Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao. Jonathan Tel

can click on: Turn up at such-and-such a location at such-and-such a time, and your long-missing property might be waiting for you.

      The municipality operates on the Cinderella system. Young and old, poor and less poor, native and migrant, stand in a line that ribbons and twists back on itself on the sidewalk outside a recreations building, and in fours or sixes, men to the right, women to the left, are allowed into what was and will be again a basketball court, where, studious, they process up and down, poring over the array of shoes, attending to them—the bargain being: if it clutches in the right way, if it seeks to meld with the foot, if it recognizes you, then you consent to recognize it. Some trudge on; some gasp with pleasure—past and future sides of the same coin—at recovering what went astray at a funeral or a whorehouse or a changing room at a gym . . . and some never had anything stolen but are here on the make—Will you be mine, will I be yours, what kind of China might we belong in?

       NETWORKING

      You could almost think you were in a foreign country. Once this was a treaty port, and there remain a number of European buildings, pretty and absurd. A pleasure steamer goes past, so close you feel you could reach out and touch it, with tourists raising phones to capture the beach. Farther out is a chemical transporter, bizarrely un-ship-like in form, being composed of reservoirs and tentacle-like pipes; NO SMOKING painted in characters larger than the name of the ship itself, and a lone seaman is on deck, leaning against a railing, smoking.

      Qin observes all this. He turns and climbs over the rocky foreshore, and encounters, coming the other way, a younger man, Nie, wearing a T-shirt with English words on it. It seems one or the other will have to step aside, but actually neither does, for there is a vendor drawing their attention. He is cross-legged on a sheet of white vinyl; his DVD emits jaunty music while a paper cut-out of a cartoon dog, upright on the plastic, jigs in tempo. How does this work? What hidden mechanism makes it possible? “Buy one for your children! Five yuan each, three for ten yuan!” and, imploring Qin, “Buy one for your mistress!”

      It is Nie who crouches, and gets six, all different, the dog in addition to other creatures. “My girls will love this!”

      “Girls?”

      “Twins. In August they’ll turn five.”

      “Ah, twin girls! How cute! Nature helps you evade the one-child policy. I have a daughter too, but she would not like this.” While the vendor is calling out to some other tourist, Qin explains, “It is a con. The animals won’t dance when you take them home.”

      “They won’t?”

      “Look carefully. There is a fishing line sewn through the cutout on display. He jiggles it with his thumb. The dog doesn’t dance just because the music plays. How could it? Do you believe in magic?”

      Nie takes off his glasses, and wipes them on his T-shirt. “Why didn’t you tell me before I bought them?”

      Qin smiles. He presents a business card; the address is a prestigious district of Beijing. Nie is not carrying his cards, no matter, he is an accountant employed by a third-tier provincial city. They shake hands, each taking a formal pleasure in saying the other’s name. Qin writes the information into his smartphone. He has an intuition in these matters: as soon he spied the accountant he knew what kind of person he must be.

      “The weather is beautiful,” Qin says.

      “It is indeed beautiful.”

      “What’s the weather like, where you come from?”

      “The summer is hot. My twins love coming here. The Qingdao breeze is so refreshing.”

      The conversation is clichéd and stilted, as it should be. This is how one approaches a person like Nie. Qin has perhaps never before encountered such a perfect example of the type.

      “Your hotel is good?” Qin says. “And not too expensive?”

      “Ai, we’re paying the high-season price.”

      “I have many friends here. Next time I will negotiate you a discount. Where are your lovely twins?”

      “They’re in the hotel with my wife.”

      “My wife and daughter are asleep in the hotel. They prefer to get up late.” In fact his wife is home in Beijing, and his daughter . . . well he certainly hopes she’s in Beijing too. Last month she took off without telling him with some school friends to Shanghai—all paid for on his credit card. He’s on his own in Qingdao, here to meet up with old clients, and, as always, looking out for new.

      “My wife chose the hotel. She found it on the internet,” Nie says. “Her cousin lives in Beijing; perhaps you know him? Their family name is Kong, the same as Confucius.”

      Qin quotes the opening of The Analects: “How delightful to meet friends from afar.”

      Nearby, the paper animal seller stands with his back to them; he urinates, calligraphing the rocks. Qin and Nie walk along a concrete path, from where they have a view of the skyscrapers in the business district across the bay. A sweating fellow is grilling a rack of cuttlefish. Qin offers to buy one for his companion. The cuttlefish are tricky to handle, since they are big and chewy and coated with sweet brown sauce. The men each hold up a skewered cuttlefish, as if gesturing with hand puppets.

      How pleasant to grumble about one’s job, while on vacation! Nie chatters away, and Qin grunts sympathetically. They lean forward so as to bite into their cuttlefish without dripping sauce on their shirts.

      “Delicious,” Qin says.

      “Yes, delicious.”

      And now Qin makes his move. As he speaks, he gestures with his food, and one might imagine his half-eaten cuttlefish is doing the talking. It is a practiced speech yet subtly modified, with many commendations of the accountant’s desire to provide for his family. What Qin suggests is a simple business proposition, with no risk to either party, a win-win situation. It might seem unusual to somebody from a provincial city, but he can confidently assert that by Beijing standards it is considered acceptable. In conclusion he raises his cuttlefish. “May we have a fruitful cooperation!” But Nie presents his own skewered cuttlefish as if to parry a thrust. “According to the reg-g-g-ulations . . .” He stammers, like the legendary courtier who disagreed with the emperor, and his regional accent becomes stronger. “Thank you, Mr. Qin, goodbye.” The young man turns and scurries inland, leaving a trail of sauce behind him. Qin calls after him, “It was a pleasure, Accountant Nie.” An elegant woman saunters by attached to a Pomeranian. A street cleaner stares at the tourists; she goes on sweeping the ground with her plastic broom.

      Qin sighs. Where did he go wrong? What else could he have done? Now if he’d had longer with Nie, taken him out for a drink, told him stories of other middle-ranking officials whom he’d helped with their financial worries. . . . He can only hope he’ll encounter him again; in his experience of business relationships, they are often like a series of seemingly independent stories that turns out in the end to make up one grand narrative.

      He checks his phone. Messages from his secretary and his lawyer and business contacts. . . . He dispatches a dozen carefully worded replies. He was a child during the Cultural Revolution; he remembers orations and anthems and chants, extravagant praise swerving into fiery denunciation. Stability is not the natural state of things, he has learned, we strive to maintain it. Also a voicemail from his wife; nothing from his daughter. He calls his daughter, and gets only the answering beep. “Xiaxia, this is Daddy. I’m at the airport, about to fly home. Where are you? I love you.”

      *

      Remember me? No, that won’t do. Or: I came all this way to see you. Definitely not. Qin puzzles how best to phrase it. It’s not quite the case that he came just for this—he arranged to do business in the provincial capital the previous day—but he’s here on the hunt. In honor of the Mid-Autumn Festival, a celebration is taking place in the main square in Nie’s city. A troupe of middle-aged women in orange uniform are banging cymbals and marching