For many visitors to China, airports may be where Chinese signs are first seen. This chapter will sample some signs that are commonly seen at airports, including those for customs, terminals, departure lounges, boarding gates, baggage claims, and transportation options. Most of the airport signs are bilingual with English translations. Most of the signs in this chapter are seen at the Pudong International Airport in Shanghai.

Chapter Two, ‘The Journey’, takes the men from home to embarkation, as they boarded troopships that brought them to training camps and fighting fronts. The chapter explores the role of distance in the men’s representations of their travels and the impact of being on board a ship. The ship was a contact zone in its own right as the extended period of travel prompted new forms of encounter and the anticipation of ‘arrival’. Examples of ‘bad behaviour’ in port towns, from Cape Town to Colombo, demonstrate how these journeys facilitated openness to encounters and new, often aggressive articulations of identity. Accounts of arriving in England and experiencing how the Mother Country welcomed its colonial troops, particularly those of colour, reveal just how precarious the men felt about their reception and how meaningful this moment was for them in affirming their status within the empire.

Chapter 5 explored the self-definition of the Classic Maya elite within a range of statuses, offices, ranks, and roles – marks of authority and entitlement that centred upon and radiated from a “holy” ruler. We now need to turn to how this collective noblesse went about constituting and maintaining a political community. Politics can never be reduced to a state of being since it always implies active, substantive acts that establish, maintain, and extend power relations. These acts are guided by formal and informal norms, rules, and protocols that express the structural properties of the system. To recover even an outline appreciation of these properties we must first take the textual record on offer, recognising its idealised, retrospective, and highly selective character, and then look beyond to what these tightly controlled narratives refer to only obliquely, or reveal only through statistical analysis. Very often it is the exceptions that demonstrate the rules, the anomalies and deviations that illuminate where orthodoxy gives way to exigency in a contingent world.

This chapter examines how writers have spatialized and dramatized the psychology of hope and desire that drives so many New Yorkers lives through scenes of arrival. This literary motif stages a recognizable, affectively charged moment in which the individual first confronts the emblem of twentieth-century technological modernity. New York in such instances stands for the Modern City, the solidly material emanation and at the same time figurative torchbearer of a new century. Into this cityscape, ready for mutual love, the individual arrives propelled, like an inexorably moving train, by desire.