Mei-ping no longer seemed like a strange Chinese woman with a Chinese problem. She was like him, she resembled him, her hunger was his hunger and her answer to that hunger was his too. She was part of him, the rest of him. He looked at her and saw himself--not his face but one of his limbs. He wondered if he might be in love, but it was a word he never used, like "cancer" or "joy," so he could only make a stab at its meaning. ...

Bunt tried to hold Mei-ping's hand, but it was so hard for him to grip its limpness, to press reassurance into something that was so yielding and passive. Her hand was a small blind boneless creature he needed to protect.

He told himself that she was stunned at the moment but that when she got over it she would realize that he was rescuing her and would be grateful. He was aroused by her, he loved having her so near to him in the ordinariness of a crowd of somber pedestrians, but he also knew that what he wanted from her now would not be satisfied by an hour in a blue hotel.

Sex was somewhat related to this feeling, but sex was simpler, sex had an end, a sudden finish, a squirt and then a stumble, leaving him with a damp amnesia that puzzled him and made him stupid. He always lay there afterward as slack as a fish on a slab, feeling sticky, his body reeking of fish. And after sex you got out of bed and went home. But this was different. He wanted more. He could not imagine being free of the feeling.

"Have you ever been in love?" he asked.

Kowloon Tong: A Novel of Hong Kong
By Paul Theroux
Pages 181-182