At home in my kitchen after work I spread a city map across the table and used the index to find the street I wanted. It connected to Spadina, near Mr. Bai’s office above the restaurant with the dragons. I had learned nothing new about the old man, but Chang had told me he was a property owner. I assumed Mr. Bai owned the restaurant and the house where I lived and the store where Mr. and Mrs. Altan presided over the potato chips and pirated DVDs. I gave my attention to the approximate route I would take across the city, making sure to include the park behind the art gallery, which the map told me was called Grange Park. I pored over the grid of streets as if reading a book. I preferred paper maps to online versions. My fascination with rivers, and all the projects I had researched, had led me to a love of maps too. I liked the idea that I was looking at a piece of the world in two dimensions. I’d study a map, with its mountain ranges, cities, coastlines, and I’d imagine what it was like to live there.
