By the time Fei Jie unhooked the last string of keys from her waistband, her fingers were numb with cold. It was November, and in one of the old buildings in the urban village, wind poured in through a broken stairwell window. Two more hallway lights had burned out. The lights were hers, and so was the building: six floors, seventeen apartments, all rented out by her alone. The neighboring buildings had long since been renovated. Hers was the only one still standing like an antique from the last century, with great swathes of peeling plaster exposing the drab gray bricks beneath and a stair rail so rusty it could pass for sandpaper.
