“Ai, we’re paying the high-season price.” Qin has perhaps never before encountered such a perfect example of the type. This is how one approaches a person like Liu. The Qingdao breeze is so refreshing.” The conversation is clichéd and stilted, as it should be. “The weather is beautiful,” Qin says. “It is indeed beautiful.” “What’s the weather like, where you come from?” “The summer is hot. He has an intuition in these matters: as soon he spied the accountant he knew what kind of person he must be. Qin writes Liu’s information into his smartphone. They shake hands, each taking a formal pleasure in saying the other’s name. He is an accountant employed by a third-tier provincial city. The younger man is not carrying his cards no matter. He presents a business card the address is a prestigious district of Beijing. “Why didn’t you tell me before I bought them?” The younger man takes off his glasses, and wipes them on his T-shirt. The dog doesn’t dance just because the music plays. There is a fishing line sewn through the cut-out on display.
The animals won’t dance when you take them home.” “Ah, twin girls! How cute! Nature helps you evade the one-child policy.” He adds, “I have a daughter too, but she would not like this.” While the vendor is calling out to some other tourist, the older man explains, “It is a con. It is the younger man who crouches, and gets six, all different, the dog in addition to other creatures. How does this work? What hidden mechanism makes it possible? “Buy one for your children! Five yuan each, three for ten yuan!” and, imploring the older man, “Buy one for your mistress!” He is cross-legged on a sheet of white vinyl his DVD emits jaunty music while a paper cut-out of a cartoon dog, upright on the plastic, jigs in tempo. It seems one or the other will have to step aside, but actually neither does, for there is a vendor drawing their attention. The man observing all this turns and climbs over the rocky foreshore, and encounters, coming the other way, a younger man wearing a T-shirt with English words on it. Farther out is a chemical transporter, bizarrely unshiplike in form, being composed of reservoirs and tentacle-like pipes NO SMOKING is painted in characters larger than the name of the ship itself, and a lone seaman is on deck, leaning against a railing, smoking. A pleasure steamer goes past, so close you feel you could reach out and touch it, with tourists raising phones to capture the beach. Once this was a treaty port, and there remain a number of European buildings, pretty and absurd. You could almost think you were in a foreign country.
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