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timely payment to the smuggling rings.”
     
    “How much?”
     
    “Thirty thousand U.S. dollars per person.”
     
    “Wow, so much. People could live comfortably on the interest of such a sum. Why should they take the risk?”
     
    “They believe they can earn that much in one or two years there. And the risk is not that great because of changes in our legal system in recent years. If they’re caught, they are no longer put into prison or labor camp. Just sent back home. Nor are there political pressures on them afterward. So they are not worried about the consequences.”
     
    “In the seventies, they would have received long prison sentences,” Chen said. One of his teachers had been put into jail for the so-called crime of merely listening to the Voice of America.
     
    “And one of the factors is—you won’t believe it—American policy. When people are caught there, they should be sent back to China at once, right? No. They are allowed to stay for long periods and encouraged to apply for political asylum. So we have been overwhelmed. If the Americans can nail Jia this time, it will be a heavy blow to the smuggling rings.”
     
    “You are so familiar with all the factors involved, Superintendent Hong. Detective Yu and I really must depend on your help. I don’t know if Yu has arrived in Fujian yet.”
     
    “I believe he did, but I haven’t heard from him directly.”
     
    “I’m waiting for the American at the airport. My coins are running out. I have to finish now. I’ll call you again tonight, Superintendent Hong.”
     
    “Call me any time, Chief Inspector Chen.”
     
    The discussion seemed to have gone more smoothly than he had expected. Normally, local police would not be so cooperative with an outsider.
     
    Putting down the phone, he turned to the arrival/departure monitor again. The time posted had changed. The airplane would arrive in twenty minutes.

Chapter 4
     
     
    D
    etective Yu Guangming had left for Fujian by train instead of by air. There was hardly any difference in travel time, but his preference for the train was prompted by frugality. The police bureau had its regulations about travel expenses. The traveler could pocket half of the difference between the air fare and the train fare—a sizable amount when one went via “hard seat” instead of in a soft sleeper. More than one hundred fifty Yuan, with which he planned to buy an electric calculator for his wife, Peiqin. She was a restaurant accountant, but still used a wooden abacus at home, clicking and clacking the abacus pieces under her slender fingers late into the night.
     
    So, sitting on a wooden bench, Detective Yu started reading material about Wen. There was not much in the folder. The part about Wen being an educated youth, however, gave him a sense of déjà vu. Both Peiqin and he had been educated youths in the early seventies.
     
    Halfway through the dossier, he lit a cigarette and gazed thoughtfully at the spiraling smoke rings. The present always changed the past, but the past changed the present, too.
     
    Classmates of the class of ‘70, Yu and Peiqin, no more than sixteen years old, had to leave Shanghai to “receive reeducation” on an army farm tucked away in remote Yunnan Province, on the southern China/Burma border. On the eve of their departure, the parents of the two young people had a long talk. The next morning, Peiqin came to his place, got into a truck, and sat with Yu, bashfully, unable to look up at him all the way to the Shanghai Railway Station. It was a sort of arranged engagement, Yu realized. Their families wanted them to take care of each other thousands of miles away. That they did, and more, though they did not get married there. Not because they had not grown affectionate, but because there might be a chance, with their status still listed as single, for them to move back to Shanghai. Under government policy, once married, educated youths had to settle down forever in the