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You’re old enough to know these things.” In a lower voice Jie told me that there were many colorful passages in the novel, and could I mark all the passages describing sex between the man and the woman for her? I blushed at the words she used— zuo-ai , doing love, an innocent yet unfortunate mistranslation of the English phrase making love . Jie said she didn’t have the patience to read the book herself, and told me if I wanted to I could skip pages as long as I did not fail to mark what she should be reading.
    Jie was an outgoing girl, loud and confident, fond of crass jokes. Perhaps the fact that I did not have someone to reveal her secret to was behind her reasoning; or she might have simply pitied me for my naïveté about the world, and thought of me as someone in need of enlightenment. In any case, I did not ask her for an explanation—it was easier to let people have their opinions than to convince them otherwise.
    At night I covered my head with the quilt and pointed the light from my flashlight onto the pages. I was sixteen when Professor Shan began to read the stories of D. H. Lawrence to me; it was the fall I entered high school. My favorite author, she said of Lawrence, but did not say more. It became clear to me—and I tried not to show my disappointment—that we would not return to Dickens or Hardy, at least not for a long while. She pointed out the novels she would read to me after we finished with the two volumes of Lawrence’s stories: The White Peacock, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love . Her eyes seemed to gleam unusually as she laid out her plan. I wonder whether she had been waiting for that moment ever since I had begun visiting her. Were Dickens and Hardy only a preparation for Lawrence? Was she waiting for me to grow older, or to become better with English, so that I could understand Lawrence?
    That fall, milk was no longer rationed, but our family could not afford it, as I needed lunch money for the high school canteen. Every day I rode out of the school gate at quarter to four, the earliest possible time, and cycled across a district and a half to get to Professor Shan’s flat at quarter after five. I did not go home to report to my parents first. My father, on a longer night shift now, would leave for work around five, and it mattered little to my mother when I returned home—my father left a cooked meal for us, which my mother rarely touched. She was becoming even thinner, ghostly hollows around her cheeks, and she lay in her bed and read ancient romance novels for hours.
    There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust . Professor Shan began reading to me as soon as I arrived. Sometimes she would lay snacks on the table—a few biscuits, half an orange, a handful of roasted chestnuts—but she herself never ate anything when I was around, so I did not touch the food either.
    I did not like Lawrence, and my mind began to wander to other things. I had enjoyed Dickens, who talked to me at times in a wordy manner as I imagined a grandparent would. I had never met my father’s parents, and my mother’s parents had washed their hands of her, so I was only a stranger to them. I had loved Hardy, and had dreamed of the countryside in his books—black-and-white dreams in which everything looked slanted as if in a woodcut print—but this may have had more to do with the joy of finding myself able to understand English. I dared not show that I was annoyed by Lawrence. I had lived with a mad mother all my life and had found madness, which seemed prevalent in the stories read to me now, the most uninteresting topic. I tried to suppress a yawn and let my mind wander to a man whose name I did not know and whose face had begun to haunt me. The man lived on the second floor of Professor Shan’s building and had a young daughter named Nini. “Nini’s Papa” was how I greeted him. He did not