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tongue could put me into a trance. I didn’t understand the strange agitation in his face, and I couldn’t find anything there to fulfill the needs of my imagination. The girl that he held in his arms was like a kitten that was too miserable to cry.
    I was nineteen. He buried me in pain, covered me with an unfamiliar substance, rude but authentic. Clutching my breasts, he moved in and out, in and out of the hole in me, and I couldn’t see his expression, and no one will remember the way I looked that night, the night I lost my virginity. The self that drained out of my body was a nullity. As I tried to soothe my dazed body, the hazy mirror reflected my empty features back to me. He was a stranger, we had met at a bar, and though the ocean waves in his eyes were familiar, I didn’t know who he was.
    2.
    That bar was painfully tacky and blazing with yellow lights that shone brightly on every sleazy detail. Sitting at the bar, I was as blank and luminous as the full moon. It was the first time I’d ever sat at a bar, and I felt a little nervous. Every now and then I’d turn and glance this way or that, making it look as if I were waiting for someone. I didn’t even know that I was in a bar. I had only just arrived in this small city in the South. It was 1989 , and in Shanghai, where I’d come from, there still weren’t any bars, just a handful of small, unofficial street-side cafés. Maybe those tiny restaurants had bars, but I’d never set foot inside one.
    Outside, it was raining hard, but I don’t remember what music was playing in the bar. And I don’t remember when I first caught sight of him, a tall boy swaying back and forth and smiling at nothing in particular. He was wearing an oversize white T-shirt and printed corduroy pants. The pants were wide enough to be a skirt, but they really were pants. He was there in the bar, all alone, rocking from side to side, with a whiskey glass in his left hand and his right hand dancing in the air. I watched his legs as, step by step, he moved toward me. His light blue sneakers had very thin soles, and it looked as if he was tripping over his own feet. His hair was long and straight and glossy, the tips brushing his upper back, and his face was very pale. I couldn’t make out his features, but I was certain that he was smiling, even if I couldn’t tell whether or not he was looking at me too.
    I ate my ice cream. Before long, I became aware that a man’s hand holding a drink had appeared at my right side. It was a large hand with sturdy fingertips, and I knew at a glance that he chewed his nails. This was something we had in common.
    A curtain of hair filled my field of vision, and I smelled the faint, delicate scent of his hair. I looked up.
    And saw the face of an angel.
    He smiled strangely, and the naked innocence in his eyes filled me with confusion. For the rest of the evening I wasn’t able to look away from that face, the face he wore then. And maybe it’s my belief in that face that has kept me alive until now, because I believe in that face. It’s my destiny.
    He started chattering on and on about different kinds of ice cream. He said he also liked chocolate, and that his mother had told him that ill-fated children liked to eat sweets. He had a foreboding that because he liked sweets, he was going to be fat at thirty and bald at forty.
    He asked me what I was doing in this town, and I said, Isn’t everyone here to make money? I didn’t graduate from high school, so I couldn’t find a job in Shanghai. What else was left except to come here? He said, But you’re so young; aren’t your parents worried about you? My dad’s pretty unusual, I said. He treats me like an adult. He wants to change his life and make a pile of money himself, so he encouraged me when I said I wanted to go off and earn some money. He asked me, Do you like money? I said, One time my dad helped a relative from overseas change some money on the black market. He thought that he could