“Don’t worry about it,” the old man said to me with a toothless grin. “Whatever he told you, you don’t have to believe it. X might have been a philosophy professor, but simply owning a copy of the Book of Changes doesn’t make him a qualified fortune teller.”

  “A philosophy professor—” I echoed, my heart missing another beat. That long-ago night, he had told me that he was a professor teaching contemporary Western philosophy at Shanghai University, but I had never learned anything about his immersion in the Chinese classics.

  “Not just a philosopher, but a poet too. He was an emerging celebrity in the old days!”

  It was him. There was no longer any question left in my mind. Stealing another glance at the business card, I recalled another one I’d received from him many years ago, with his university position written under his name. Juxtaposing the two cards in my memory seemed to produce a new one, with all the years written and then crossed out in between.

  All these years …

  I tilted up my head, seeing a flash of the dying sunlight on a blue jay’s wings.

  A word is a bird.

  It perches, and it flies.

  It was a short poem I had read, but I couldn’t remember when and where. Not in Bund Park; I felt quite sure about that.

  More fragments of memories were triggered in confusion, all from so long ago, some that I must have partially forgotten. Those days in the park, I had hardly noticed him—he was just one of the young people practicing tai chi in the tiny square, who then started studying English on another park bench. Nor could I recall why I had quit studying English. But if his presence in the park had contributed to my decision to leave it, I knew I should be grateful to him for it.

  That decision had been a crucial link connected with another in a long chain of karma. And years later, that night he’d given me a business card in my restaurant, smiling over his shoulder, had turned out to be another crucial link. In the days afterward, I had read about him, so proud of his success. I did not try to contact him, however. He cared for me, I knew, but not as a struggling proprietor of a shabby eatery. So I’d made up my mind to do something—in my way—before contacting him again.

  By coincidence, my business began expanding shortly afterward. I became so busy, hearing no more about him. Thanks to China’s reform, people had more choices for themselves. Some went abroad, and it was not unimaginable that a talented scholar like him would also do such a thing. I believed he would be successful wherever he went.

  “Have you heard of him before?” the old man asked me.

  “Yes, years ago. I read one of his books.”

  “So you’re one of his fans?”

  “Has he had lots of fans?” I asked, without responding to the question raised by the old man.

  “Well, he had a lot of them many years ago, but not a single one today—except you.”

  “Oh, please tell me more about what has happened to him,” I begged.

  “Tell her the story, Old Root,” the bespectacled man urged with tangible expectancy in his voice, pouring water into a cup for the old man, and pulling over a bamboo chair for her to sit in. “You think so highly of him.”

  “Confucius says: he who seeks virtue reaps virtue, and he who seeks righteousness reaps righteousness. Alas, neither virtue nor righteousness is worth a single penny in today’s China. As for what has happened to him, Yingchang is the one to tell her.” Old Root turned to another man sitting in the group, who was probably in his early fifties, with beady eyes and a high forehead accentuated by a balding hairline.

  “Yes, you’re coming to the very man for the story, Madam,” the man named Yingchang responded with a chuckle. “I’ve known X for over thirty years. We grew up together, played lots of games with each other, like chess and crickets, and practiced tai chi in Bund Park too—”

  “Practiced tai chi in Bund Park?”

  “Yes, that was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, but it lasted for only a short while. Then X switched to studying English there instead. Because of that, he got into college in the late seventies with the highest English score that year. He continued with his graduate studies, and it did not take long for him to make a name for himself in the academic world. While he was still in his early thirties, he was promoted to a full professorship. Back then, he was an emerging public intellectual, and a lot of people predicted he had a most promising future ahead of him.”

  “His future appeared to be so promising indeed,” I agreed.

  “Toward the end of the eighties, he was offered a prestigious fellowship to go to the United States, but for some reason, he chose to stay in China—as editor-in-chief for a series of books. It’s strange, but that’s what I have heard.

  “Then came the summer of 1989, when students started protesting at Tian’anmen Square in Beijing. X was in Shanghai, so he did not have to do anything with it. But he was an impossible bookworm and believed that a public intellectual should have certain so-called principles. He met with Western foreign correspondents and issued a strong statement, speaking out in front of the TV cameras: ‘If the government fires on the students, it could not but be described as anything other than a fascist regime, and I will give up my Party membership.’

  “The PLA soldiers did fire on the students just a couple of days later. A government official approached him, suggesting that he retract the statement on the grounds that he was drunk that day. Can you guess what response X made? He declared that he never touched a drop that morning; he remembered it very clearly. And he refused to make any ‘self-criticisms’ for what he said and did in that interview.

  “Going further, he kept his word by turning in his Party membership card. That left the government authorities no choice whatsoever.”

  So that accounted for his abrupt disappearance from the media, I thought with a sinking heart. That summer, I had been busy opening a second restaurant in Jin’an District. Students also went on the streets to protest, causing terrible traffic congestion, I remembered, as they passed by my new restaurant. I’d wanted to place bottles of water outside, free for the students to pick up, but Ouyang had stopped me. Some people got into serious trouble afterward, I heard. But I had never thought of X in connection with it.

  “So he was fired as one involved in the counter-revolutionary activities against the Party government that fatal summer,” Yingchang resumed, taking a long, deliberate sip of his tea. “It was not a very harsh punishment, considering what he did at that time. He could have been sentenced to jail for years.

  “A number of people tried to help him, giving him money in secret, but he declined all help and all money. Instead, he set up a fortune-telling stall here, which you have just visited. He also started translating philosophy works when he had no customers. The only publisher who accepted his translations was said to be a friend of his, but he did so on the condition that X would not sign his real name as the translator.”

  “But philosophy books were not popular, and the royalties would have been nowhere near enough for him to live on. How could X have supported himself without any other income?” I asked in genuine concern.

  “It took tremendous efforts for the neighborhood committee to secure the city resident minimum allowance for him. Really, that was all credit to Comrade Jun, the head of the committee at the time,” Old Root commented, nodding at a gray-haired man sitting in the back. “But it’s not much—the city minimum allowance, I mean.

  “Things then improved a little for X. No longer under such close surveillance, he managed to have his translations published by some other publishing houses as well. But China was changing too fast. Disillusioned after that bloody summer in Beijing, most people lost interest in political and philosophical discussions. Look to the money—that’s all society was about. His translations became hardly relevant.”

  “But he refused to mend his ways,” Yingchang cut in. “Let me give you a most illuminating example. A ‘beauty writer’ contacted him about a decade ago, trying to invite him as a guest at her book launch party. It was an attempt to capitalize on his name and reputation as a serious scholar, no question about it. But, being realistic, few really remembered his name. So accepting her invitation could also have helped him. He refused, however, on the grounds that she wrote with her body rather than with her brain—”

  “How do you know about all this, Yingchang?”

  “Because the ‘beauty writer’ happens to be a distant relative of mine, and I introduced her to him. I meant well, but I lost face because of his actions.”

  “Whatever the result,” Old Root also cut in, spitting on the gray ground, “there is nothing new under the sun. The water flows, the flower petals fall, even in a changed world.”

  There was not too much of a story for the audience here, I reflected. Story or not, what had happened to X had become intertwined with what happened to me.

  “I did not know …” I didn’t go on. What could I have done had I known about it?

  “You’re so concerned about him,” Yingchang said, looking me in the eye.

  “He’s a brilliant man, full of integrity and idealism.”

  “So what? People nowadays judge a man by the money he makes, and he has none. You’re the first one to ask about him for years.”

  “Has he always been so bookish—even in the days you practiced tai chi with him in the park?”

  “He’s always been a different duck, from as early as those Bund Park days. Let me tell you another anecdote about him. We went to the park to practice tai chi, but can you guess why he switched to English studies? Because of a girl he noticed sitting on a green bench with an English book on her lap. He must have had an instant crush on her. Instead of approaching her directly, though, he tried to impress her by also taking an English book to the park and reading it on a bench nearby. But soon he was hooked by the book itself, and he started studying like crazy. Impressed, she made some encouraging signs to him, which were all wasted—like water off a duck’s back. She was so pissed off, she did not come to the park anymore.”

  That was not true. I had never given him any of these so-called signals. In fact, I could hardly remember the young man who’d read English on the bench next to me at the time. Nor had I been so pissed off by him that I decided not to come to the park anymore.

  All this must have come out of Yingchang’s uncontrollable imagination.

  “When the fish is caught, the net is forgotten,” Old Root commented with another grin. “This old saying is still profound today.”

  “Did he tell you any other details, Yingchang?” I asked.

  “His love was written all over his face. You don’t have to worry about the details,” Yingchang said, pinching his jaw between his two fingers. “She might not have been exactly a knockout, but she wasn’t without her charms. I’m still wondering what he saw in her at the time, though.”

  What X had seen in her—in the park?

  It was obvious that Yingchang did not recognize me.

  But X hadn’t recognized me today, in front of the lane, either.

  Had I changed that much?

  For X, I could have been an idea rather than a living person—an embodiment of youthful idealism by the Huangpu River, holding an English book on her lap. This idea was so incongruous with a prosperous, middle-aged woman in real life, carrying a Louis Vuitton purse.

  “Indeed, the woman was trouble-bringing waters,” Yingchang said, “But she was the making of him, so to speak, because of her English studies there. But it was also the unmaking of him, leading to his eventual downfall in 1989.”

  What X had said to me that night outside the restaurant flashed through my mind in an illuminating moment: “I think I have now made up my mind, after tonight’s reunion.”

  Could our meeting have helped him decide that he’d remain in China to work on the Marching Toward the Twenty-First Century project?

  If so, was it because I had meant such a lot to him?

  And if so, I truly had been the unmaking of him, so to speak.

  I thought I could have been flattering myself. But there was no ruling out that possibility. After that night, having given me his business card, he must have expected me to call. But I chose not to do so, for reasons hardly known to myself. Was I too proud to call a successful man like Xiaohui? It was true I had wanted to wait until my business picked up.

  But then, if I had contacted him during that tragic summer, might I have been able to calm him down? Perhaps, at the very least, he might not have reacted so impulsively. It was a scenario I could not completely rule out.

  “Something wrong, Madam? You are looking dreadfully pale,” Yingchang said with undisguised curiosity in his voice, “as if you had just seen a ghost in the daylight.”

  “So that’s how he has come to the profession of fortune telling?” I said, not answering Yingchang’s question, and repeating a question in spite of myself. “How could he make enough to support himself?”

  “He scrapes by,” Old Root said with a wan smile. “It doesn’t make much. But with so many things turning unpredictable in the world of red dust, fortune telling seems to be coming into fashion again.”

  For a fleeting moment, I was tempted to tell my story to the group of people sitting there. A true story, though full of unpredictable, unimaginable twists. About those dew-decked mornings in the park, and the night in the eatery, the stars whispering outside the window, the lambent light wrapping the two of us up as if in a white cocoon—and then the totally unexpected reunion in the lane today, under the streaming Red Dust Fortune Telling banner.

  But I hastened to check myself.

  What would be the purpose of telling our story?

  Perhaps it would be good material for gossip and speculation at the next Red Dust Evening Talk. But it was not a story that could make things happen. It was incapable of bringing me back—or bringing him back, either—to those long-ago days when we still had the opportunity to make different choices for ourselves—

  Not like what he had told me in my Small Family restaurant, nor like the final scene in Random Harvest, with Paula running down the slope after Smithy, shouting out breathlessly that it may not be too late—

  My cell phone started screeching, like a cricket scratching its wings underneath the park bench in my memory. The screen showed no other name than Ouyang’s.

  I did not want to press the talk button while I was in the company of the lane’s residents.

  But I was definitely having second thoughts about the Red Dust Lane redevelopment project. The people here appeared to be enjoying themselves so much, talking and laughing as the evening spread out against the sky, light clouds rolling, changing shapes, careless of what might happen here the next day.

  Xiaohui, too, was here, sitting outside the lane with occasional customers passing by. If he was relocated to a new apartment complex in some faraway, hard-to-reach suburb, I failed to imagine how he could continue with his fortune-telling practice.

  So how could I go ahead with the plan to bulldoze Red Dust Lane to the ground?

  I decided that it was not the right moment, however, for me to worry too much about the difficult business decisions that were staring me in the face.

  “Will the practice of fortune telling get him into trouble again?” I asked with a tremor in my voice.

  “Well, he uses the I Ching, the Book of Changes,” Old Root said. “Nowadays, you may see this book included as part of the rediscovery of Chinese classics. There is even a popular TV series about the Book of Changes. I don’t see that it will be too much of a problem if he makes a modest living of it. For all you know, there could be a lot of learning to be gained from Oriental fortune telling, as there is in Occidental philosophy.”

  “Tell you what, Madam. You might make a surprising profit,” Yingchang said with a grin, changing the topic abruptly, “if you chose to invest in him. One of his customers has suggested that he develop it into a proper business with a neon sign—and base himself in a large, imposing office. It may not be easy to get a license for that, though.”

  “The more important question,” Old Root said, “is whether he himself wants to do so or not.”

  I made no response, not sure whether Xiaohui himself really believed in the practice of fortune telling. It was true, however, that in this new century, more and more people were willing to pay for a “divine oracle.”

  His Red Dust Fortune Telling business might work out well if he relocated to a more impressive office, advertised with a larger sign. I could easily help him to secure the license through my connections. That should not pose a problem to me. I knew quite a number of people inside the city government, and in the Forbidden City too. With his fortune-telling business set up properly, he would not have to struggle on so hard, in dire poverty, as he did now.

  Alternatively, I could set him up in a luxurious suite in one of those upper-scale buildings under my name, where he might be more easily able to attract Big Buck customers. I myself was in a position to introduce some wealthy clients to him. In Hong Kong, a successful fortune teller could also be a billionaire. I met someone surnamed Ling there, who even had a Hong Kong TV program about his practice.

  Xiaohui was special to me, I knew, not just because of our encounters in Bund Park, or because of our reunion in my Small Family restaurant. It was also because of the idealism we had shared in our youthful days. I admired the man that he was—even more so after I’d learned how he’d suffered such injustices after the brutal Tian’anmen crackdown in 1989, but he had been uncompromising in all the years that followed, despite the changes to his life. In spite of the waves of materialism in China, and the general loss of faith, he was still adhering to his convictions to his own cost.

  “Mencius says well, ‘A true gentleman is not confounded by money or rank, nor subdued by poverty or hardship, nor bent by power or might,’” Old Root commented again, as if capable of reading my thoughts.

  So it was up to me to help Xiaohui this time, I realized as my thoughts swirled. Yes, I could provide an office for him in one of my own office buildings, provided he agreed to move out of the lane. There was a suite recently vacant on the first floor, I remembered.