The driver pulled out a basket from under their bench and, taking his eyes off the road, gestured for Nola to put Lulu in it. The padding in the basket was tattered. She placed Lulu's blanket on it, stifling her apprehension; the basket might be infested with lice, and the stale, hot air must be worse at the bottom of the cab, but at least on the floor Lulu would not risk crashing into the dashboard or flying through the windshield.

She handed Lulu the bottle. “Bottle,” she said. “Bottle.”

“Boddy,” Lulu repeated.

Nola smiled at Ming-Ji with pride. “You’re right about her speech.”

As the truck chugged on, Nola dozed while her body jerked in concert with the mountainous, rutted roads. Several times, her head hit the ceiling and she woke up.

The morning brought a breathtaking panorama of hills, serene in their undulating, lush green. Rows of tea plants stretched like corduroy as far as the eye could see. But the picture-perfect scenery was marred by unbearable heat. Nothing was as good as it looked, Nola thought, as she took in the view beyond the crushed insects dappling the windshield. She asked Ming-Ji to roll down the window to let in fresh air, but insects that had escaped the fate of their kin flew right in along with the dust that billowed about the car.

“They don’t know you are a famous singer,” Ming-Ji said.

“Who?” Nola asked.

“The insects. Have no respect for American star.”

Nola laughed.

The truck left the hills and descended into a valley slashed by a river. The green of the rice plants shimmered in the pearl-gray water until it was hard to tell where the rice paddies ended and the river began. Terraced fields on the far bank of the river climbed the mountain ridge, dotted by tiny figures in straw hats. Closer to the road, laborers shucked dry corn and bundled it into sheaves. They never looked up from their tasks.

The road cut through a series of industrial towns where huge factories with grime-covered windows ran for long blocks, almost touching one another, as though fighting for a scarce foothold in this vast land. Debris filled the streets. An occasional tree struggled for existence. At the edge of each town, the factories were replaced by multifamily prefabricated housing with thousands of small windows. Beyond them stretched rows of four-story concrete buildings with washed-out fronts and tiny verandas that exposed underbellies of rusted, twisted metal. Like ducks, unkempt children squatted at buildings’ entrances or scampered about in trash-filled lots.

Nola thought of Ambassador Ashford’s lecture that China managed to feed its people. At the time, she had resented the purpose of his talk. “This country is immense,” she remarked to Ming-Ji. “I’m beginning to appreciate the task you face.”

Ming-Ji crinkled her nose. “Smell this? Chemical factories. Many cancer.”

Nola held her breath, wishing that Lulu, too, could stop breathing for a few minutes.