laughed at his smile. "My name is Emily Dorset," she said. "I probably should have told you that before." She looked down at her steak, smiled at him. "Since you bought me dinner and everything. My friends call me Emma."
"Mine is Yu Lin," he said. "I come from Hangchow, a provincial city in central China."
Just the thought of home, the thought of houses not pressed together, the thought of houses that weren't rabbit warrens in the monolithic cement of totalitarian countries, brought with it a wave of longing. He thought of sailing on the reservoir of Hangchow, and sighed.
He'd given it all up to come to England. It had seemed such a good idea. Go to England. Introduce them to free enterprise.
Instead, he was working for a monolithic corporation in exile amid the barbarians.
And he smiled at that, because that was exactly what his ancestors had called the rest of the world. Barbarians. And Yu Lin who'd thought himself so modern had, over the last year, come to think of them just that way.
He'd thought Englishmen were just like Chinese, only with different customs, religion and politics. Now he wasn't so sure.
He wasn't so sure there wasn't something wrong, servile, subservient, at the bottom of the European soul.
Emma was smiling into his abstracted expression. "You're thinking of home, aren't you?"
He felt himself blush, a heat on his cheeks.
"It's all right," she said. "I often feel that way too, only I have no home to return to, except . . .."
"Except?" Lin prompted. Her sky-blue eyes had darkened, as though a cloud passed over them.
"Nothing. I was going to say if I had a home, it would be a home more like China, with human rights, with vote, with freedom."
Now Lin was sure of it, an almost palpable listening silence in the hotel.
England was supposed to be freer now. England couldn't touch him. But what would they do to Emma?
"What do you do?" he asked. "For a living." And immediately upon it, he kicked himself. Most English didn't do much for a living. A sentence often heard floated up through his mind: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
But she grinned brightly up at him. "I'm a student," she said. "Art. Something other than the stiff icons of communism, which are no better than the stiff icons