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looked as if he were dreaming.
    I missed you so much, he said. You have that power. I used to be so depressed, before I met you. I want to give myself a chance, a chance to see if I can make something beautiful.
    I was speechless. I just sat there, not believing my ears. I had never heard him say anything like this before. I was hearing the words of my first love. I said, I don’t really know who you are, but I love you anyway. That must be what love is.
    We called Saining’s band mates up on the phone and asked them to join us. Saining told everyone that he had never thought he was capable of love, that he used to have trouble trusting women, and that he had assumed love must be something that would have to wait until he was middle-aged.
    For the first time, Saining talked about himself. He had been bullied terribly as a child. Both of his parents were what was then known as “artistic political criminals.” They had met at a labor farm somewhere in the Northwest, where they had both been sent for “Reform through Labor.” His mother was a passionate admirer of the Soviet poet Sergei Esenin, so she named him Saining, which was the Chinese equivalent of Sergei. He was born at the labor camp. When he was nine, his parents were rehabilitated. They divorced soon thereafter. Saining said, Chinese marriages can withstand hardship and disaster, but they can’t survive the good times. Sometime later, his mother remarried and moved to Japan. When he was twelve, Saining immigrated to England with his father. When I met him, he had been back in China for only a year.
    His father had stubbornly hoped that Saining would become a violin prodigy. His first violin had been made for him by his father, out of bamboo, and the violin tunes of his childhood had all been hummed to him by his father. Saining said, Maybe this is why I got into the bad habit of always running away from things.
    His parents had had to wait a long time for their political rehabilitation, but it didn’t take them long at all to get a divorce. My parents are both really good people, he said, but they’re both crazy. Until I was nine, we all lived at the labor farm. The three of us had been buffeted around too much already, and when it was all over, we just couldn’t live together anymore.
    Birmingham is a terrible place, he went on, an especially ugly place, and its streets are always full of worried people. I don’t feel any connection to the place at all, but I truly loved the English countryside. If you haven’t been to England, you can’t possibly understand their literature or their music. England is unique, and the English don’t like anybody who isn’t English. When I traded in my violin for a guitar, I thought that my life was finally going to get interesting. Music was not going to shut me out anymore. But my relationship with my father deteriorated; we were always arguing. Things got out of control.
    We pushed together a bunch of small tables to make a big one and began loudly extolling one another’s virtues. Sanmao had brought along a U 2 CD and he put it on the bar’s sound system. The food at the bar was terrible, the beer was warm, and the waitresses were frank to the point of rudeness. When Sanmao caught someone spying on my man from the door to the toilet, our “wedding banquet” disintegrated into a free-for-all. Two opposing gangs turned the bar upside down while the bar owner just looked on without trying to stop it. I saw one guy who was missing not just one but both of his shirtsleeves, and meanwhile Sanmao had got ahold of a shovel and was standing stock-still in the middle of the room, and somehow Saining ended up with a tiny hat on his head that made him look like a train engineer’s son.
    Finally somebody in the other group yelled out, Stop fighting! None of us are from around here. Let’s not give the locals an excuse to laugh at us!
    The brawl ended instantly.
    Saining returned the hat to its rightful owner, everybody