If only he had more money to invest, he thought. Li Xueshi had recently bought a brand-new speaker set, and the two of them spent hours listening to the sounds of rappers paying frantic homage to places they’d never seen, New York, London, São Paulo. They had beautiful women in their beds and the best of everything: Lamborghini, Rolex, Versace. Together, the two of them mouthed the syllables.

No, there wasn’t much for men like Zhu Feng here. He had ideas. He had ambition. He had taste. He liked that phrase, taste. It was something that belonged, emphatically, to his and Li’s generation. Not the shabbiness of his parents’ lives, their shuffling steps, the curtailed hopes that seemed to express nothing more than a desire to chide bao, chuan de nuan—to be full in the belly, to be warmly clothed.