I referenced a book in my last post - Oracle Bones - and found an unfolding coincidence a few days later.

Recently I also mentioned the chat site, QQ, together with my reservations concerning it. It seemed to me that QQ was really just a thinly-veiled dating site, such was my general experience. But one or two of my QQ friends seemed genuinely interested in practising their English and talking about their lives.

May first wrote to me on a school trip to Canada. She was alone in a hotel room and probably a little lonely, so we struck up a (typed) conversation. She was worried about going out alone in Montreal and losing her way back to the hotel.

Later when she was back in China, we kept up our conversations. I was ploughing through Oracle Bones at the same time, never once making the connection between her home city, Shenzhen, and the chapters from the book I was reading, about the same town.

So here's the thing. In Oracle Bones, Hessler talks about the life of one of his former students who has moved to the booming proto-capitalist experiment that is Shenzhen, a city that came out of nothing and is a magnet for young Chinese escaping their villages. For migrating Chinese, this was tantamount to heading into the Wild West, a place that was inventing itself on the fly, inverting the usual ethics and mores of Chinese society and substituting a dog-eat-dog laisser-faire.

In the night dormitories of the Dickensian-like factories that these young women worked in 12 hours a day, new ways of living this extreme, untried life emerged. Many whiled away the little spare time they had listening to a radio program, At Night You're Not Lonely, in which a kind of Chinese agony-aunt, Hu Xiaomei, took calls from lonely, troubled or love-struck women.

When the Shenzhen moment struck me -it occurred to me in an instant- that May might have had the same experience as the women I was reading about. I asked her a few questions and was astonished to find that in fact she had. May had moved to Shenzhen in the 1990's. She knew the radio program and much else besides. It was like the pages of a book coming to life before my eyes. I think that this has formed an unusual connection between us, for she was just as astonished that I had asked her about, what were essentially, esoteric matters.

You never know where your path may lead.