Trying to meet up with Charity in the big station is the first exercise of many during the trip in challenging cell phone culture. My "little smart phone" only works in Sichuan province . . . and we ain't in Sichuan anymore. I use a public phone to call Charity and tell her I'll wait at the Northeast exit. But when I climb up and out the exit is complicated, with three floors. I choose the middle one, and wait. The weather is much colder than I brought clothes for. Wind. I watch the other waiters play with their many-featured cell phones, wonder if I could charm them into letting me send her a message.

When she doesn't come I wonder nervously downstairs to see her (I think it's her) squinting at a map of the station. She begins to walk away, and I follow after, disturbed by how unsure I am that it is her. When I touch her shoulder to turn her around, our reunion is underwhelming, like meetings of loved ones here are. I don't hug her, though I want to.

She has come more than an hour to the train station to meet me, but she dismisses her own hospitality, saying, "I've never seen the Shanghai South Train Station" - a backwards excuse we delight in making to our friends. No one ever means exactly what they say and you're not SUPPOSED to take anything at face value.

We bus back out to the outlying district of Shanghai where she is stuck in (forgive me) nothing of a life. Just work (and nothing to hold her there) and trying to make it another year or two when the college loans will be paid off and she can return to Sichuan. An older cousin and his family but she doesn't see them often. No money to go out on the weekends. No ping-pong in the common room because someone would call her boyfriend and tell him she's hanging out with other guys. You could mistake the place for any small city, China. We spend two days between the hotel room they have rented for me and the restaurants where we eat lunch and dinner with her boyfriend, who is nice, and gentlemanly in every patronizing way. She stays with me at the hotel and finally we have someone to whom we can tell everything.

On the second night we gang up on her boyfriend about the dinner choice. We want dumplings. He wants to go back to the same Sichuan restaurant where we had (granted, a very tasty) lunch. We win. The dumplings are terrible. I buy microwave popcorn and we go back to the hotel to watch TV.