees an opportunity to the north and opens dens supplying dope and philopon ferried up the Soochow Creek and distributed out of Fah Wah Village, adjacent to the new sin strip.
