Mr Lü told me that these lines were written by one of his superiors – a poet – not long after he had joined the underground. It was the very first time that they met. They were in a rickshaw when he wrote it; you could say it was like an old potato giving advice to a young one; it was also a souvenir of his first job. The year was 1947; he was a third-year student in Western Languages at the National Central University in Nanjing. Similar souvenirs would, without warning, present themselves over the years. Mr Lü said that since before liberation to after it, whether at home or abroad, from big events to small, from well-known operations to the anonymous ones, every job he undertook had this kind of ‘testimony’. These were the things he kept in his photo album. In total, there were twenty-eight photos, eleven slips of paper, seven newspaper clippings and five pictures, as well as an assortment of odd objects such as an old steel coin with the centre drilled out, an envelope from a foreign country, and various receipts and business cards. Most items were accompanied by a word or two to explain them.

Out of all these bits and pieces, one photo piqued my curiosity. It was the picture of a dead man. There was an ugly hand that could be seen reaching into his breast pocket, as if about to steal his last possessions. Mr Lü explained that the hand hadn’t ‘stolen’ anything; in fact, it was ‘giving’ something; the hand was giving a bank statement … and that the ‘frightening-looking hand’ was his own – he was giving the bank statement to a dead man … The whole thing is totally bizarre … Underneath the photo Mr Lü had written: ‘My name is Vĩ Phu. Please don’t call me Hồ Hải Dương.’