She spoke in Mandarin. Not the careful classroom Mandarin of the language labs at Middlebury, but the fast, warm, slightly rough Mandarin she had learned on the streets of Futian, with the soft southern edges that Shenzhen gave to everything, the Mandarin of the wet markets and the bus stops and Chen Popo's six tables under the green awning. It took about seven seconds. Her voice did not rise and did not hurry.
Saying one sentence of Chinese is no challenge at all for me, Mr. Kincaid. I could say a hundred. What you ought to be worried about isn't my Chinese. It's whether Chairman Lin, who is standing right behind you, understands English.
She stopped.
The silence that followed was a silence nobody who heard it ever forgot. Kenji would try, that night, to describe it to his girlfriend over takeout in their apartment in the Sunset, and she would laugh at him for being dramatic, and he would put down his chopsticks and say, No. Listen. I'm serious. It was like the whole building stopped breathing.
Bradley Kincaid stood on the gravel with his arms folded and his chin up and his face perfectly blank, and he waited for someone, anyone, to tell him what she had said.
Nobody told him.
Bradley turned his head, not his body, and looked at Owen. Owen was holding his phone out in front of him at arm's length, the translation app open, the little microphone icon still pulsing. His glasses had slid all the way down his nose. He did not push them back up. His face had gone the color of skim milk.
"Owen," said Bradley. "What did she say?"
Owen's mouth opened. Nothing came out of it. He tried again. When his voice arrived it cracked in the middle, like a teenager's.
"Bradley," he said. "Look behind you."
"What did she say?"
Amara answered for him. In English this time, in the same level working voice, unhurried, as though she were reading back a sentence that someone else had spoken into her headphones.
"I said that saying one sentence in Chinese is no challenge for me, Mr. Kincaid. I could say a hundred. I said that what you should be worried about isn't my Chinese." She paused. "It's whether Chairman Lin, who is standing behind you, understands English."
Bradley Kincaid turned around.
He did it slowly. Owen, describing it later to his sister on the phone, would compare it to watching a container ship turn in a narrow harbor: a long, laborious, almost geological process, with a great deal of mass involved and no possibility of hurrying.
At the far end of the gravel path, under the tall arch of the main entrance, five people in dark suits stood in a loose group. In front of them, a little apart, stood a slight man of about sixty-five in a plain charcoal jacket and an open-collared white shirt, with silver hair cut short and rimless glasses and a folded copy of that morning's Wall Street Journal tucked neatly under one arm. His face was calm. It wore an expression of polite, attentive curiosity, the expression of a man at a museum who has come across an exhibit he had not expected and is in no hurry to move on.
Bradley had seen that face perhaps two hundred times in the last eight months. In photographs, in annual reports, in a forty-minute documentary on Chinese industry that Owen had made him watch on a flight to Denver. He had never seen it in person. He had imagined, many times, in some detail, the first moment he would see it in person. He had imagined himself striding forward, hand out, smile ready.
He had not imagined this.
Lin Weiguo began to walk down the path.
He did not hurry. He walked the way some very small, very old men walk, with a kind of unbothered precision, as though the ground belonged to him and he was merely checking on it. The gravel crunched softly under his shoes. The five people in dark suits followed a few paces behind. He came down between the round lemon trees, and he passed Teddy, who was standing with both hands pressed over his mouth, and he passed Marcus Bell and his leather folder, and he passed Owen, and he passed Bradley Kincaid.
He passed Bradley the way you pass a lamppost.
He stopped about four feet from Amara, in the edge of the shaft of sunlight. He was a good eight inches shorter than she was. It did not appear to trouble him at all. He looked up at her with frank interest.
"Good afternoon," he said in English.
His English was precise and a little old-fashioned, with the faint flattened vowels of someone who had learned it a long time ago in California and had not had much occasion to update it since.
"I studied electrical engineering at Stanford," he said, as if she had asked. "In 1986. I'm afraid I've lost all my slang. My grandchildren tell me I speak English like a textbook from the Reagan administration." He tilted his head slightly. Then he switched, without any pause, into Mandarin. "But I think your Mandarin is better than my English. Where did you grow up?"
"Futian," Amara said in Mandarin. "Near Hongli Road. Behind the Xinzhou market."
His eyebrows went up a little. "Xinzhou," he said. "That was all fields when I was a boy." And then, switching again, into Cantonese, softer and quicker, with a slight lift at the end, like a man trying a door to see if it opened: "And Cantonese? Do you speak Cantonese too?"
Amara smiled.
It was the first time she had smiled since 6:02 that morning. She felt it happen before she could decide whether to let it, a real smile, surprised and wide, the smile of someone who has been speaking to strangers in careful formal voices all day and suddenly hears, in a glass building on the wrong side of the Pacific, someone call to her from across the street at home.
"I speak Cantonese," she answered, in Cantonese. It came out exactly the way she had learned it, fast and blunt and musical, with the hard edges and rough consonants of the wet-market grandmothers on Fuhua Road who had taught it to her by shouting at her over crates of mantis shrimp. "I learned it from the aunties at the market. Very rude aunties. Excellent at scolding. I learned a lot of words that I'm not allowed to use in front of a chairman."