“She had been gang-raped and murdered. An autopsy showed she was two months pregnant.”

“Oh, my God.” Nola's fingers shook. She wanted to say that his telling her this was a gift more meaningful than his painted snuff bottle. He had shared himself. She whispered, “Nothing I could say would come out right.”

“I wanted you to know.” His voice returned to its normal tone. She thought she heard a minute chuckle. “There’s a Chinese proverb that says, ‘If you have happiness, don’t use it all up.’ I’ve been using up all the grief.”

The corner between the night table and the bed was a cocoon shrouded in shadows. “I read somewhere that we’re made of losses and separations,” she said. “Those are the forces that shape us the most.”

“How true. For all of us.” He let the crackling of the line take over for a minute. “Now that we got this piece out of the way, would you like to talk about something more cheerful?”

“I’m so wrapped up in my fear of losing Lulu, I’m afraid I don’t make fun company.” Nola moaned. “Not what you’d expect from an entertainer.”

“Which is why you called. You can be no-fun company with me any time.”

She let out a soft laugh. “Actually, I was thinking of picking your professorial brain.” When he didn’t reply, she added, “I’ll ask again the question I posed so gracelessly at the start of this conversation: Why are the Chinese so immovable?”

“In Taoist philosophy, which is deeply ingrained here, no single person can change the world. A person is like a drop of water, insignificant, a soft substance with no natural shape of its own. From the government’s perspective, people—like water—will take the shape that surrounds them.”

“My Western mind has a hard time accepting this callous approach to humanity.”

“Within traditional Chinese thinking, the government perceives itself as merely abiding by the natural order of things,” he replied.

She climbed on the bed and propped up her feet on a pillow. “If no one counts, how does anyone ever accomplish anything here?”

“Many drops of water become a river, and the flow of water over many years may wear down even the hardest of rocks. Harry Wu, the dissident who spent more years in jail than out, has put up an extraordinary fight. He believes that to bow the body is easy; to bow the will is hard.”

“Much good it did him.”

“He broke the boundaries of silence and made the world take notice.”

“What got me into this mess in the first place was the public spectacle of Lulu handed to me.” She paused. “Are you saying that to get Lulu back I must do jail time?”

“As a foreigner, you can raise issues that ordinary Chinese can’t.”

She sighed. “I’ve tried public criticism. It backfired. The rest is history.”