For Lulu’s sake, whose wide eyes savored the goings-on in the street, she had to carry on. “Look,” Nola said, with a cheerfulness she didn’t feel, as she pointed out the window. “Look. These are your people.”

Of the thousands of pedestrians, only a few wore the traditional gray Mao suits with mandarin collars. Most were dressed in plain European-style clothes, the women in shapeless shirts and straight-leg cotton pants in faded blue. Sometimes, a short jacket was thrown on top. Only the occasional coolie hat tied under a wrinkled chin, or the rare thin pigtail dangling down a stooped old man’s back hinted at an exotic past.

A makeshift stall displayed a blurred photo reproduction of her latest album, and Nola recognized the Chinese characters that translated her name as “Bashful Fire,” more of a publicity ploy than a direct translation, she had been told. A young man stood beside a table piled high with cassettes.

Leslie straightened in his seat. “Pirates! Wade and Mauriello should see this.”

“It gets my music around.” Nola said, and averted her eyes to the sun’s rays breaking through the clouds, which scrambled away from the heat.

The limousine was about to cross an intersection when the music of cymbals, small drums, wooden clackers, flutes, gongs and woodwinds stopped all traffic. Rows of women moved in a dance. They were dressed in matching red silk pajamas with wide green scarves tied over waists broadened by age. Each woman’s hair was twisted in elaborate loops from which cherry blossoms or tiny bells dangled and swung in rhythm with her feet. Holding long-stemmed pipes, fans, or colorful batons, the dancers’ arms swayed, painting delicate calligraphy in the air.

Lulu turned her head toward the sounds.

“The Golden Girls,” Nola called out. “Look, Lulu.” A similar mission of older retired female factory workers had welcomed her at a reception upon her arrival. Now Nola watched these smiling women, whose stage makeup failed to pop open eyelids drooping with years, or to lift cheeks gathered in pouches at the jaws. The high-pitched half-notes of their singing were haunting in their strangeness. The voices, clear, yet girlish, were filled with delight.

“What guileless dignity,” Leslie, a perpetual student of dance, said.

It was the joy on the performers’ faces that arrested Nola's attention. She had known this emotion ever since her childhood performance at Woodstock. The street was their stage. Nola searched the simple dance for stories of these women’s lives, but found none. No hint that many of them had to desert a baby or risk a job and housing and starve—or even suffer beatings—as Daniel had described. No hint that they had endured the hunger, forced migration and persecutions of the Cultural Revolution. Just like her, music helped make order of their lives’ chaos.

And just like them, she should go on living.