The bar was closing, and the other customers were leaving. The outside lights went out. Yin Zheng stared at the candle on our table. He said quietly, I wrote a letter reporting your dad for his actions. One of his students told me the sorts of things your dad had said to them, and I replied, don’t repeat that to anyone else, you’ll get Professor Li in trouble. If I hadn’t said anything myself, the whole thing would have gone away. Then one afternoon a month later, I was alone in the office preparing the next week’s classes. I was tired, so I made myself a cup of tea. Dark clouds were racing across the sky—it was about to rain. The air pressed down on me. I reached into my drawer for some paper, uncapped my fountain pen, and wrote the letter without pausing. I didn’t read it over afterwards, just put it in an envelope, walked downstairs, and dropped it into the department head’s mailbox. A colleague walked past and I said hello. Back in the office, I ripped up the bottom sheets of paper that had the imprint of my words and stuffed the pieces in my pocket. Then I sat and finished my tea. It was still warm. The rain began, spattering against the window. Sweat was beading on my forehead, but I felt very calm, as if this had been an ordinary moment of exertion. This calm followed me afterwards, and even your dad’s resignation didn’t break it. I ran into him as he was gathering his things for the last time. We exchanged nods of greeting and I said, The Compendium of Contemporary Chinese Fiction will be out next year, shall I mail you a copy? Sure, he said, and closed the door behind him. It had been a few years since we’d actually spoken, and though we’d both been in meetings about this anthology we’d been editing together, we had managed to ignore each other. The compendium came out a year later, and I asked a colleague to pass him a set. Then we got the news about his car accident, and some people said he’d done it deliberately. I sat alone on the balcony for a very long time that day, smoking one cigarette after another. Finally, I convinced myself that a person’s fate is decided mainly by his own character, and doesn’t have much to do with other people. This kept me going until I met you. The first time I saw you, I thought there was something tragic about you that I was connected to. I’ve had complicated feelings about you: fondness, pity, guilt. When you looked at me with those too-mature eyes, my heart clenched, as if you could see right through me. That wasn’t pleasant, but I couldn’t resist you. I told myself you needed me—I would lift you out of the nihilism you’d sunk into. But when we were actually together, I felt I was the one being rescued—the thought made me ashamed. That last night, your innocence hurt me. I couldn’t do it, not just because of my family, or because you were still a child, but because our relationship would have started with deception. Please forgive me for not telling you this before. Perhaps you would have suffered less if I had, but then again, perhaps you’d have become disillusioned with the world instead.