Bahram looked at him quickly before dropping his eyes. It is very hard, isn’t it?

There was something in his tone that made Zadig pause. So you have someone too?

With his head lowered, Bahram nodded.

Is she Chinese?

Yes.

Is she what they call a ‘sing-song girl’ – a professional?

No! said Bahram vehemently. No. When I met her she was a washerwoman, a widow. She was living on a boat, with her mother and daughter; they made their living by taking in laundry from the residents of the foreign enclave …

Bahram had never talked about this with anyone: to speak of it was such a release that having started he could not stop.

Her name was Chi-mei, he told Zadig, and he, Bahram, was a newcomer to Canton when he met her; as the youngest member of the Parsi contingent he was often asked to run errands for the big Sethjis; sometimes he would even be sent to the waterfront to inquire after their laundry. That was how he first came across Chi-mei; she was scrubbing clothes in the flat stern of her boat. A scarf was tightly tied over her hair, but a few ringlets had escaped their bindings and lay curled on her forehead. Her face was pert and lively, with glinting black eyes, and cheeks that glowed like polished apples. They locked eyes briefly and then she quickly turned her face away. But later, when he was about to head back to the factory he glanced at her over his shoulder and caught her looking in his direction again.

When he was back in his room, her face kept coming back to him. This was not the first time that Bahram had been plagued by fantasies about the girls who worked on the waterfront – but this time his longings had a keener edge than ever before. Something about the way she had looked at him had lodged in his mind and kept pulling him back towards her sampan. He began to visit the laundry-boats on invented errands and it happened a couple of times that he saw her blush and look away on catching sight of him: this was his only way of knowing that she had come to recognize him.

He noticed that her sampan seemed to have only two other occupants, an old woman and a little girl: there were never any men around. He was obscurely encouraged by this, and finding her alone one day he seized his chance: ‘You name blongi what-thing?’

She blushed: ‘Li Shiu-je. Mistoh name blongi what-thing ah?’

It wasn’t till later that he understood that she’d told him to call her ‘Miss Li’: at that moment it was enough to know that she was fluent in Fanqui-town’s idiom.

‘Me Barry. Barry Moddie.’

She rolled this around her tongue. ‘Mister Barry?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mister Barry blongi Pak-taw-gwai?’

Bahram knew this phrase: it meant ‘White-Hat-Ghost’ and was used to refer to Parsis because many of them wore white turbans. He smiled: ‘Yes.’