Prologue
******** happened in the dark quiet is up for interpretation. As with Chinese-English interpretation and its reverse, the best I can do for you are words approximating the full truth. You’ll have to take yourself the rest of the way.
First, you ought to know that Beijing is the world. A crush of people from far afoot, so vast and frenzied, pushed together so closely that the city lays bare the best and worst of people. That night, there were people from across China and around the globe, colliding in the breathtaking sea of human flesh that is the Xizhimen subway transfer, a station vast and overwhelming as transportation hubs in similarly crowded places like Cairo, Mexico City, and New York.
That night, in an alley far from Tiananmen Square, the Haidian District universities,
