For a second, Mei was terrified by the well-rolled quilts covered with a sheet.
It was where she had last slept with Bing in the winter thirteen years earlier. Mei captured the vividness of Bing’s handwriting. That day was Bing’s fi rst and only time to have visited her birthplace. On that night, he kept bitching about how cold it was. Before he hastily took her away the next morning, he marked what he was thinking with characters scratched on the wall by the bedside. Each character struck Mei like a hammer hitting a gong.