Now she wanted this person to see Glen as he’d first appeared to her, aged forty-nine, his sideburns stippled with white, but with the build of a young guy. At that time, everything in Hongmei’s life was going well; she and her husband had finally managed to get transferred from the south to Beijing and had just been allocated living quarters. She had a stable job as a military interpreter and was taking English classes on side—that was where Glen came into the picture. Unlike the other foreign professors at her school, he had self-confidence and maturity. Glen strode into the classroom, his back ramrod straight, apparently unworried about attracting trouble with how different he was, how confident he could be. He said in Mandarin, “Good morning,” then told the class the second and third phrases he’d learned in their language were “hot water” and “meat bun.” He stopped there, as if waiting for something, and resumed a moment later. “Why didn’t you laugh? That pause was so you could laugh.” He told the students that one of his colleagues had taught in China, and when he got back to the States, he warned Glen that the most important words he’d learn were “hot water”; otherwise he’d miss the attendant coming down the corridor dispensing it each morning, and then he couldn’t even have a cup of coffee. “Meat bun” was important too; otherwise the canteen staff might give him a solid steamed bun without any meat filling. He also knew one other Chinese phrase, “I love you.” As the students gaped at him, he told them he’d memorized this but would certainly never say it out loud to a woman. The same colleague had warned him that if he said it to a woman, the rest of his time in China would be bloody troublesome. He actually used the British swear word “bloody,” which stripped away his scholarly image right away. He told the students, particularly the cute female ones, to be sure to remind Professor Glen never to say “I love you” out loud. He was an old hand at love songs.

As she wrote these words, Hongmei realized she was smiling at the Glen she was conjuring up. She knew how attractive he was. She told the guy, You have no idea how I felt when Glen said those three Chinese words, “I,” “love,” “you.” They were beyond the capabilities of his mouth, and he looked like a child trying to spit them out.