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Commissar Liu’s arrival, though according to the schedule, the whole thing should have been finished half an hour ago.
    Granny was no longer able to contain her anxieties. She had another responsibility: to cook dinner for the family. A punctual soul, she had to start preparing aroundfour, or her day would be totally derailed. She was also seized with an asthma attack, possibly induced by the deteriorating air quality in the room or by her frustration over the impossible dinner. Her lips livid, she desperately needed to breathe fresh air, but her political responsibility demanded she stay shut up in the room. To our surprise, she produced a clay Buddha image hidden in the closet, and she started hugging the image in earnest:
Come back, Commissar Liu, oh Buddha, please allow us to cook, to cough, and to cope.
    Miles away from Red Dust Lane, Commissar Liu did not hear any of those desperate messages. At that moment, he was catching a glimpse of a waitress becoming a legend in Green Waves, a restaurant located by the nine-turn bridge in the City God Temple Market.
    Earlier in the afternoon, the Americans had come to the restaurant, which was celebrated for its Shanghai-style delicacies. President Nixon had been very satisfied, offering to shake hands with a young waitress who served at the table and describing her as “delicious” while still smacking his lips over a mini pork-and-crab-stuffed soup bun. The interpreter did an excellent job in translating the compliment. Such an epithet was a revelation, like a magic wand waving in a foreign fairy tale, shining over the waitress in her transparent crystallike plastic sandals. Several reporters rushed over to the one and only pay phone in the restaurant to share the latest news, which then spread quickly, especiallyamong those security personnel with mobile communication equipment, with details being added or modified in quick succession. In one version, President Nixon forgot to bite into the soup bun at the sight of her. In another variation, he bit, but so forcibly that the soup spilled out, and his wife scowled beside him. In every version, the waitress was a graceful beauty beyond description.
    The moment the American president left the restaurant, people rushed over from all directions. The waitress was standing behind a large window, cutting crisp-skinned roast pork on a huge stump with a sharp knife. She looked flushed—possibly with the American’s praise, though unaware of its instant rippling effect throughout the city. People immediately had excuses for being at her window—to buy some cooked food to bring home after a day’s hard work. A queue soon formed outside the window, looking through the glass at this “delicious” girl. Commissar Liu arrived in a great hurry, but he still had to stand at the end of a long line, waiting for an hour before his turn to come to the window. The sun radiated patience in the afternoon as the line inched forward. A fungus appeared out of a wall cranny close to his left foot. Finally, he moved up to the small opening in the window. She was now cutting a Beijing roast duck with its fat still dripping from the stitched ass. An iridescent-eyed fly sucked the sticky duck sauce on her bare rounded toe, delicious as the scallop buns in the banquet in honor of the American president.
    A fire hydrant squatting outside the restaurant stared through the glass in outrage. The red armband crumbled in his pocket, Commissar Liu forgot us.
    We did not hear anything about the visit that afternoon, nor did we hear in the early evening. In fact, the notice about the return of the American president to the hotel did not come until after nine o’clock that night, when the neighborhood committee called the district government. The details of the incident did not come out until much later, when Comrade Liu (having lost the Commissar title due to his “unforgivable negligence in a political assignment”) was