On the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month in 2019, the Little New Year.
The urban village beyond East Fifth Ring Road in Yanjing was like an old patch forgotten in the folds of the city’s rapid expansion. The air was dry and cold, stinging the nose with the smell of coal smoke and a faint, sour rot from the garbage. The sky was dull and gray, with leaden clouds hanging low, stingily withholding even the faintest glimmer of light. Lü Shaojie leaned his blue electric scooter against an old locust tree by the roadside, stripped bare of leaves. He rubbed his stiff, frozen hands, the knuckles red, and watched his breath vanish at once into the cold air.
