“I miss your voices. Sometimes I’m on the subway for hours each day, I feel like a child in the underworld, and I imagine all kinds of things . . . The netherworld is a kingdom of its own, with its own prefectures, magistrates and government, it’s supposed to be another city entirely . . . I am lovesick for some lost paradise / I would rise free and journey far away. Do you know this poem?” Her words frightened me. “Ai-ming, don’t lose hope now, not when you’ve worked so hard.” “Oh, Ma-li, it’s not that I’m unhappy. Far from it. I just want to take another step. I want to live.”
