Not exactly to my surprise, I saw a wooden chamber pot airing outside in the afternoon light. A small bamboo broom leaned against the bare wall, like an inverted exclamation mark against the black-painted door of the shikumen house. Possibly, its owner had not yet returned home.

  A drop of water fell down out of nowhere, feeling so cold on my cheek. In folk beliefs, this was an ominous sign, I thought, frowning, as I raised my glance up to the dripping laundry overhead. Not too many people in the lane had washing machines at home. The network of bamboo laundry poles spoke volumes about the economic status of the residents. I might as well purchase some properties here, I decided. Their prices could not be too high at this moment. Whether Ouyang’s ambitious plan worked out or not, it would not hurt. Once the relocation project started, the property prices could shoot up like crazy.

  Several middle-aged and elderly people looked in my direction. Some were sitting outside their homes, some standing. One was holding a large bowl of watery rice, another stretched out on a ramshackle bamboo recliner, smoking, and still another was scaling a belt fish vigorously in a moss-covered sink. It was a common scene for a lane like this—though I had read that it had been a part of the French Concession many years ago.

  I felt inexplicably drawn toward the panoramic scenes of the lane, so reminiscent of my earlier life. I’d lived in another such lane, poor yet nonetheless vibrant, with my neighbors still enjoying close relationships and activities, even though that way of life had been necessitated, ironically, by the cramped space of their housing conditions at the time. Shanghai was now becoming more and more like other metropolises around the world—New York, London, Paris. All sporting skyscrapers and mega shopping malls, and becoming practically identical to each other. I could not help casting a self-conscious glance at the Louis Vuitton purse in my hand.

  It took me only three or four minutes to walk through the lane. Near the front entrance, I noticed an antique-like blackboard, presumably painted and repainted black, though the latest layer of paint was peeling. I realized that a newsletter was written in chalk on the blackboard. The concept of such a newsletter, too, was outdated. I wondered how many people still read it today, and another wave of disorientation washed over me.

  Emerging out onto Jinling Road, I saw a group of people sitting in front of the lane. Most of them were white- or gray-haired. Some of the men were in shorts, stripped to their waists, and some were in threadbare pajamas.

  Strolling to the left of the group, I saw a middle-aged man with gray temples sitting by himself on a bamboo stool beside a dark wooden chair. He was wearing a “culture T-shirt” that was popular among foreign tourists. Draped over the chair was a paper scroll written in bold brush strokes: “Pick a character and I will tell your fortune.”

  Over his head was a banner streaming in the breeze, declaring “Red Dust Fortune Telling.” Apparently, he was a fortune teller who specialized in divining the future by interpreting characters and symbols.

  I had seen Chinese glyphomancy being practiced in a Beijing opera entitled Fifteen Strings of Copper Coins. In the opera, a disguised judge had tricked a full confession out of a murderer by performing such a character divination.

  Each Chinese character has multifarious meanings when read not just alone but in combination with other characters. In addition, a character can be broken down into meaningful radicals or common component parts, so the number of interpretations may be unlimited. This was the theory behind this kind of fortune telling.

  I had never really believed in fortune telling myself. But that late afternoon, I somehow slowed down my steps, conscious of an incomprehensible premonition.

  Was it because of the prospective real-estate project? Anyway, it would not hurt for me to have a talk with him, I decided. He should be able to tell me a little about the neighborhood, if nothing else.

  “Hi, Madam, my mundane surname is Xiaohui, and I am but a poor scriber in this world of red dust,” the fortune teller started before I had uttered a single word. “True, it is a humble profession, but it takes a lot of training to read a character and use it to give an accurate interpretation of the future. Rest assured: I won’t mislead or misguide my customers for anything.”

  “Can you really read such a lot of things from one single character, Mr. Xiaohui?”

  “Our world is made up of illusions, and everything comes and goes,” he said, “but interpretation in the Daoist tradition helps to make sense of it.”

  “That sounds too abstract to me, Mr. Xiao.”

  “Well, it’s just as if you were looking for an ox while riding on its back. Eventually, you’d come to find that the answer you are seeking is already there, right in your heart. My practice simply makes the process a bit easier.”

  It sounded like a paraphrasing of a Zen paradox, but I was in no mood for any metaphysical discussions.

  “With so many things unknowable, unpredictable in today’s world, a ‘divine interpretation’ may be as good a help to me as any other kind. Yes, I think I could really use your help, Mr. Xiao.”

  “You surely have wisdom at your heart, Madam. When Cangxie first created the system of Chinese language, every archetypal stroke came out of the cosmos in correspondence to the omnipresent qi, and, in turn, in correspondence to the micro-cosmos of an individual human being. Indeed, tianren heyi—heaven-and-human in one. Whatever character you choose to write in this moment, there will be elements recognizable from the mysterious correspondence. It’s truly profound.”

  “What if two people wrote the same character, at the same time?”

  The arrival of several lane residents interrupted our talk. It appeared that others were also curious about his fortune telling. Xiaohui stopped talking, aware of the audience, and then the lane people moved away.

  A curious black cat crept into the shade cast by the streaming fortune-telling banner, starting to play with its own shadow.

  “Illusion rises from your own heart,” Xiaohui continued. “What is everything to one person may prove to be nothing to another. Heaven or hell really exists only in your own thoughts. So go ahead and choose a character. If you find my interpretation is neither here nor there, you may walk away without having to pay me a single penny.” Xiaohui closed his eyes, breathing slowly and deeply as though in meditation, before handing me a brush pen. “Fortune or misfortune is self-sought. Human proposes, Heaven disposes. Now write a character arising from your heart.”

  I did not consider myself easily gullible to such ambiguous mumbo-jumbo. But there was something about the man opposite me. Something mysterious. Something authentic. I was not so sure about him, about myself, all of a sudden.

  “Ao—” I murmured, debating with myself whether to play along.

  “Ao as in Aomiao—or the first syllable in ‘Olympic’ in English?”

  I might as well put down the character ao on the paper, I thought, though it had just been a random exclamation on my part. Still, I nodded. One character was as good as another.

  “Were you thinking of the Olympic Games when you chose that character?”

  “No,” I said. “Not exactly.”

  The Olympics were related to my current dilemma over the Red Dust Lane redevelopment project, however, in an ironic way. One of the contributing factors to China’s housing market fever was the Olympics. Housing prices had shot up like a rocket the day it was announced that Beijing would host the Olympic Games. “China has finally ranked itself with other powerful countries,” the People Daily had announced so proudly.

  And now the prospect of the World Expo next year could give another boost to the housing market.

  “Well, things as small as a peck, as a sip, are all related or interrelated under the sun,” he continued, producing those metaphysical phrases like the continuous beer bubbles from a barrel. “It’s an interesting character. Ao also as in aomiao—mysterious and miraculous. You want to find out more about something that’s unknown to you, right?”

  “Well—” Aomiao. The character ao in combination with the character miao. It was not exactly what I meant. But then what about the mysterious, if not miraculous, changes in my life so far?

  “While the character seems to be positive in its general connotation, some other thematic possibilities could be quite contradictory. A Chinese (hanzi) character consists of different radicals—or building blocks—each of them carrying a meaning of its own. So for ao, we may deconstruct it as a combination of the top and the bottom parts. Regarding the top, the outside looks like a square or a building without a solid base. What’s inside? The character mi, as you know, which can mean ‘rice.’”

  “Rice?”

  “Yes, but symbolically it can mean anything important to you—money, capital, job. It really depends on your chosen perspective.”

  “Capital,” I echoed, in spite of myself. For the Red Dust project, the worst-case scenario would be that after making the investment, I would not be able to push ahead with the demolition and construction because of resistance on the part of the residents.

  “The possibility of your capital being stuck somewhere, for instance,” he added after a theatrical pause. “Now, take a look at the bottom part of the character. It’s the character da, meaning ‘big.’ As a rule, the horizontal stroke is not completely connected with the ‘square,’ so the rice inside could easily slip out. A big risk is involved.”

  “Go on,” I said. This, too, seemed to be relevant to the potential project. But it was common for a fortune teller to be capable of making his statement ambiguous, yet suggestive enough for a client to follow along the line of his divination. “So what’s your overall interpretation?”

  “Well, it is not we who make the interpretation,” Xiao said, “but the interpretation makes us—”

  “So it’s just like tuishou practice in martial arts, isn’t it?” I said, musing over the repartee. “Not that we push tuishou, but the kung fu practice pushes us.”

  “Exactly, Madam. But I would like to say something first. Your handwriting is extraordinary—‘like a dragon soaring and like a phoenix dancing,’ as an old proverb would put it.”

  “You don’t have to say that to me, Mr. Xiao,” I said, shaking my head and dismissing it as a bogus compliment.

  “Now, the square on the top of the character looks like a cage weighing heavily overhead. You are no ordinary woman, so this makes the cage a big one, possibly concerning a lot of people.”

  “Wow! What else can you read in the character?”

  “What time period do you want to know about, Madam?”

  “The near future.”

  “There’s something weird,” he said, having restudied the character in silence for one or two minutes. “The bottom part of the character, because of its position, actually resembles that of the character ji—the foundation of a house.”

  It was surprising, yet not too surprising. Everybody in Shanghai was now talking about buying or selling houses.

  “And the way you’ve written it is interesting too. When some people write this character, the top and bottom parts do not appear to be sealed tight, so the thing between—the rice—leaks through. But yours is different. The parts are so closely connected … That makes a difference.”

  “What are you talking about, Mr. Xiao?” I blurted out, staring at him in spite of myself.

  “About all that I can read, Madam. It could mean a possible turn of events in the near future.”

  “Can you be a bit more specific?”

  “Some important people will come to your side. But, believe it or not, what eventually helps you comes from your own heart. The Way of the Heavens is mysterious. It’s imperative to remain pure in one’s heart and do good things.”

  It sounded like a warning, but it was perhaps conventional for a fortune teller to end by giving advice to do good things. This kind of advice would never go wrong.

  “You are no ordinary fortune teller, Sir,” I said politely.

  “In Buddhist scriptures, identity too is said to be like an illusion, like a bubble, like a bolt of lightning. You take me as a fortune teller, and I am one for you. But I’m afraid I have to go now.”

  I produced five hundred yuan out of my purse. “Thank you for your extraordinary job.”

  “No, I don’t take more than what is due.” He picked up a one-hundred-yuan bill. “Thank you, Madam. Goodbye.”

  He stood up, carrying in one hand the chair with the scroll sign draped over, and the stool in the other. Then he turned, smiling over his shoulder before heading to the lane.

  So he lived in the lane, I reflected. I, too, was about to turn when I came to an abrupt halt, as if his parting smile had struck an almost forgotten chord deep within me, yet suddenly familiar again.

  “Oh, excuse me, Sir. Do you have a business card?” I said in a hurry, stepping up, lifting the bangs from my forehead. “Some friends of mine may also wish to use your services.”

  “Sure.” He produced a card, which showed only his name, along with a telephone number printed underneath. No address, except for the name of the lane.

  Xiaohui

  54171006

  Red Dust Lane

  The name clicked—out of the blue. It was him. The man I had met first in the park in the seventies, then in the eatery in the eighties, and now again at the beginning of this new century. The same man I had cherished deep in my mind, in fragments which had become blurred, confused, even right then and there, before I could even try to sort them out into tranquil memories …

  But how could Xiaohui, a professor at a respected college, have come to this?

  Still holding the business card in my hand, I looked up to see no trace of him left in front of Red Dust Lane …

  DAY 5

  Morning

  “A Letter to the North in the Night Rain”

  Li Shangyin (813–858)

  When it rains in the mountains,

  the candle that remembers your trimming

  fingers flickers by the western window,

  and the autumn pool swells,

  with all my thoughts of missing you,

  I hear you asking the question:

  “When can you come back?”

  Oh, back home—

  I long to tell you about the moment

  when you become the mountain,

  and the mountain becomes you, deep

  in the night, the candlelight illuminating

  the autumn pool of thoughts

  swelling outside the western window, and

  the rain patters on, repeating

  your question.

  “Li Shangyin’s English Version II”

  Chen Cao

  The fragrance of the jasmine in your hair

  and then in my teacup, that evening,

  when you believed I was drunk, an orange

  pinwheel turning at the rice-paper window …

  The present is, when you think

  of it, already the past. I am

  trying to quote from Li Shangyin

  to say what cannot be said,

  but the English version

  at hand fails to do justice

  to him (the translator, divorced

  from his American wife, drunk,

  found English beating him

  like a blind horse). The miraculous,

  micaceous mist issuing

  from a Lantian jade is blurring

  your own reflection.

  Last night’s star,

  last night’s wind—the memory

  of trimming a candle, the minute

  of a spring silkworm wrapping itself

  in a cocoon, when the rain

  becomes the mountain, and the mountain

  becomes the rain …

  It is like a painting

  of Li Shangyin going to open

  the door, and of the door

  opening him to the painting,

  that Tang scroll you showed me

  in the rare-book section

  of Beijing Library, while you

  read my ecstasy as empathy

  with the silverfish escaping

  the sleepy eyes of the full stops,

  and I felt a violent wonder

  at your bare feet beating

  a Bolero on the filmy dust

  of the ancient floor.

  Even then and there, lost

  in each other’s interpretations, we

  agreed to hold hands, like a page

  violently torn from an ancient book—

  A horn starts honking outside the window.

  I am going to give a lecture on Lacan:

  nothing but the floating duckweed of selves.

  Poetry makes no petals fall in a teacup.

  Early in the morning, with the first gray light peeping into his bedroom, Chen awoke with a start. He must have drifted off to sleep while reading Mei’s memoir. The manila folder was lying open beside his pillow, its pages now looking dog-eared.

  He was no longer the energetic man he’d been in his younger days, capable of burning the midnight oil. He had to admit this to himself, aware of a bitter taste in his mouth.

  He checked the time on his phone, lying on the nightstand. It was seven thirty. Jin could be already on her way to Red Dust Lane.

  Instead of lying awake in bed, worrying about the possible risks of the job he’d given her, he picked up Mei’s memoir, rubbing his dry eyes, and resumed reading.

  “The Same River: Part III” (continued)

  By Mei

  I seemed to make a decision at that moment, even though I was still confounded by the thoughts rushing into my mind.

  I would not go ahead with the Red Dust Lane project.

  I turned toward the group of people sitting and talking in front of the lane. Several more people had joined them there.

  I moved toward the white-haired man in the center, who was possibly in his early seventies, grasping a purple sand teapot in his bony hand.

  “Excuse me, Sir,” I said, addressing the old man respectfully. “I’ve just talked to the fortune teller—”

  “So you’re the one who arrived in a Mercedes earlier,” cut in a middle-aged bespectacled man, who must have caught sight of me stepping out of the car earlier. “What did he tell you?”