“I don’t know. I could try to take a look, but not right now, I don’t think.” Paul, with the box on his lap, was running his hand through a set of bamboo chimes. When he stopped, Lily pointed; when he clattered them again, she laughed.

“If you could, it might help. Anything from that time. And I’d like to try to translate this.”

“I don’t know… What if he asks for it? Now that he’s been reminded.”

“We’ll Xerox it,” Bill suggested. “Then you can put it back. It won’t take long.”

“Well.” Anita smiled. “All right. After all, that he gave to you.”

“Can you really read that?” Bill asked as I got back into the car. We’d spent twenty minutes at the Kinko’s in the mall, and then I’d returned the book to Anita, thanking her profusely and trying not to look like I was running out the door.

“Why wouldn’t I be able to?” I airily traced my finger down a column of Chinese characters.

“Because if it was written in Shanghai while Paul Gilder was there, it’s probably in the Shanghainese dialect, which, though Chinese characters carry no phonetic information and therefore can be read by anyone literate, still may be different enough in the vocabulary formed by those characters to baffle a speaker of one of the other Chinese dialects, say for example Cantonese.”

I stared at him. “What are you, Wikipedia?”

“What’s that?”

“Never mind. How do you know all that, what you just said?”

“Anybody trying to impress his Chinese associate into thinking he wasn’t a total loser would have gone out of his way to know that. So can you read it?”

“Anyone trying to impress her lo faan associate into thinking she was a genius wouldn’t admit it if she couldn’t.”

“I already know you’re a genius.”

“Oh. Okay, then, I can read it, but I have to guess at some words. But there’s no question it’s Mei-lin’s diary. Listen how it starts: ‘Kai-rong is back!!!’ That’s written extra big, with emphasis. Then it goes, ‘What-’ uproar, I think that’s the word. ‘The houseboys airing his rooms, Cook racing to market, the kitchen maids peeling and chopping. I wanted to go meet his ship but of course Father and Amah said no.’ Doesn’t that sound like family?”

“Not my family, but I see what you mean.”

I scanned the page. Modern Chinese is written in simplified characters, but at the Mott Street Chinese school my brothers and I had (with varying degress of grumpiness) gone to Saturday mornings, the teachers had been educated before Mao’s reforms. They’d proudly taught us the old ways. And these strokes-made with a pen, I thought, not a brush-were particularly crisp. “Okay,” I said, “now listen.”

“You’re about to show off?”

“I am. Any objection?”

“None.”

So as we drove toward and over the gleaming Hudson, I read the entry out loud. I stumbled occasionally, but generally, I think I did my Chinese teachers proud.

“ ‘Father sent bodyguards, so I’d have been perfectly safe, but it’s not the danger, I know it’s not! The docks are like every place I want to go: A decent young lady can’t be seen there. SO old-fashioned!!! A decent young lady can’t go anywhere except the homes of other decent young ladies. Even then her amah goes with her! A decent young lady is the same as a prisoner!

“ ‘So I’m sitting, waiting. Sitting, waiting!! Amah sent me to work on my embroidery-an ancient, useless art! Though I am rather good at it. But I stuck myself twice when I thought I heard the car. So I threw that aside to start this book.

“ ‘I haven’t put a stroke in it since Kai-rong sent it from Italy. Father wanted me to fill it with calligraphy-another useless art I’m good at! Copies of famous poems. Amah thought that was a lovely idea. I didn’t! I know why Kai-rong sent it: So I could keep a journal the way European women do. Until now it’s been empty, because what could I write about? Whatever happens behind these walls? But now that Kai-rong’s back, things will change! Father and Amah listen to him. He’ll tell them I’m grown up! He’ll make them let me go out! I’ll finally, finally, finally get out from behind these walls! Kai-rong’s come back to rescue me!!!’ ”

That was the first entry. I took a breath.

“Boy,” said Bill.

“No kidding.”

“Girls just wanna have fun, huh?”

“Hey, give her a break! In the old days women could spend their whole lives locked up in the house. And Shanghai was a dangerous place. You’re the one who’s reading a book about it.”

“Doesn’t say much about girls locked behind walls.”

“What does it say?” I was realizing I didn’t know much about wartime Shanghai. “If it doesn’t make me sound like not a genius to ask.”

“Every word you speak makes you sound like the genius you are. Mostly it says the opposite: the place was a nonstop end-of-the-world party. Everyone who didn’t run when the Japanese came was frantically dancing and drinking, pretending nothing had changed.”

“Party like it’s 1936? All during the war, they did that?”

“What we mean by ‘the war’ was different in Shanghai. Until ’forty-two, the only way you could tell there was war in Europe was when Europeans snubbed each other in the streets.”

“But the Chinese civil war? And the Japanese invasion?”

“The civil war had been going on for years. When the Japanese came, Mao wanted to unite with Chiang Kai-shek to fight them, but Chiang wasn’t interested. That worked for the Japanese. Chiang went inland to push Mao north, and Japan set up puppet governments and occupied the coast. Everyone left Europeans alone and Europeans made money. Until ’forty-two, that was ‘the war’ in China.”

“And in ’forty-two?”

“December ’forty-one was Pearl Harbor. A few months later the Japanese locked Allied nationals-English, Belgians, Dutch, Americans-into internment camps.”

“That’s where Alice Fairchild was, one of those. So the party was over then?”

“No. Things got ugly, but the party went on.”

“Who was left to party?”

“To start with, lots of Japanese. And Germans. Vichy French. Neutrals-Swedes, Spanish, Portuguese. Filipinos, Indians. White Russians. Wealthy Chinese.”

“Indians? Weren’t they British citizens? And Filipinos-”

“They were Asian. The Japanese didn’t lock up other Asians, no matter whose citizens they were. They wanted to be loved when they took over that half of the world and Germany took over the other. They didn’t intern the Jewish refugees, either. Japan had no argument with them. To make Germany happy, they moved them to a ghetto-”

“In Hongkew. In 1943. Rosalie and Paul went there. What, you think you’re my only source of historical information?” I looked at the Xeroxed pages. “So here’s poor Mei-lin, in 1938, in the middle of a wild party, and she can’t go.”

We exited the bridge. Bill asked, “How many entries?”

I flipped through. “Hard to say, but the last one’s dated 1943. After that the pages are blank. Oh…”

“Oh, what?”

“Oh, I’m being stupid. You saw how it threw me when Anita told us Rosalie died so young. I just remembered C.D. Zhang saying Mei-lin had disappeared. I asked him what happened and he said, ‘It was wartime.’ ”

“So you’re worried about her, too?”

“How stupid is that? I hardly know her! I mean, obviously I don’t know her at all-”

“It’s not stupid. It’s one of the best things about you.”

“How I get carried away?”

“No,” he said. “How you care.”

I shot him a suspicious look, but he was concentrating on the road as though he were new in town.

After a moment I looked at the papers again. What a day this has been! She could say that again, I thought. To Bill I said, “I have an idea.”

“Good, I like ideas.”

“I’m really hungry.”

“That’s less an idea than a description of your existential situation.”

“It was the preface. I’m suggesting we find someplace for a snack and I read to you.”