Crimson China Read Online Free PDF

emptying the glass in one go. For the first time, she smiles. “You’re a quick study,” she says. She turns and leads the way back to the sitting room, where he sees that she has made up a bed for him on the sofa. She motions to it. “You sleep here. And me in there.” She points to a closed door opposite the kitchen.
    “Okay,” he nods.
    “Okay,” she repeats, flourishing the bottle a little drunkenly.
    She crosses to the closed door and opens it, disappearing inside with the bottle. He has the briefest glimpse of a double bed, a wooden chest of drawers, a painting on the wall. Then he hears a key turn in the lock, just once.
    He sinks down onto the sofa. He is suddenly starving. Thewoman did not think to offer him food, but he dares not enter her kitchen, and anyway, it is sleep he needs more than anything. He lies down on the sofa and covers himself with the duvet she has given him, closing his eyes. It occurs to him that the sofa is more comfortable than anything he has slept on these past six months. And he had almost forgotten the pleasure of sleeping alone, without the sighs and stirrings of others around him in the darkness.
    But he must not think of the others. For there is nothing now that he can do.

September 2004
    London, she soon learns, is enormous: a city of endless streets with row upon row of houses that are identical. The street Jin lives on could be any one of thousands. For the first few days, Lili trails after her, struggling to memorise the names of all the roads around the bedsit: Beaver’s Lane, Martindale, Hibernia.
    “Don’t bother,” says Jin. “All you need to know are numbers. We live three streets west of Bus 237, which will take you to the language school at Sheep Pen. Get off at the last stop, turn left, walk one street south, turn right and the school is at number 57. From Sheep Pen there are buses going everywhere. Bus 18 will take you to Chinatown. Don’t take the underground unless you’re prepared to pay,” she admonishes.
    Jin has invented her own codex of Chinese names for London landmarks. Sheep Pen is Shepherd’s Bush, Westminster is Big Ben Clock, Oxford Street is Rip Off Street and Hounslow is Plane City. Even after two years, Lili notices, Jin’s English is full of errors and shortcuts, as if she has given up trying to learn the language properly. Her accent, too, remains strong, so much that Lili finds it difficult to understand her when she speaks. Her own English is relatively good, though she has had little chance to use it since she arrived.
    True to her word, Jin has found her a part-time job teachingMandarin at the language school where she works. Lili will teach children, many of whom are overseas Chinese, after school during the week and on Saturdays. The centre can employ only her twelve hours per week, but at fourteen pounds an hour the pay is better than elsewhere, says Jin. And if Lili is resourceful, she can build up a range of private students, who will pay as much as twenty pounds per hour. Jin herself has five such students, whom she sees each week in the evenings after work. In this way, Lili can hope to earn as much as four hundred pounds per week: a small fortune at home.
    Four hundred, she thinks. Life is reduced to numbers here. In his letter, Wen wrote that he earned ten pounds for each bag of cockles that he picked, and that he could pick up to four in a day. If he worked daily through the winter season, he hoped to save two thousand pounds. His living expenses were low: he paid twelve pounds a week for space on the floor with six others in a run-down house in Liverpool, a pound a day for transport to and from Morecambe Bay and another pound for food. With a bit of luck he could save nearly two-fifty a week. Almost twice what he was earning washing dishes in London. But this is far less than she will earn, Lili thinks, for a fraction of the effort and hardship. Not to mention the risk. Wen never once mentioned the dangers of cockling in