Gowanus, Brooklyn.
It is 8 o’clock on the dot and the asphalt is spread out like a giant blackened fish – yellow stripe down the middle, white markings on either side like scales. The street is dark, save for an errant streetlamp and the light reflecting off the neon sign from the carpark across the street.
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It was two days and thirteen hours before the New Hampshire primary, where back home Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner, was inciting Americans to turn out and vote for him like it was their destiny. But halfway around the world, in the ethnically Chinese enclave of Malacca, people were met with a different kind of providence: the Lunar New Year.
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It was a week after the student protests at Yale, and I knew better than to engage in even the most minor form of cultural appropriation, so I passed on both the pilgrim hat and the Indian headdress in favor of a Thanksgiving turkey that I traced in the shape of my hand and cut from a sheet of construction paper before circling around my head.
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The first thing you need to know about Hot Spring Leisure City is that there were no hot springs.
It was January, and each hotel room had a bathtub the size of a kiddie pool on the balcony filled with construction tubes that looked like a cross between pig intestines and telephone wire. I called down to say something about it, but no one at the hotel really gave a shit. The important thing was that there was a telephone in the bathroom and a TV with 41 channels, and that every one of the company’s 2000 rural employees could say that they, too, had visited the capital.
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He met her over the classifieds; that was how it started. He was living in Beijing for a couple of years then, teaching, and porting in and out of Mongolia on a tourist visa. Truth be told, though, even the teaching was a stretch. He rented a small room in an apartment with a couple of other foreigners and was going out nearly every night. By the time Thursday arrived, he could practically count the stiches at the bottom of his wallet.
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