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railing next to me.
    She laughed. “No, it’s just Hong Kong,” she said. “It’s like this every night.”
    I turned back to the harbor but noticed a minute later that the girl was still looking at us and giggling as her friend whispered in her ear.
    “What’s so funny?” I asked.
    “My friend was saying that even though your friend is not from here, she and I look like each other,” she said. “I said, no, your friend is prettier.” And she giggled some more.
    There was some resemblance. The girl wore her hair likeTi-Anna’s and had the same longish face with high cheekbones and full lips.
    “How do you know she’s not from here?” I challenged. At which both of them burst into laughter again.
    The question apparently was so silly that the girl, who turned out to be called Wei, didn’t deign to reply.
    “Is it your first time?” she asked.
    We chatted with her and her friend Mai as we watched the Star Ferries come and go. They were high school kids like us, just hanging out, and we traded complaints about exams and homework and boring teachers. It felt good to be having a conversation about normal things.
    Eventually we said we were hungry, and they told us they knew a great-but-cheap noodle restaurant. We tore ourselves away from the light show and let them lead us through a maze of streets so narrow that motor scooters were the biggest vehicles that could get through.
    We came to a kind of outdoor café with two long, high tables with kerosene lanterns at each end. All along them young people perched on stools, chattering and slurping from huge, steaming bowls.
    The girls installed us and helped us figure out the menu. They said they had to be home soon and couldn’t stay to eat, but they sat next to us and didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. Wei especially was a talker, asking lots of questions about America and excited at every answer. (We lived in
Washington
? Had we ever met the
president
?) All her questions ended in bubbly squeaks. All her statements ended with exclamation marks.
    Finally, when our food came, Wei said they really, really had to go. They slid off their stools and left—only to return two minutes later.
    “Oh!” Wei said, beaming proudly as she saw us eating. “I justwanted to make sure you could use chopsticks! You look like you’ve been doing it all your lives!”
    This time, before leaving, she gave Ti-Anna her phone number and said to be sure to call if we had any trouble while we were in Hong Kong. And they were gone again, this time for good.
    You can’t imagine our trouble, I thought. But still. We’d made a couple of new friends.
    Ti-Anna as usual didn’t seem particularly hungry, but suddenly I was starving. Noodles with roasted pork had never tasted so good.
    Only when we’d paid and were trying to find our way back through the maze to Nathan Road did I ask Ti-Anna about our hotel room door.
    “A good-luck charm to keep the room safe?” I guessed.
    “Not exactly,” she said. “Listen, I’ll be surprised if
they
don’t try to track us, maybe bug our hotel room.” It was that familiar “they” again. “The only question is how soon—if they’ve gone in already, we’ll have some idea of what we’re up against.”
    I felt like maybe I’d been reading too much nonfiction. I should have picked up a few more spy novels. “Where did you learn to do that?”
    “It’s not like my father and I didn’t talk about stuff,” she said.
    “So if the hair is broken when we get back, it’ll be bad news.”
    She nodded.
    “And then?”
    “Well,” she said, “I have an idea.”
    She prodded me into something resembling a hardware store. The aisles were narrow and so crowded with junk that I could only follow her as she poked around. Eventually she settled on a couple of little knapsacks—the kind you might use if you were biking out to do a few errands—and air mattresses that folded down to almost nothing. I paid for them both.
    Back on the street,