And then there she is, standing in front of the restaurant. A tiny figure. Why are life’s biggies always so much tinier than they ought to be? As a young man, one time I was doing sit-ups on a beach, and afterward I looked down at the impression my back had made in the sand, and it was minuscule. That was me? All my foolish drive and strifer, my precious fuck-upedness, and that was all I had to show for it-a pint-size dent in the earth? So does Jade turn out to be only Jade: a small, solitary figure on a dirty sidewalk, examining her thumbnail with great gravity, nearly engulfed by colorful people streaming past.

I see her before she sees me. Then, as my cab rolls to the curb, she ignites with pleasure. She hops to my door-one, two, three-and yanks it open.

Then she stops hopping. She seems to know at once, sensing it with a single glance. With animal subtlety she reads it in the set of my shoulders, the angle of my chin. She hears it in the catch of my voice as I thank the cabbie. It pains me to see her look so stunned.

“You are feeling just so-so?” she inquires, not meeting my eyes.

“Just so-so,” I reply.

She is careful not to ask me why. With unusual quietness we walk into the restaurant and take our seats. Jade is further stunned by the opulence of the place: six kinds of spoons, a glut of drinking glasses. “So many windows,” Jade says, meaning glasses, clicking her fingernail against each of three at her setting. With an attempt at lightness, she picks one up and holds it to her eye, peering through it. “You can see through me?” she asks.

“Why would I want to do that?” I ask.

But this is cruel. And cruel is the last thing I mean to be. She is made speechless by my words, suffering the Chinese equivalent of a deep blush-more a flush of immobility than a change of color. It’s almost scary to see that highly animated face immobile for nearly half a minute.

Her downcast eyes don’t meet mine even as she tries to make conversation. “How Larry is doing?”

“The kidney’s great. Can’t vouch for the rest of him.”

Is this guilt I’m witnessing on Jade’s face? But why? She did what she had to do and then some, maybe helping save Larry’s life in the bargain. We sit there, Jade and me, churning with separate unspoken guilts. Both of us did what we had to do, and would do so again. But it wasn’t without cost.

“And your father, how’s he doing?” I ask.

“This middle squeeze take place every autumn,” Jade says. “She has the burning heart, so I am sure she okay, but I go home to see.”

I look at her, my dear double agent, my co-conspirator on the opposite side of a deep divide.

“He,” I say, correcting her.

“He,” she says.

Neither of us smiles.

We order. As usual, the dishes come out in random order: bowls of rice first, then cups of crème brûlée for dessert. Eventually the duck comes. We watch it being sliced.

“You feel more delicious with chopsticks,” Jade says, plucking adroitly. I think she means that one eats more slowly this way, savoring the morsels.

We’re both eating slowly, not wanting the meal to end, wanting it to end as quickly as possible.

“I have ducks not so different from this one at my home,” I tell her. “In my pond.”

I’m used to her eyes being blank, the emotions coming from somewhere else and not the eyes themselves, yet now they are filling up, overflowing with liquid light. A tear falls into her crème brûlée. “I am never see that,” she says.

Suddenly she whirls up to go to the bathroom. It’s strange to see her walk in so unlively a fashion, hop-less. I write a note and stick it in her purse before she comes back. So how do you like that: For all my talk of the crude cloak-and-dagger tactics of the Chinese, I’m the one who performs the most blatant act of all. Going into a personal pocketbook! But of course my particular cause is just, which distinguishes it from 99 percent of the other causes in the world. Right…

“Don’t talk about the leaving,” she instructs upon her return. “We transfer to another topic.” But there are no other topics. And now a hip-hop band has begun performing in an alcove near the bar, so we can’t hear each other anyway, which only highlights the fact that we have nothing to say. The bass is so booming it sounds like a trapdoor’s open in my chest and my usual emotions have drained out. Making room for new emotions to seep in. I’m a jumble of contradictory feelings, but rising to the surface is something I didn’t expect: admiration. I can’t help it. Keystone Kops, like hell-the laugh’s on me: The Chinese did a better job of pairing Jade and me than candeyblossoms.com ever could. And Jade herself-bravo! I was already impressed by how well she spied for me, but that wasn’t the half of it. What a girl! The cult of Mao and the cult of Larry are pretty mutually exclusive, yet she managed to juggle both. I’m as sad and proud as a papa bear bone-bitten by his cub: Ow! Very good! This must be what a father feels walking his daughter down the aisle. She’s not mine any longer, and never really was. I’m thrilled, and a bit closer to death. What a maudlin combination! But yes, these compromises do reconcile us little by little to our graves.

As if mirroring my mood, the bass sounds like a death knell, syncopated. It’s energetic, but it’s death.

There are more tears, not springing from her seal eyes but leaking, falling silently onto the shellacky crust of her crème brûlée, mixing with the soft custard beneath. “I am sorrow for this sorrowness,” she says.

“Don’t apologize,” I say. I don’t want to make her cry harder. Yet maybe I do, because suddenly it’s vitally, perversely important for me to hear myself telling her about Tiananmen. That it wasn’t the way her government makes it out, they mowed down thousands…

“I know.” She is weeping. “I hear a little bird of this.”

Still I make her weep more. It’s like draining a wound as I speak. They machine-gunned innocents…they ran over teenagers with tanks…they disemboweled one another, they torched one another. It’s been a lot of years now, but that hasn’t dulled the horror of it in one degree…

Suddenly I’m claustrophobic, just when the appetizers arrive with the bill. We have to leave. We can’t stay here. Besides, her train leaves in less than an hour. I take her hand to escort her to a cab. Up front, the driver swims slowly through the traffic, as though sensitive to our restless, funereal mood. The cab feels like a hearse.

“This is not a joyride,” she says.

“No, more of a joy die,” I confirm.

She doesn’t look at me. “You want take that ride?” she asks.

“I can’t,” I say. “My family…”

I turn away. There’s another reason I can’t take that ride, I acknowledge to myself. I’m an American. I don’t want to be like that Foreign Service guy from the temple who felt he wasn’t from anyplace anymore. Also-and this seems almost as important, somehow-my hat needs cleaning. It’s collected two months worth of limbo dinge; any more and it might never come clean. So there we are.

But of course the main reason I can’t-I know it, she knows it-is if I did, I’d be stuck here for good. Situation not splendid, or splendid in its own way, even though it means we’ll never see each other again.

I lift the hand I’m still holding, plant kisses on it. Not a few. Many.

“You are doing this because you are cold?” she asks, not flinching.

“No,” I say. I put her hand away. Her tears continue, silently, a reluctant leakage. But now I’m perverse in a new way and want to make her laugh. “And what about you? You are crying for the duck we ate?” I ask.

“Maybe,” she says, sniffling and smiling.

“Or for the ducks of my home?”

“All of them.” She laughs through her tears.

“Because I can eat the ones at home, too, if that will make you feel better.”

“No no no!” She laughs, beating fists into her lap and crying more now, making so many bubbles in her teeth that I can’t keep track of them all. Are these the same bubbles as the ones I fell for so long ago? They aren’t, of course-woe, woe!-she must be making new ones all the time. This thought fills me with unease, but also a kind of joy. She’s using herself up but also remaking herself all the time! Again I have the unlikely thought: She must never die! How can the flower of Chinese youth bite the dust, and by extension American youth, all of us everywhere? They must never suffer depressionism, or earthquick, or even death when death is due. I can’t ask such a thing, can I, Cool God? Or is that how it works: You dare to hope for whatever you can, the bolder the better?