Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao. Jonathan Tel

internet: People born in the Year of the Rooster are virtuous, constant, and financially lucky. An excellent choice of partner would be a person born in the Year of the Ox. . . . And Chen Rong was an Ox!

      It wasn’t till June that Linlin (who was then in the process of breaking up with Jean-Phi) got a text from Feifei: she and Rong were in a hotel near the Great Wall. Feifei was in provocative lingerie that her sister had helped her choose, and Rong was taking a preliminary shower. Linlin texted back at once: Good luck! An hour later, the reply: It was amazing! followed by a string of emoticons to express the Little Sister’s delight.

      The sisters tried to switch from text to speech, but the reception was poor; they could only hear fragments of each other. “I’m losing you,” they kept crying. And when they next met, the following evening, beaming Feifei announced that Rong had proposed marriage. And how romantically! He’d taken their mingled pubic hairs and pressed them on the steamed-up bathroom mirror in the shape of the double-happiness sign! It turned out that on top of his salary he had an extra income (he supplied business analysis to a banker named Qin) and useful family connections (his maternal uncle was a high-ranking cadre). He owned an apartment in Haidian; the housing market was soaring; it was sure to be a solid investment. The sisters hugged; they jumped up and down together, till Feifei got a nosebleed, which, as Linlin pointed out, signifies passionate love, in the case of cartoon characters anyway.

      *

      George was a step up on Linlin’s previous boyfriends; though no older, he seemed more mature. He’d worked for the federal government. “In the US, China’s the whipping boy, but you get a different perspective when you’re actually here.” He was making a determined effort to learn Mandarin. His career was advancing too: so many opportunities to practice international law, which would be impossible in America. She didn’t officially move in with him, but stayed in his apartment in Dongzhimen most nights, shortening her commute. He referred to his favorite kind of sex with her as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—a pun that he explained at length.

      Like her, too, he perceived himself as an outsider at the Hash. “It’s like a Brit having the hots for a Hollywood star, or being a fan of the Yankees—he loves them just as much as we do, but he knows they’re not his.” A consideration might have been that he was worried about his waistline (he was a devotee of a diet which permits protein and fat but forbids carbohydrates; his standby was steak) and puffed when he ran.

      He narrated the myth of origin. In colonial Kuala Lumpur, in the 1930s, a group of British accountants used to lunch every day at their club, which they nicknamed the Hash House; they took it on themselves to run to and from it. The founder of the Hash House Harriers died in Singapore during the War. Afterward the organization was re-founded, and spread among expats around the world. Linlin had a paternal great-uncle whose black-and-white photograph was on the family shrine; she knew practically nothing about him except that he too had been killed by the Japanese. Now the Hash didn’t seem quite so exotic. She envisioned the ghost of Great-Uncle Xie, tipsy and cheery, scampering along with the Hashers.

      Once upon a time, a man in Shanghai was cycling past a residential building when a fire extinguisher fell on him, injuring his shoulder. It must have come from one of the apartments, but there was no knowing which. He sued, and all the residents had to pay their share of his compensation.

      This was a precedent for a case George was dealing with. A client of his, an American company with a subsidiary in Guangdong, operated a factory that might or might not have been polluting the water table. If his client’s factory wasn’t the cause, it was one of a number of local factories. The nearby villagers were suing the owners of all the factories. George was trying to get the case transferred to American jurisdiction, in which case (he was confident) his client would win.