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back. Lihua was thrilled at the prospect of meeting this legendary figure.
    The game had been set up in front of a dingy hot-water shop near the end of the street. Normally, such a game would be held inside the shop, where people could smoke, drink, and sometimes eat as well. The decision to have it outside was probably due to Wan’s name, which would draw a larger audience. There were five or six thermos bottles lined up along the curb, and the owner of the hot-water shop, a plump man surnamed Han, an enthusiastic amateur chess player, was rubbing his hands, beaming with pride.
    Wan Liang was a gaunt, grizzle-haired man with a constant smile revealing his tea-and-cigarette-stained teeth. He straddled one end of a wooden bench, while his opponent perched on the other end and the chessboard sat between them. There was a tall, worn bamboo broom leaning against the wall behind Wan like an exclamation mark. Stripped to the waist in his black homespun shorts and wooden slippers, Wan appeared sallow, malnourished, his ribs visible like a board in the glaring daylight. They looked like frets on a stringed instrument, and they reminded Lihua of a Shanghai expression: it’s possible to play the pipa on his ribs.
    Wan was unquestionably a master of the chessboard, but his manner was surprising. He kept lifting one bare foot, and then another, onto the bench. Clasping the yellow sole of his foot in one hand, he held a huge sticky rice ball in the other, unaware of the grain stuck on his nose tip.
    What’s more, Wan applauded his own moves and criticizedhis opponent’s loudly. With the audience talking, cursing, laughing alongside, Wan seemed to build ever-increasing momentum on the chessboard, peppering the game with sarcastic remarks, making it hard for his opponent to concentrate.
    â€œMy horse, it is really galloping in the skies, but the stinking positioning of your soldier really reeks like a dog shit,” Wan said, busy nodding or munching at his rice ball. “The way you move your piece—exactly the way a blind man rides a blind horse along a steep cliff on a dark, stormy night. Your head must have been stuffed with straw.”
    Lihua was growing more and more uncomfortable. After years, if he had the potential and studied hard, he might be able to play a masterful hand like Wan—maybe even as a member of the City Chess Team. But then what?
    Wan was like a down-and-out Don Quixote, an old man stripped of his shining armor, holding a broken lance, fighting one absurd battle after another with imagined dignity. Still, Wan was a powerful player, and his tactics, which were not aboveboard, also helped. His tactics of distraction brought unbearable pressure on his opponent, who was befuddled into making one blunder after another. The third game that morning was finished in less than ten minutes.
    Lihua didn’t know exactly how the challenge matches were arranged. It appeared that each of the challengers had the opportunity to play one or two games with Wan, while at the other end of the bench a line of new challengers waited. Soon, however, there was only one left, a sturdymiddle-aged man surnamed Pan, with a bald head, bushy eyebrows, and a determined expression in his beady eyes. Pan played slowly, stubbornly, thinking long and hard before making a single move, in a sharp contrast to Wan’s carefree style. Wan started to show his impatience through a variety of new gestures—tapping his fingers at the edge of the board, breathing audibly into the cup, turning to examine the clock inside the hot-water shop . . .
    As Pan was holding a cannon piece in the air, debating with himself for several minutes about where to fire, Wan commented with a sardonic smile, “Charge forward, Amier.” It was a witty reference to the movie
The Visitor from the Ice Mountains
and the character Amier, a young naïve man too shy to express his love. The audience burst out laughing. Pan’s face