She wiped her hands on her apron and took it off. “So . . . Mr. Chao,” she said. “Nobody liked him much. Come through.” And she led them into a cluttered living room, birdcages arrayed along one wall. Pale lemon-and-white birds filled the room with a constant chirruping chorus. The balcony was chock full of plants and drying clothes hanging from a line. Condensation was forming on the glass. Against the opposite wall stood an old upright piano covered with the remains of big character posters which had, at one time, been pasted all over it. “It’s not mine,” Liu Xinxin said, following their eyes to the piano. “It belongs to the state. I’m a musician really. I don’t know how I got mixed up in street politics, except I’ve been a good member of the Communist Party for nearly forty years. I was only sent for reform two times. Maybe you’ve heard some of my songs?” She addressed this to Qian, who was nonplussed. He looked to Li for help.

Li said, “Perhaps if you told us what you’d written . . .”

“Oh,” she said vaguely, “hundreds. More than I can remember. I’ve lost more than I’ve written. In the sixties a collection of my songs was put together in Shanghai. They were all typeset and ready for publication. And then came the Cultural Revolution and my music was condemned as ‘reactionary.’ I never did like the official formula for composition—‘High, Fast, Hard and Loud.’” She parodied stiff marching movements to each word as she said it. “So they were lost. About fifteen years ago I tried to trace them. But the typesetter was dead, and the publisher knew nothing about the proofs.” She gave a tiny philosophical smile. “But other songs survived . . . ‘Let’s Build Our World Together’ and ‘That Was Me Then And This Is Me Now’ and ‘Our Country.’”

Both Li and Qian had sung “Our Country” as children, and “Let’s Build Our World Together” had been popular when Li was a teenager in the eighties, and had won a national award. Both were struck by a sense of awe and amazement that this insignificantly tiny and ageing lady should have written such songs.

She saw their surprise and smiled ruefully. “Today, if I was thirty years younger and writing the same songs, I would have been gloriously rich, and very glamorous, and poor Mr. Deng, had he still been alive, would have been very pleased with me.”

Liu Xinxin smiled, and her smile was infectious, and Li found himself being drawn to her. “It could not have been easy for you,” he said. “A woman writing music in a man’s world. My uncle used to often quote an old proverb which he said was still part of the male Chinese mindset, even in communist China: ‘A woman’s virtue is that she has no talent.’”