They were deadlocked, tossing the same few questions and answers back and forth, until suddenly, at the three-week mark, the interrogation stopped and she was told to write out her every encounter with Glen, every word, every action, every detail, to record all of it with dates.

Hongmei told the secret talker that she’d handwritten more than three hundred pages of this “regret journal” when she had a sudden revelation about herself. She now knew herself to be a woman for whom monogamy was difficult. Each time she met a new man she would forget everything else and go after him. “New” as in someone who had a mystique about them and gave her a sense of the unknown, snapping short her destiny with her existing man. She said that as a girl from a small village, she was attracted to distance, to anything or anyone that felt foreign. When Glen had said “I love you” in class with that bizarre pronunciation, she had become obsessed. Those three Chinese words, spoken by him, had seemed to transcend themselves, a breakthrough in linguistic expression.

She said, Glen, this American man more than twenty years older than me, smashed the world as I knew it and opened up a vast swathe of unknowing. While I was there, every glance, every touch, felt wonderful. When our last line of defense falls, I think I could die there.

Perhaps the consciousness of those two hundred thirteen young girls now resided in her. A shame they would never know what they were missing out on.

The secret talker responded, asking how she had gotten back together with Glen.

After a forced confession, Hongmei was released from prison. It took two years of her working in various humble jobs before she was finally able to squeeze a little extra money out of her salary after paying her rent and meals. One day as she walked past a public phone booth, she stopped. Yes, two years had passed. And Glen was then a Pacific Ocean away from her. Yet the love and longing for him still hurt so much. She found herself on the street, asking to change a ten-yuan bill for coins. She walked back to the phone booth and started inserting coins. She pulled out a business card that Glen had given her, on which he’d written out the spelling of the word “ostracize.”