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name—he had never asked me for it, so perhaps he did not know mine either—and he called me Nini’s Sister, as if I were connected to his daughter by blood.
    I now know his name, as he has become one of the most renowned flutists in the nation. I have seen his face on posters, and read in newspapers and magazines the story of his success after years of hardship, about his childhood spent as an orphan with distant relatives, serving in his teens as an apprentice to a blind folk musician whom he then had buried while traveling across south China, about his years of playing in the street for small change, his failed marriage and estranged daughter. The articles called him “a figure of inspiration.” He has not aged much in twenty-five years, though he looks less melancholy, more at ease with the world. I imagine his students in the conservatory having youthful crushes on him, love that has long been due him. Sometimes I wonder if he still remembers me, but the moment the thought occurs to me, I laugh at myself. Why should he think about someone who is a reminder of his humiliation? Only those who live in the past have space in their hearts for people from thepast; the man surely has enough success to savor only the present, with many people to occupy his heart, perhaps far too many.
    Nini’s father had married into the flat on the second floor. Having no place of his own and, worse, no job, made him a laughingstock, or, rather, his wife. It was said that she had fallen in love with him when she saw him play his flute in the park, a near beggar who, the neighbors used to say, “must have a short circuit in his brain to think of himself as an artist.” Much to her parents’ chagrin, she made up her mind to marry him and support him while he tried his luck getting into the National Conservatory. A year later they had a daughter, and his in-laws, with whom he and his wife shared the two-bedroom flat on the second floor, refused—unlike most grandparents—to take care of the baby. Nini’s mother worked as a clerk in a government agency, and while she was away, Nini’s father could be seen walking the baby around the neighborhood. It must have been disheartening for a man, once homeless, to be made homeless again, during the daytime, along with his child, but as a young girl I did not sense the agony of his situation. Rather, I was envious of his freedom, not belonging to a school or a work unit, and I wished to be his companion during his long hours of aimless wandering.
    Nini was just learning to speak when I first began to visit Professor Shan. I was not the kind of well-raised child who knew to compliment a woman on her new dress or a father on his adorable daughter, but whenever I saw Nini and her father in the late afternoons, often playing in the small garden across the narrow lane from Professor Shan’s building, I would greet them. I praised the girl for the stick she held in her hand, or the pebbles she gathered into a pile. Her father thanked me, speaking on her behalf, and it became a habit for both of us to speak through his daughter. “Nini, have you had a good day with your
baba?”
I wouldask her. “Tell your sister that we’ve had a good day,” her father would reply, and even later, when Nini was older and chose not to acknowledge either of our existences, we would still use the girl as an intermediary to exchange words.
    I never saw Nini’s father play the flute. He had a gaunt look by the time I entered high school: Where there had once been a smile, there was now only a distracted look, his hair gray before its time, his back beginning to stoop. He spent less time with Nini then—the girl must have been accepted by her grandparents, as a few times I saw them walk her to a preschool. I wondered what he would do with his time now that Nini was in school. When I walked past their flat on the way to Professor Shan’s, I studied the green wooden door, the paint peeling off at the edge, a child’s