"Mr. China"

Is there a more ominous phrase than '山雨欲来风满楼'? The author's travails across China somehow reminds me of the old Frogger game.

• a meeting room with rows of brown sofas draped with antimacassars {Victorian, isn't it?}
• In one particular place, called Tianxing, the factory with its three thousand five hundred souls was set in a valley so narrow that there was direct sunlight for only a few hours a day.
• She said, in her perfect Hochdeutsch, that when her husband had been out drinking (baijiu), she had "woken up the following morning next to an oily rag that had been soaked in diesel."
• Everywhere, the lakes were covered with bits of polystyrene and empty plastic bottles that I thought must have been rubbish dumped into the water. But I soon discovered that they were floats in the oyster beds. Jiangsu is the world's largest producer of freshwater pearls.
•  I found it difficult to pull the people at Pat's "Breakfast in America " and the workers up in the Chinese hills into the same worldview
  

It's fun to see literal translations of Chinese phrases:
__ 'just patted their asses and went off home'
__ 'We were really at sevens and eights'. ('I... wondering why Chinese always went a step further than English, even with an expression to describe utter chaos.')
 
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