“I understand.”

“It may not be too late.” Yong delivered her Parthian shot. “She still cares so much for you. Come to Beijing, and I’ll tell you a lot of things. You’ve not been to Beijing for such a long time. I almost forget what you look like.”

So Yong wasn’t willing to give up even when Ling herself already had, having married somebody else. Yong, essentially, wanted him to make a trip to Beijing for a possible “salvage mission.”

How long the phone conversation in the corridor lasted, he didn’t know.

When he finally went back into the conference room, the political study was coming to a close. Commissar Zhang shook his head like a rattle drum. Li gave Chen a long inquiring look. Taking a seat next to the Party secretary, Chen refrained from saying anything until the session ended.

As people began to leave, Li drew Chen aside. “Is everything all right, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen?”

“Everything is fine,” Chen said, shifting back into his official role. “It’s an important issue that we discussed today.”

Afterward, instead of going back to his own apartment, Chen decided to pay a visit to his mother. It wasn’t a night that he would enjoy making dinner for himself.

As he turned onto Jiujiang Road, however, he slowed down. It was almost six. His mother lived alone in the old neighborhood, frail in her health, and frugal in her way. He’d better buy some cooked food for the unannounced visit. There was a small eatery around the corner, he recalled. In his elementary school years, he had passed by the place many times, peeping in curiously without ever stepping in.

A little boy was rolling a rusted iron hoop on a side street, a familiar scene yet one he hadn’t seen for a long time. It was as if the hoop was rolling back the memories from childhood in the gathering dusk. He was struck with a sense of déjà vu.

He had second thoughts about visiting his mother. He missed her, feeling bad for having not been able to take care of her as much as he would have liked. But an evening there could also mean another of her lectures about his continuing bachelorhood, where she quoted the Confucian statement, “There are things that make a man unfilial, and to have no offspring is the most serious.” It wasn’t the evening for that.