I guess there were two reasons why Party Secretary Wang cold-shouldered me the way that he did: one is that it was raining outside and the sky was pitch-black, so I had to make a run for the door of the guest house like an escaped convict. Even so my clothes ended up wet through and bedraggled, so I really didn’t look like a VIP; the second is that I used an assumed name when registering. I noticed that right from the moment I arrived he was paying attention to me, so that when I walked into the main hall, he was trying to work out who I could be as unobtrusively as possible; taking a good look at me. When I was registering at the front desk he was hanging around beside me, pretending that he wanted to talk to the staff member behind the counter. He would have made a useless detective! When I fished out my letter of introduction, written on perfectly ordinary paper and proclaiming that I was an instructor from some university or other in the south named Yang Xiaogang, he completely lost interest in me, and slipped away. I could feel in my spine that he was walking away from me. When all formalities had been completed and I was on my way upstairs, I saw him pacing up and down by the main entrance, occasionally casting a worried glance out into the rain-soaked night, as if I were still en route and would soon be walking out of the darkness towards him.