14. Cat and Mouse
********** morning. I’m thinking of you, Sam said in a text to Alim. It was the first of several texts he sent Alim that day, the first since Alim’s truncated call in the guard’s office, the night before.
In class, Sam paid little attention to Ms. Yi’s lecture about privatised insurance and its pitfalls in modern Chinese society, decades after the People’s ** - danwei - work units had ceased to take responsibility for their health care.
Sam had meant to copy a long list of new vocabulary words from this lecture into his notebook, but his hands were in the hollow of his desk, moving back and forth between his mobile phone menu and his texts, as though doing this would coax a response from Alim, who until that point, had always responded in minutes, even in the middle of
