I met Dawei and Zichen on the same day, an hour apart. Dawei and I were both late for a bookshop panel, and arrived to find no seats left. We stood at the back and listened for a while, then one after the other we headed to the coffee shop downstairs. Dawei sat at the table next to mine, still holding the book that the event was for: Roberto Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth. We both ordered Americanos. He started talking to me in a not particularly enthusiastic tone, wondering which story from the book was my favourite. ‘Anne Moore’s Life’, I said. You girls all like that one, he said. What about you? I asked. His favourite was ‘Mauricio (“The Eye”) Silva’. Right away I thought he might be gay, because I had a gay friend who also liked that story. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans, which didn’t tell me anything. We chatted for a bit about 2666, then he said the panel would be ending soon, and suggested we go somewhere else before the audience came down and the place got crowded. Outside we saw someone else holding a copy of Last Evenings on Earth. This was Zichen. He’d gone to the loo halfway through the event and, while peeing, realised that none of the speakers understood Bolaño any better than he did, so he went back for his bag and left. Now he was standing beneath a clove tree having a cigarette. It was spring, and there’d just been a rain shower. Zichen told us this reminded him of a Bolaño simile: the quadrangular sky looked like the grimace of a robot. Neither of us could remember which book this was from, so we didn’t respond. Dawei had a smoke too, then we asked Zichen if he wanted to hang out with us.

We ended up in a cafe with numerous three-blade fans hanging from the ceiling. After talking more about Bolaño, we parted ways and headed home to bed. In the months that followed we spent many afternoons at that cafe. By summer, we’d decided to start an independent literary journal called Whale. It was Dawei who came up with the name. He insisted that a journal was alive, and so should be named after a living creature. There’d be one issue every three months, which would include short stories and poems, plus a few photographs. Dawei provided the money for paying contributors and printing. His dad had given him a flat in the city centre which brought in a spectacular amount of rent each month. He refused to work at his dad’s firm, though – in his words, it was a rubbish dump of capitalism. ‘Rubbish’ was his favourite term for everything he hated. The world was just one rubbish dump after another. It was 2012. Dawei was twenty-nine, I was thirty and Zichen thirty-two. Not exactly young any more. By the time they were our age, Nick had witnessed Gatsby’s downfall, and Frank had lost April in Revolutionary Road. It was time for us to stop dreaming, but meeting each other seemed only to delay our awakening. In a way, Whale was a shelter for our remaining dreams. I serialised a novel about a young woman and her lover, the ghost of a sailor from Joseph Conrad’s era. Dawei mostly wrote poems. He had been influenced by Conrad too, who believed that even fiction writers needed to go through the baptism of poetry in their youth. As for the actual poems, it was hard to say whose influence was at work in them, though there were traces of Celan, Trakl and Dickinson. His poems were nebulous, full of bizarre images: a polar bear’s kiss, a seal’s toes, Qu Yuan’s pillow. He illustrated them himself. Zichen barely contributed any writing apart from the foreword to every issue; his main duty was soliciting manuscripts. We knew he was working on a novel, but he refused to show it to anyone. His writing was, as he put it, in the midst of a violent transformation.

Whale shut down after a year due to a lack of material; there weren’t many writers we actually found worthy of publishing. More pragmatically, sales were terrible. We left copies at small bookshops on consignment, but barely any of them sold. The returns soon piled up in our warehouse. One evening we shoved them all against the walls to clear some space in the centre of the room, where we sat and held a simple ceremony to dissolve the magazine. We all got very drunk, hugging and kissing each other. When Dawei kissed me, I thought of the polar bear in his poem. There was a purity to it, no lust at all. If I were to fall in love with either of these men it would destroy quite a few things, and our dream would crumble in an instant – an awful prospect. That’s what was on my mind as I stumbled outside to the loo, a red-brick outhouse. When I was done, I heard flowing water nearby and walked towards it. I found myself at a river. The sailor’s ghost was standing on the water. I came up with an ending for my novel, I said, but I have no reason to finish writing it now. It ought to sink along with Whale, don’t you think? The ghost neither agreed nor disagreed. He held up a hand, as if to see whether moonlight could pass through his palm. I went back to the warehouse and stood before the door, thinking about how my laptop had died earlier that day, which meant I’d lost the first half of my novel. If I were to light a fire and burn down the warehouse, every remaining word of my novel would vanish from this world. The sailor, having followed me back, whispered in my ear, If you do that, I’ll become the ghost of a ghost! I ignored him, and imagined flames devouring the building with my two friends still inside. I’d be lonely without them, but also free. I pushed open the door. Zichen was cradling Dawei’s head, rocking him to sleep, but when he saw me he shook him awake. Dawei sat up unsteadily. In the murky light, Zichen stood and officially proclaimed that we were dissolving Whale. He ended by repeating our credo: against philistinism. We also stood against realism and political writing. Personally, Zichen believed novels should be unstructured, without a defined centre. They should be full of riddles that didn’t need to be answered. He thought it was difficult to lead a purely literary life in this country. We finished the booze, and felt sad.

We didn’t see each other for a while after the magazine closed, maybe three or four months. During this time I almost married a guy I met at a friend’s wedding, and Dawei split up with the woman in the UK he’d been dating long-distance for the last two years. We phoned each other to share the pain of our broken hearts. Realising we hadn’t seen Zichen for a while, we each called him separately, which is how we found out he’d broken a leg and had been lying at home for two months. We wanted to see him but he turned us down. I called Dawei, who said, I’m going anyway, he needs us. I’d like to see him too, I said, I feel like we’re losing him. We kept calling Zichen until he said okay, we could get together, but not at his home. We arranged to meet by a lake in a park. It was a strange encounter. Dawei and I arrived at the appointed time to find Zichen already there, waiting alone in his wheelchair. It was evening and there was no one in sight, just wild ducks flying across the water. He seemed to have been there a while, part of the landscape. When we said goodbye, he insisted that we leave first. Someone would pick him up soon, he said. We left him alone by the lake.

It was at that meeting that Zichen first brought up Hai Tong, whose book he’d been reading. Neither of us had heard of her. We asked if we ought to have done.

Not many people have read her work, he said. She’s very mysterious, no one knows where she lives. Remember in 2666 when three academics travel to Mexico in search of Benno von Archimboldi? Maybe Hai Tong is our Archimboldi. Do you mean – we should go searching for her? Dawei asked. The best way to get close to an author is to become part of their story, Zichen said. We all like Bolaño, right? Fiction is a kind of spell, I said, and analysing a story is an exorcism. It loses all its mystery. All great fiction is a maze, Zichen said. You can’t understand if you haven’t walked through it. Dawei pointed at Zichen’s cast, We’d better wait till you’re back on your feet, though.

After saying goodbye to Zichen, Dawei and I went for dinner. Zichen looked a bit fragile, Dawei said, like he hadn’t spoken to anyone for a while. It’s true, I said, being alone for too long gives you all kinds of peculiar ideas. He replied, You’re not wrong, we should go see him again next week.

When I got home, I looked up Hai Tong. She’d published a novel in 2008, The Pleiades, which was now out of print. The used-book site I checked only listed one seller in Beijing. I bought a copy, and later learned Dawei had done the same. Our books arrived the following day. By that time, I’d read all the information about Hai Tong I could find on the internet. The publication of The Pleiades had caused some controversy. Readers were outraged by the graphic scenes: a young boy sexually assaulted by an older man, a woman masturbating with a police truncheon, a teacher suffocating a cat in a piano, a water cooler full of blood. Critics assumed these sensational moments were there for spectacle, to attract readers’ eyeballs. Four hundred and eighty seven pages of chaos, with no structure to speak of. Reading it, you had no idea what the author was trying to say. Some readers said they felt so uncomfortable they wanted to fling the book from a window. Others said they pitied the author, who was clearly a confused woman with severe childhood trauma. The novel was resolutely ignored by the literary establishment until a prominent award unexpectedly named it Book of the Year. The citation went: This book is impossible to summarise or analyse. It manifests the author’s abundant life force and unrestrained talent. Hai Tong didn’t attend the ceremony. Her editor explained she was travelling abroad. When interviewed afterwards, this tall, skinny man with black-rimmed glasses confessed he’d never actually met Hai Tong in person, they’d only ever emailed. The reporter – who seemed in a rush to get home in time for the school run – tried to wrap things up by asking, In your view, what kind of person is Hai Tong? The editor pushed his glasses up his nose and said, I sense that she’s a little plump, even though she doesn’t eat much, and that she’s on the shy side, with a quiet voice, and . . . The reporter put her recorder away and said, All right, thank you, we look forward to reading more of Hai Tong’s books.