Of course this was something I found out much later on. That evening, shortly after getting to the coffee shop, we went our separate ways without having said much. Or rather, I walked out. The coffee shop wasn’t big, having been converted from a classroom. The owner was a middle-aged woman who looked to be from Xinjiang, though she actually turned out to be Russian, of Kazakh origin. Apparently her husband had been one of the first foreign experts to come from the Soviet Union, and she had opened the coffee shop so that the Russians would have somewhere to go. Now more than half the Russians had left, including her husband, but she had decided to stay. Huang Yiyi told me that she had got together with a Chinese man and could not bear to leave him; she wasn’t staying for the coffee shop. With so many of the foreign experts gone, business was pretty bad – in fact when we got there I saw only one other customer. I don’t know where he came from, but he was definitely a foreigner. He had a big beard just like Marx and he was listening intently to the song ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on the gramophone. When the record finished, he asked the owner in halting Chinese for permission to play it again. Since there were no other customers the whole room felt empty, and perhaps it was because of this that Huang Yiyi, while we were waiting for the music to start again, asked me to dance.

‘I don’t know how to dance,’ I said.

‘If you don’t know, I will teach you,’ she replied. She was determined to make me dance.