Like the previous day, Yu followed him across a couple of blocks and into the station. It was five, the exact time for the first subway train.

It was all Yu could do to get into the same train without being detected. Fortunately, there were already so many passengers, even at that early hour.

Holding on to the railing ring hung from above, Yu was pretty sure about the destination of the subway trip: the New World.

Sure enough, after changing to another train on Line 10, Lou got out at the New World.

Inspector Chen found himself in Bund Park again.

Standing on the bank near the park entrance, he glanced up at the big clock atop the Custom House Building. It was still too early for him to assume the role of an inspector on a secret mission.

Instead, he started strolling about the park in unhurried steps, like years earlier, trying to clear his mind in the fresh morning air.

Except that it was anything but the fresh morning air of the past.

He mounted a flight of steps to the color-stone promenade overlooking the river. A petrel seemed to come out of nowhere, gliding over the murky waves, its wings flashing in the somber gray light.

Perhaps it was soaring out of a half-forgotten dream.

In the early seventies, as a ‘waiting-for-assignment-middle-school-graduate’ caught in the national campaign launched by Mao, of ‘the educated youths going to the countryside for the re-education from the poor and lower-middle class peasants’, Chen was left waiting in the city for recovery from his bronchitis, out of school, out of a job. Along with several neighbors, he came to practice tai chi in Bund Park, but on one mist-enveloped morning, after yet another half-hearted attempt at copying those ancient tai chi poses, he realized it wasn’t for him.

Instead, he decided to bring to the park with him an old English textbook and sit on a bench. Those days, few would have carried such a book – except as a placemat for the dew-drenched bench. It became the first link in a long, long chain of causality for him. In the park, he began his English studies, which opened up a brave new world.

In retrospect, life seemed to be so full of the ironical causalities of misplaced Yin and Yang, like the misplaced book in that park, like the misplaced youth in those years, or like the misplaced chief inspector today. One thing led to another, and to still another …

Then he moved down, looking for a bench. That green-painted bench, once his customary seat in the park, was long gone, though he still remembered a slogan carved on its back: Long Live the Proletarian Dictatorship.

Behind Chen, an elderly man in a white silk martial art costume, loose-sleeved, red-silk buttoned, started practicing tai chi by himself, wearing such a peaceful expression on his face, and an electronic filtered mask over his mouth, which made him look more like a robot in a sci-fi movie, striking out one graceful, time-honored pose after another: grasping a bird’s tail, spreading a white crane’s wings, parting a wild horse’s mane on both sides … Chen watched him pushing out the right hand, and then the left hand, as if fighting against the invisible particles in the contaminated air.