There were seven or eight of us, huddled under umbrellas, heading for the bar. The others were all his students. They ordered beer, so I did too. One of them suggested we all recite a poem. I chose one from Yin Zheng’s collection. He said, That poem hasn’t received much attention, but I’m very fond of it. He wrote it many years ago for a girl in his class, while he was a visiting a scholar in America. Everyone asked him to say more. The girl was American, he said, and had smoky eyes and many arm tattoos. Thanks to a heroin habit in high school, she’d spent time in rehab, and was only now in college at twenty-four. She still looked like a wreck, and didn’t participate much in class, as if she wasn’t really present. For some reason, Yin Zheng kept finding his gaze drifting towards her as he taught—she made him feel calm. He wrote this poem while the students were doing a test, and he had a lot of time to observe her. Why is it, he asked, that sometimes dangerous things can make us feel warm, a mystical sensation? He laughed. A male student asked if he’d thought about confessing his feelings for her at the time, and a female student asked if he had a photo of her, they all wanted to take a look. This was the first time I’d heard a man around my father’s age talking about his own feelings. Had Dad spoken like this with his students? You ought to give her this poem, I said. Every poem is a letter, and this one belongs to her. He smiled and said, It was a long time ago, and if not for this poem, I’d have forgotten she even existed. I must have looked downcast, because he said, I know young people like you don’t want to believe that situations change, but it’s inevitable, strong feelings can’t last for very long, just like in chemistry, some materials have violent reactions, but those are short-lived and in the end they’re transformed into a different substance. I wished I could tell him my dad’s feelings weren’t like this.

The students kept saying they wanted to go, but Yin Zheng insisted on staying a little longer. He’d had a lot to drink, and his eyes were gleaming. We stayed till the bar closed at three in the morning. It was drizzling. He lived near my school and offered to see me home. There weren’t any taxis around so we walked. I held an umbrella but didn’t unfurl it. The air was chilly, and each droplet felt like a weak electric jolt as it landed on my face. To my right, Yin Zheng was tall and skinny, and his footsteps were light. When we got to my school and he saw the locked gates, he realized I’d planned to wait here till they were opened at dawn. He said he would wait with me, though the temperature was falling and we were both shivering in our thin clothes. After a while he said, This won’t do, come wait at my place.