The axiom of storytelling is that a person defines their life through their choices. From ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ to Hamlet, a protagonist desires, and then acts, and then lives through the consequences of their decisions. We parse the events of our lives in this way, turning them into stories – of triumph and failure, of odds overcome, moments of insight and redemption, and lessons learned. But for millions of people, ourselves included, the truth of a life lies in shadows and absences, roads not taken, unborn daughters-in-law. The Qin Yu Lan I met was only one possible version of her. And who’s to say whether it was the most accurate, fairest or best? Even starting with such difficult ingredients – being born poor and female in Shaanxi province in 1942 – we can still conjure numberless variations of the life she might have led. Her husband, who had arrived to work on the railway in the 1960s, might easily have been dispatched to another village. She could have caught the eye of a well-connected Party member; or perished in a famine; or learned English; or become a Red Guard; or moved to the city. But now we are entering the territory of the haruspex, engaging in activity  that is futile and tempts absurdity. And yet there is a stab of compassion in remembering this: glimpsed in her crib, or at her mother’s breast, with her hopeful bright eyes and tufts of ebony hair, tiny Yu Lan was already someone; she surely had an inner essence, which would struggle to find expression in the world; which would be shaped and thwarted by circumstances over which she had no control.

It seemed to me then that the people we didn’t become, the lives we couldn’t lead, and the worlds that never were, were like so many secret books, whose pages supported with certainty one single knowable assertion: things might all have been so different. And any other conclusion or story was a shameful collaboration with the tyranny of this accidental world.

Nabokov writes, on the final page of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, that ‘any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations’. Back in London, hauling myself through the icy water, I felt an ambition stirring: to gather one soul, just one in its entirety, from the oblivion of the secret books.

*

FICTION SHOULD HAVE PREPARED me for this inevitable reversal: the soul I went looking for was not the one I ended up with. In the beginning, I was searching for one of my distant relatives. I wanted to write about a lost boy.