Crimson China Read Online Free PDF Page B

his letter, though she has since learned from reading news reports on the internet that the tides at Morecambe Bay are notorious for claiming lives. Whether he was aware of the risks, she doesn’t know. At any rate, it would not have mattered: she felt certain he would not have heeded them.
    Jin shows Lili where to buy food inexpensively, where to do her laundry and where to find cheap internet access. It feels strange to her, this reliance on Jin, and she must stifle a creeping resentment. She feels as if she is merely passing through Jin’s life on the way to somewhere else: she does not know where she is going, only that when she reaches it, Wen will be there. At the end of thesecond day, Jin takes her to Chinatown for a celebratory meal. When they are finally seated in a tiny restaurant beside a steaming window filled with rows of smoked ducks, Jin gestures towards the room.
    “See? Just like home,” she smiles, looking around her. The room is filled with Chinese people; there is not a single Westerner present. Lili overhears snatches of three different dialects from the surrounding tables.
    “I wonder if Wen ever came here,” she muses aloud. Jin’s smile vanishes.
    “No.” She shakes her head. “He would not have done,” she says emphatically. Lili is surprised by her vehemence. Jin never met her brother, so her conviction is puzzling.
    “Why not?” she asks. Jin pauses for a moment, frowning.
    “Because people like your brother, they live in a parallel world here,” she says finally. “Like shadows.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “They are migrants: they move from place to place and never settle. They’re always on the run. It’s a different life from ours. And believe me, it isn’t one you’d want.”
    The waiter arrives just then with two steaming bowls of noodle soup, which he sets in front of them. Lili watches Jin spoon crushed chilli into her soup.
    “How strange to think that you were both here at the same time,” she murmurs.
    “Not so strange. London’s full of Chinese. There are thousands of us here.”
    “Perhaps I should have come to England with him,” Lili says tentatively. Jin pauses and looks up at her.
    “Why?” she asks. Lili looks around the room a little searchingly.
    “Because… then I could have helped him,” she explains.
    “Maybe he didn’t want your help.”
    Lili considers this. “Maybe not,” she admits. “But in the end he was unlucky.”
    “Maybe,” says Jin. “And maybe he was just foolish,” she says with an air of finality.
    Jin picks up her chopsticks and snaps them apart while Lili looks on, a lump rising in her throat. She is startled by the harshness of Jin’s words, and wonders what lies behind them. Her brother Wen was many things, she thinks. But he was not a fool.
    •
    The next day Jin goes to work, leaving Lili to face London on her own. She knows at once what she will do. Wen wrote that his second job was in a Chinese restaurant near the river. Not far from the restaurant was a bridge where he often went when he’d finished his shift. The bridge was cast in wrought iron and painted green, and at night it was magnificently lit. He liked to stand in the middle and watch the river flow beneath him. The restaurant specialised in hotpot, he said. So each day he faced a mountain of greasy metal pans in the kitchen. And it was run by a sour-faced Cantonese who docked their wages for the meagre meals he served them. She does not know where the restaurant is, but Jin has given her a map book of London, and she hopes she can find it. After all, she thinks, how many bridges can there be?
    She is dismayed by the answer. She sees that it would take her days to walk the length of the Thames, particularly since it does not flow in a straight line, but curves like an unruly serpent. But surely not all the bridges in London are painted green? she thinks. She decides to walk to the closest point of the Thames to Hounslow, and from there follow it east as