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quickly fly out of Starbucks.
A future master
    Ever since the All Sages Bookstore, the best one in Beijing for humanities and academic books, had been forced to close down, I hardly ever went to the Haidian area near Peking University’s east gate. But about a week after the Sanlian
Reading Journal
spring reception I found myself over there. Things had been fine all week, nothing unpleasant had happened. Every day I read the papers, surfed the net, and watched the TV news, and every day I congratulated myself on living in China. At first I didn’t think about Little Xi. I figured her attitude was out of tune with my life and my present state of mind. But then for a few nights in a row the last dream I had before waking up was about her, and it got me all aroused. I guess it had been too long since I’d been with anyone. I also dreamed about Fang Caodi, a repetitive dream of walking up and down in the same spot. I was sorry I hadn’t taken their cell phone numbers. But they hadn’t contacted me, either—I guessed I wasn’t that important to them. I didn’t know how to track down Fang Caodi and actually I didn’t really want to. But I still had an idea of how to find Little Xi and that’s what brought me to the east gate of Peking University.
    In the 1980s, Little Xi and her mother were
getihu,
self-employed entrepreneurs. They ran a small restaurant called the Five Flavors in a one-story temporary shack outside some apartments near the university’s east gate. I called Little Xi’s mother Big Sister Song; her Guizhou-style goose was very popular, but the main attraction of the Five Flavors was that Little Xi and her mates hung around there all day. They chatted all day and all night, so that the restaurant became a sort of Haidian salon for foreigners and intellectuals. They went out of business for a few years, but afterDeng Xiaoping’s 1992 southern tour called for continued economic reforms, they found a place nearby and started up again. Whenever I came to Beijing, I would go over there to eat, but I hadn’t been there for years and didn’t even know if the restaurant was still there.
    As soon as I reached the east gate, I knew I was out of luck. The surrounding apartments had all been torn down to build office towers. The Five Flavors was gone, the All Sages Bookstore was gone, too, so I left without a backward glance. I decided to walk over to the Photosynthesis Bookstore in the Wudaokou district and browse around. It was better than nothing, and I could kill some time having a cup of coffee. This used to be the rock-music center of Beijing’s Westside, with quite a few performance venues, but I hadn’t followed those guys in recent years and didn’t know if there were any venues left. On Chengfu Road just before Wudaokou, I passed by a restaurant and then felt like I’d missed something, so I stopped. Turning back, I saw that the front was extensively decorated. The place was simply called Five Flavors, with no indication whether it was a Chinese restaurant, a Western restaurant, or some kind of club. I decided to go in and investigate.
    The inside was also elaborately decorated, though the tables and chairs were quite ordinary. There was a stage that could just about accommodate a four-man rock band. The front hall was empty, but I heard the sound of a loud, resonant, and very familiar voice ringing out from the back room. I drew the curtain and marched in. “Big Sister Song!” I called.
    “Lao Chen!” Little Xi’s mother recognized me instantly.
    “I came to see you, Big Sister Song.” It felt a little hypocritical saying that.
    “It’s good to see you after all this time!”
    She picked up a room-temperature bottle of Yanjing beer and led me into the front hall. “It’s so great to see you, Lao Chen, I’ve really missed you.”
    I felt a little ashamed that I’d lived in Beijing for so many years and had never come to see the old lady. “I ran into Little Xi last week,” I said.
    Big