He left his sentence unfinished again. Perhaps it was coincidental that Mao kept coming up like a returning ghost. Chen ground out his cigarette, ready to finish his sentence when his cell phone rang shrilly. Without looking at the others in room, he answered it.

“Hi, this is Yong,” a woman’s voice said, clear and crisp, “I’m calling about Ling.”

Ling was Chen’s girlfriend in Beijing, or to be exact, ex-girlfriend, though they hadn’t exactly said so explicitly. Yong, a friend and former colleague of Ling’s, had tried to help during their prolonged off-and-on relationship, which went back as early as his college years.

“Oh? What’s happened to Ling?” he exclaimed, drawing surprised stares from his colleagues. He stood up in a hurry, saying to the room, “Sorry, I have to take this.”

“Ling got married,” Yong said.

“What?” he said, striding out into the corridor.

He really shouldn’t have been astonished. Their relationship had long been on the rocks, what with the insurmountable problem of her being an HCC – a high cadre’s child, her father was a top-ranking Party cadre, with his being unable to imagine himself becoming an HCC, because of her, even for her sake. The friction was intensified by his dislike of the social injustice, with the distance between Beijing and Shanghai, and by so many things between them…

Ling was not to blame, he had kept telling himself. Still, the news came as a shattering blow.

“He’s another HCC, but also a successful businessman and a Party official. She doesn’t really care for all that, you know…”

He listened, leaning into a corner, gazing at the opposite wall, which resembled a piece of blank paper. Somehow he felt like an audience, listening to a story about something that had happened to others.

“You should have tried harder,” Yong said, in Ling’s defense. “You can’t expect a woman to wait forever.”