“Good. We’ll do that first, then the hospital. Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of time for your father.”

“Are you sure? What about Keung? He’s coming to pick us up, isn’t he?”

“I’ll call him.” She held her cell phone to her ear and smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

I had to admit that it made sense logistically to go to the museum first. We crossed the road and walked through the courtyard with its Indian fortune tellers and imported palm trees. For a while we stood in the lobby, pondering the program board, which displayed information about the museum’s permanent collection of Asian art as well as a special exhibition of international art.

“I don’t know if I want to write the essay in Chinese or English,” I said sulkily. Sometimes I hated the sound of my voice, and I could tell Vivienne didn’t like it either.

“Well,” she said. “I suggest we walk about and see what inspires you. How does that sound?”

“Okay. But we shouldn’t stay too long.”

We took the escalator to the upper floors and worked hastily through “The Unrestrained Brush: Selections from the Xubaizhai Collection of Chinese Calligraphy II” and “Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth: Gems of Antiquity.” Vivienne started reminiscing about the the Vermeers she’d seen at the Royal Academy, so we moved down to the next floor to “International Art Through the Ages.”

The exhibition was screened off into four separate rooms, displaying paintings from different movements and periods, while sculptures from the same period were dotted around the remaining space without much consideration. We shared a vaguely similar route through the exhibition, Vivienne moving with slow, measured purpose while I slouched a little behind or hurried ahead, stretching my arms up or folding them or stuffing my hands in my pockets. At one point I left Vivienne with a landscape while I studied a bronze sculpture in the next room of a giant man in mid-stride. He looked sort of compressed, as if he’d been whittled down to his bare essence, a rough, unfinished look to his surface. As I came closer, his features began to lose their defining edges, appearing to dissolve into a knobbly surface of waves, knots, and twists. I stepped back a few feet and saw that it was still a man. I amused myself with this for a while, coming close then stepping back, experimenting with distance, trying to find the point where the column of metal no longer resembled a man, dissolving instead into texture and form. When this became tiresome, I decided to look for Vivienne.