By that time, from what she said, I had fi nally come to know something about Mr Bao. He was an orphan. He grew up in an orphanage. He had been a child laborer in factories. Aged forty-eight, he had had rugged paths of life. He had worked as a mover, a waiter, a doorkeeper, a furniture repairer, an assistant in a bookshop, a mechanic, a construction supervisor and, at last, a self-taught engineer on building sites. Due to his childhood, he decided to be a bachelor. Not that he didn’t want to marry a woman. He simply didn’t want to be a father. As all the women he met wanted children, he was still unmarried.