The letters and phone calls I worried about never came. I knew, however, that I was not yet in the clear. Ah-bing continued to ring me constantly, and judging by his voice on the phone yesterday, he still had high hopes of getting me to give in. If he hasn’t given up, he’ll be calling in reinforcements in the form of his older sister. Her name is Chen Sisi.

Chen Sisi is tall. A large, dark mole graces her chin, setting off the whiteness of her skin. In my home town we had a saying about people who had this kind of mole: ‘A man’s mole must draw attention; a woman’s must shun it.’ This meant that a man with such a mole used it to catch the eye; the more eye-catching it was, the greater his fortune; for a woman, it meant the opposite. That’s to say, Chen Sisi’s mole was in the wrong place; or rather, it meant that she was an unlucky woman. Good fortune is a mysterious thing; it’s difficult to say who has it and who doesn’t. As for Chen Sisi, I can’t say that I didn’t understand her – in truth, she was much like her father: quiet, reticent; she kept things inside; she didn’t like to talk much; there was always a modest, shy, bashful smile on her face. To be honest, her silence and bashfulness were quite alluring, so much so that her father, years ago, had been able to see how fond I was of her. As my superior, he was much more gracious, much kinder to me than usual in such a relationship. In a sense, I, too, was his son. He had served for longer than I had been alive, and so tended to treat me with the same affection he showed towards his own children. One day, he asked whether or not I had a girlfriend, to which I answered that I did not. He said he’d like to introduce me to someone. That person was his daughter, Chen Sisi. We ended up dating for about half a year. The relationship really only amounted to a couple of trips to the cinema and one walk through the park. It was during our walk that she said she hoped that our relationship could return to what it was before we had started dating. So that’s what we did. I should explain that it wasn’t because we didn’t love each other that things worked out that way, not at all. We went back to the way things were before, meeting occasionally because of her father. Things remained that way until I left.