‘You don’t understand the situation. I do – only too well.’ As he spoke he pulled a stack of letters out of a drawer and handed them to me to read. I looked through them and they were all complaints, some anonymous, some signed, but the contents were the same: ‘Huang Yiyi’s thinking is tainted by bourgeois corruption and she engages in illicit relationships with members of the opposite sex.’ Some of the letters named names, saying who it was, when and where. As I read through them, I asked the Party secretary what kind of people were involved. He said all kinds, some from the institute, and some from outside.

‘So many? How is that possible?’

‘With her, anything is possible. I’ve asked her about most of the named men, hoping she’d deny it, or at least try to make excuses for herself, but she didn’t. She didn’t.’ He sighed. ‘Quite honestly, this has caused an awful lot of trouble. Every time there’s a meeting of the directors of the institute someone asks us to punish her or get rid of her. She’s very lucky to have a weapon: after all, Zhou Enlai himself invited her to come back. If it weren’t for that she would have been thrown out of here long ago. Huang Yiyi, Huang Yiyi … You know the saying, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”? Since coming back to China she still behaves in this completely Westernized way. How can we accept that? How can she behave like that?’

‘Does she have a family?’ I asked.

‘What kind of man would want her?’

‘Perhaps she would sort herself out if she was married.’

‘Do you think she hasn’t been married? She’s been married twice, divorced both times.’

‘In the US or in China?’

‘Once in the US and once here. When she got married in the US, her husband was a chemistry professor, an overseas Chinese from Fujian. The two of them got divorced just before she came back. Not long after she arrived in China, she got together with a cameraman working in the film studios in Changchun, but they divorced not long after the wedding because she was having an affair.’

‘So after that divorce she didn’t remarry?’