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Daru was still there and waiting when I returned with sixteen years of par avion envelopes that had shivered across oceans, carrying his photographs to me. Now he had abandoned his school-issue red scarf for a Western tie, and time had cut soft furrows upon his brow. I did not scream or laugh or punch him as I used to. Instead I thanked him for coming, speaking Chinese for the first time in over a year. As he took my luggage I wished we were strangers, that I might tell him a hundred pretty lies about myself and why I’d returned, but I had written him too many truths from the war zones.

“So you’re a reporter now,” he said as we left the fluorescent airport for his car.

“Yeah. But I don’t usually do this kind of news.”

“Well, this is pretty interesting, writing about culture.”

My editors at the Times had assigned me to do a series on China—not the usual economics and politics, but people and their lives. This, I dimly suspected, was their attempt to grant me some sort of reprieve from the constant insomnia that accompanied crisis coverage.

“But I write about wars,” I reminded him. I gasped as we merged onto the highway. There had been no four-lane roads or personal cars sixteen years ago. Now the gray highway stretched parallel to the ocean, from Pudong Airport toward the sky. The greenery in the median dividers looked plastic in the rain.

“Tell me about them,” Daru said, “the wars, I mean. What did you see there?”

“You know about them. Didn’t you read the articles I sent you?”

He shrugged. “Just wanted to hear it in person.” He paused and I could hear that broad southern accent native to Shanghai, “Tell me about one. What are they really like? They can’t really be as bad as that?”

Eight years ago, fresh from my studies in America, I’d asked the same question—what were wars really like?—and left for Sarajevo. Going to war zones was about never slowing down. You ran toward the bullets when everyone else ran away. It was a suicide wish of a career, but I wanted to feel the motion, the emotional bonds that rooted a humanity stripped naked. You had to act fast, cameras and cars ready to go. Coming back home meant slowing down, so pain could set in. I felt suddenly tired.

“No, Daru, they’re not that bad.” I didn’t know how to describe my wars to this man. Everything about the new Shanghai was too grand and too gaudy to contain my memories.

* * *

That night I half-dozed in a hotel room with pink carpeted walls. In a moment I was in a crowd at an outdoor market, China or Bosnia or anywhere. The shoppers and vendors were in their best dresses and suits, quietly waiting for a sniper’s bullet while money and groceries exchanged hands. They all knew they would die sooner or later, and they all wanted to die with dignity. In front of me a man

dropped silently to the ground after a bullet pierced his head. He did not fall gracefully like in the movies. No music, no suspended weightlessness in air, no pauses in time: the vendors bagged groceries, the shoppers continued to walk. We filled in the space quickly.

I woke with a gasp into all the places that contained grit, smelling of earth and death. Then I found the tap and sigh of the rain, and the sound of nouveau-riche city nightlife twenty floors below my room.

* * *

Daru met me in the hotel lobby the next evening to take me to Xintiandi Ark, a nightclub on the corner of Shanghai’s busiest shopping street. In the main lounge, people slow danced under the haze of smoke as a girl in a red dress played at a white piano. A man stood beside her, lazily turning the pages of a Gershwin rhapsody, his hand brushing her bare shoulders at every turn of music.

“Well, you’ll love the culture here!” Daru grinned at me. “Have fun.” Then he was off into the crowd, with handshakes and hopes of new acquaintances, leaving me to wander toward the bar with paper and pen.

“What can I get for you?” The young bartender offered me a lopsided smile as he rinsed some leftover glasses.

“Nothing, thanks.” I sat down. “Uh, how long have you worked here?”

The young man was silent. Then, “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

The woman next to me snickered. “You’re not from here, are you?” She had bleached-white skin and fingers choked with diamond rings. “You don’t know the policies?”

“What policies?”

“Never mind, the boss’s policies don’t concern you anyway. Xiao Zhang, get me another martini.”

The young man handed her the glass and turned to wait on a giggling woman in a black chiffon dress.

“And how are you today? I haven’t seen you around lately,” the woman slurred to him. “My husband’s in Europe. You should stop by.”

“Classless,” said the woman next to me loudly, playing with her diamond ring. “I think this one needs to be brought in and polished.”

The song changed and a very young woman climbed onstage in heavy makeup and a short dress. Nearby, a line of women waited for their turn. In Nigeria, too, women had formed long lines, standing outside tents set up by Médecins Sans Frontières and cradling children with legs too thin to support their bloated stomachs. In Nigeria rain was rare, and the women told me stories through lips that were dried and caked as the brown earth at their feet. Together they waited for the few available beds in a tent that smelled of urine and blood. The children were five or six, the same age as Daru and I when we had played in the endless ginkgo-tree alleyways. In the intervening years, Shanghai had grown into a city I no longer knew.

I found Daru in a crowded booth, toasting to everything in life with three pink-haired women in tight jeans and neon tops.

“Well, how are you, my dear!” He waved his glass at me. “Have a seat, have a seat! Have a drink! Let me introduce you to my ladies! Stunning, aren’t they? Isn’t this place beautiful? And the beer is so good—the simple pleasures of life!”

“Daru, what are the boss’s policies?”

“Ai-ya, those, what are they compared with these simple pleasures? Just something to do with hiring illegal migrant workers. You don’t care—have a drink, Sasha!”

“I think I’m actually going back to the hotel.”

“No, too soon! The night is still young.”

“Do you want to come with me?”

“Well, if you insist on leaving, goodbye, farewell! God speed!” He saluted me with his beer, then tipped its contents down the side of his chin.

* * *

I woke at half past two to the sound of a foghorn that cut through the shouting and traffic of Shanghai. Could it be the same horn that used to sound from the waterfront? I stood and walked to the rain-streaked window. Could I still recognize some part of the city? Would I lose this place once I lost Daru?

I called him. When he answered, I could hear a lot of shouting in the background, and it took time for his voice to reach the phone through a room that was probably filled with saccharine smoke.

“Daru, let’s go for a walk, like we used to.”

“What—what? What did you say?” he shouted over the phone, giddy and intoxicated, stretching the end of his words like a six year-old play-acting, “where are you going? What do you say? Do you say you want me to pick you up?”

“Daru, where are you? Can you hear me? …Daru!”

“What? What? What is it that you want to do what?”

I hung up. I would walk by myself. I put on a stiff white dress.

Outside, the sky was purple with rain. Before me lay a maze of childhood that twisted and unfurled the locations of buildings I had half forgotten. Tonight I was practically Cinderella—borrowed gown, borrowed town, borrowed stroll in the rain.

“Remember how we used to do this,” I said to the dark, to Daru, “a long time ago?” The few straggling cars of the night honked as I crossed the streets.

Lukewarm rain dripped from the eaves of buildings and splashed my feet; the city tossed and turned in its sleep. I waited so I would be alone in my city, in my mind, near the banks of the river that flowed into the South China Sea. I remembered a water tower that used to be near the river on the Bund, a statue of iron rising into the night like an immortal out of the old stories. There it was now, in front of me. Hand over hand I began to climb. The wet rust bled around my fingers and onto the front of my dress.

There were wars in Europe, famines in Africa, hurricanes and tsunamis and Israel and Palestine, and here there was just me and Daru as he used to be, nine and naïve, natives in a land we two had created as children, climbing toward the skies on the old water tower.

Shanghai. The characters inverted meant on the ocean, and here we were, precariously balanced far above the spinning black waters. “The wars, Daru—you asked about them? Well, they were terrible. Bloated and infested. You never get to see them like I do. They don’t show them on the news. My first corpse wore a white dress, like the one I’m wearing now, see? And I couldn’t tell if she had been white or black or yellow because her skin was all red flesh baked and peeled in the sun. Like cracked wooden birches. You never see that here, do you? Terrible, and also terribly romantic because you were so close to death. Do you see what I’m talking about?” I was shivering.

“Sasha, Sasha, Sasha,” said Daru, “stop. You were never meant to be a war correspondent. Stay here. Come back home.”

I laughed for the first time since I had arrived in Shanghai. “Stay here? Daru, I don’t even recognize this city.”

He was silent. We sat with our feet dangling over the edge of a ledge that once had barely fit the two of us. In the river below I could hear the rush of water chased by the wind. I let one shoe drop. I imagined its diver’s splash: clean, graceful, empty of this world. In an instant it would disappear in the current. I dropped the other. The rain had softened the fabric of my dress; it filmed my face, my eyes, until Daru began to fade into the night.

“Daru, this is the most beautiful city in the world,” I said, exhausted from trying to create and preserve him. “And I wish it were at war.”