The music activated a mental slide show—Mei in daylight, Mei in the dark. To pass the time I played solitaire on the laptop. By setting the level of difficulty at “beginner” I managed to win 8 percent of my games. The computer refuses to be cheated, and that takes away a lot of the fun of the game, but even so solitaire opens the mind. That was the problem—more Mei, more Chen Qi, more Yangtze. After an hour or so I surfed the Web and found one of those ads that invites you to track high school classmates. I clicked on it and typed in the name of Mei’s high school. She had told me she played volleyball, so I tried “girls volleyball team.” No luck. I tried different class years, and on the third try, there in the team photograph was sweet seventeen-year-old Mei in gym shorts, kneeling first row center. She was identified as Susan Peng. I typed this name into the search box and found her graduation picture—apparently the book had gone to print before she was thrown out of America on a morals charge.
