Volume One, Chapter Twenty-Three: Ami

The flying squirrel drifted into a hazy slumber, entirely unaware of the flashes of lightning and dry thunder that rumbled outside the wooden cabin.

In the middle of the night, he was jolted awake from nightmares five times. In one of them, he was driving a car with an adorable little yellow dog in the back seat. In reality, he had never owned a dog—he was even afraid of tiny lapdogs—but in the dream, the puppy’s presence seemed perfectly natural, frolicking about the vehicle.

He drove through a bustling market in a small town. Instead of lining the roadside, the crowd surged thick in the very middle of the street, each person carrying colorful woven baskets of various shapes and sizes on their backs.

The car was stuck there, and he watched the peaceful folk scene with easy contentment.

Suddenly, a large yellow dog burst through the throng, snarling and baring its teeth, charging straight at him. Panic seized him as he realized, with a start, that the puppy in his car was the offspring of that big dog—and that what was racing toward him was no ordinary hound, but a wolf.

With no way out and terror closing in, he chose to wrench himself out of the nightmare.

He awoke drenched in sweat, frantically reaching beneath the bed for the bottle of strong corn liquor he kept on hand, gulping it down. Afterward, he told himself that as long as he could still have nightmares, things weren’t so bad—it meant he was still alive.

Since leaving the compound at Yannuo, a sense of lingering dread dogged him. Escaping had been more gratifying than simply surviving.

He remembered something the instructor had once written on the blackboard during training: When you’re captured, even death feels like a luxury.

Lying on that hard bamboo cot, he tried to analyze the strange dream with what little psychology he’d learned.

He believed that letting his thoughts wander was the best remedy for sleeplessness.

Each time a nightmare woke him, he downed a few more swigs of liquor.

Almost as if it were preordained, by the time the cheap countryside spirit reached its dregs, he had finally slipped into a deep, dreamless sleep, too exhausted to conjure up anything further.

He was roused by sunlight streaming through a hole in the canvas curtain, its rays falling across his face, and by the sound of Amei drawing water from the well outside, reminding him where he was.

When he opened his eyes to check his digital watch, it was already noon.

He couldn’t let Amei know he was hurt.

Amei had already been home for some time. She was no more surprised by the flying squirrel’s unannounced arrival than she had been by his sudden departure.

Outside the window, the wild bamboo grove cast swaying green shadows. He lay on the bamboo cot, eyes half-closed, savoring the play of light and shade streaming in.

“Brother, you’re hurt again, aren’t you?” When Amei entered, the light at the doorway dimmed for a moment, and he was suddenly reminded of the fairy-tale snail maiden.

Amei, the daughter of the Tai family, was indeed beautiful—petite yet delicate, with deep-set eyes, a refined, gently upturned nose, and striking facial features that bore her father’s South Asian heritage.

Because her mother was a native Han Chinese from Deze, her skin was not as rough or sallow as that of tropical southerners; her face was fair with a healthy flush. Her gaze was profound, and to the flying squirrel, it seemed as though there was a mist in those eyes, tempting him to peer into whatever mysteries lay behind it.

She spoke Mandarin poorly. When outsiders conversed with the flying squirrel, she always smiled in silence. In private, she would sometimes haltingly chat with him in Mandarin—though usually it was he who did most of the talking, spinning stories about the big city, things she had neither seen nor heard of. She listened with a warm, amused smile, occasionally interjecting an innocent question or a soft gasp of amazement, which only encouraged him to talk more.

That year, Yingzhou already boasted a sixty-three-story building. Amei listened in wide-eyed awe: “Here, if we build two stories, it’ll collapse.”

The longer the flying squirrel stayed up in the mountains, the more often she used her slender hands to cut his hair.

Amei managed the family’s two mu of sugarcane fields, switching to tobacco in the summer. She also had to tend to the dozen or so mu of rubber trees under the family contract.

At night, she sold tickets for three yuan apiece at the disco in town, the one with spinning colored lights. Her monthly wage was a hundred and fifty yuan. Usually, she finished selling tickets before eight and was off work. The flying squirrel would sit at a quiet little shop by the street from six, drinking beer and smoking. Once Amei closed up the ticket window, he’d quietly pick her up on the “Great White Shark” and take her back up the mountain.

Once, the flying squirrel coughed for half a month—until blood came up. Amei insisted on taking him to the county hospital. The young doctor needed only a stethoscope to diagnose pneumonia.

He had just run out of cash, and the hospital stay would cost eight hundred yuan. Without a word, Amei went to the dance hall boss and advanced six months’ pay to get him admitted.

Amei had left school after fourth grade. In this border town, everyone agreed there was no future in education—especially for girls. If she could write her own name and do simple arithmetic, that was enough to see her through a long life. Beauty was not always a blessing; it only drew trouble. Poor girls were married off young, not only for the dowry, but also to have a household, a man—to cut short the idle hopes of loafers and wanderers.

Yet Amei had not been betrothed early, as other girls were. The meager crops they grew could not support a family—a year’s harvest from two seasons barely brought in two hundred yuan, and even that was taxed.

Her parents had gone off to work in Yunting two years before, taking her ten-year-old brother with them. Left alone, Amei had to think of how to feed herself. She had no idea she was beautiful, believing that her thin frame made her as undesirable as an ugly duckling.

But the flying squirrel liked her simplicity. Living on the edge, he could not abide emotionally complicated women.

“Brother Mouse, tomorrow is the Water-Splashing Festival, you know.” Almost every sentence Amei uttered trailed off with a drawn-out “ne,” and when telling you something, it was a gentle, lingering tone. The flying squirrel especially liked hearing her ask questions with that “ne,” so reminiscent of the third tone in Mandarin.

He froze for a few seconds, realizing Amei was thinking of the festival day they’d spent together last year—the happiest they’d ever been.

At that time, he was waiting here for an important secret rendezvous. He’d been notified that a courier would bring him vital intelligence once it was safe to do so.

It was supposed to be important, but he had waited over a month with no sign of the messenger.

Such was the nature of the trade—always waiting in uncertainty. Who was he waiting for? How long would it be? A day, a week, a month?

This kind of waiting did not cultivate patience; it only made one forget the point of waiting, even forget who one was.

To him, this endless waiting felt like serving a life sentence.

At first, he took it in stride, spending his days with a book by the reservoir, fishing in the thatched pavilion. After half a month, he finished reading Camus’s collected plays in the Liu Mingjiu translation, and then the restlessness of youth set in. He stared at his pager every day, and, out of boredom, memorized the entire codebook—so thoroughly that he could have worked at the paging station.

Eventually, he discovered a few appliance user manuals in a pile of scrap paper Amei’s father had scavenged years ago, and he studied them with great interest.

Soon, his mind was filled with the functions and operating methods of various brands of televisions, refrigerators, and washing machines. He then compiled the three manuals into three sets of simplified Morse codebooks, annotating them and tapping out their contents with his middle finger on the door threshold.

Before long, even this last diversion lost its charm. He realized, a little forlornly, that with advances in intelligence work, such traditional methods of communication had become obsolete.