Until a matter of hours ago, Li would have believed that to be true for him. His widowed uncle had been his role model. Single, driven, ultimately successful. Li had never met his aunt, never really pictured Old Yifu and his wife together. He had always known, because Yifu would never talk about it, how much he missed her. But today, in the park with Margaret, Old Yifu had revealed more of himself than Li had seen in twelve years. And for the first time, Li realised that it was the loss of his wife that had driven Yifu all these years. His work, his pursuit of success, had all been a means of filling the void left by her death. He would have traded it all for the chance of five more precious minutes with her. It was making Li question now what was driving him. If there was a void in his life, it had always been there. He had no memories of a life shared with someone he loved. He had no real sense of what love was, separated as a very young child from his parents, his mother torn away from him, never to be returned. His job, he understood now, wasn’t a way of life, it was an alternative to one.

Margaret had watched the sadness descend on him in an instant, like a veil, his dark eyes deep and languid, almost mournful. “A yuan for them,” she said.

“Hmm?” He looked at her distractedly.

“Your thoughts.”

He dragged himself away from them and forced a smile. “They’re not worth half that,” he said. And, quickly, to change the subject, “Are you thirsty?”

She nodded. “Very.” All that salty, sweet food.

“We’ll go get some tea,” he said. “I know a place.”

The Sanwei Bookstore was in a small side street off Fuxingmennei Avenue, opposite the Minorities Palace. It was dark here, leafy spreading trees casting shadows from the streetlights, the noise of traffic on the avenue muffled by a bank of trees on the sidewalk side of the cycle lane. Dark hutongs ran off into a maze of siheyuan courtyards, dusty and crumbling and newly emerged from behind hoardings raised during the construction of a new stretch of Underground. Everywhere, families had left the cramped and unbreathable spaces they occupied in tiny houses and spilled out on to the pavements to sit on walls, drinking jars of tea and chatting idly. Men squatted in groups under the trees playing chess, and children chased up and down the sidewalks, burning up energy and their mothers’ patience in the stifling heat of the night.