"Always good to have a family that gets lucky like that. My family is from Xi'An," ...she would have no idea where that is. "Which is in the middle. But my father and mother moved down to Hong Kong for business, before I came here."

"It must have been such a change. Coming here from the West Country was enough of a shock. I almost got run over in the road my first day."

"The first few weeks were Quite Interesting. My English was not as good as it is now."

"Your accent is very good."

"I'm glad the work paid off."

"When I grew up, my mother always taught me that the most important thing is to be beautiful."

"Well, I'd say you've made her proud."

She laughs. "I should, it was all I learned as a child. How to stand, how to walk, how to dress, how to speak so that men would be entranced by me." She moves her hand delicately in a way that catches Jing Yi's eye.

"Learning how to look like a certain person-- it's harder than most people think it is."

"And then when I moved out of the West Country of course I became a fashion designer. It was the only skill I had, assuming I didn't want to go into prostitution or marriage-- not that those occupations are terribly different."

He laughs. "Those are really just two different ways to get paid for sex. Though vicars unreasonably approve of one more than the other."

She strokes the pigeon with her fingers. "Reading books was-- a marvel to me. There was a whole other world out there. Shakespeare, science... So many things to know other than being pleasing to men."

He is going to have to acquire her So Many Books. Unfortunately most of the books he knows are screenplays and not science. But he'd be happy to give up his Importance of Being Earnest for a worthy cause. "It's a big world-- and a shame you got shut off from it."

"There are so many places one can be that go beyond a small town in the West Country. So what's your tragic story?"

He laughs. "It's not excitingly tragic. I left university without much in the way of career prospects-- acting is bad enough, entry level acting is worse-- and instructions that while my father would love for me to come home, it would be a terrible idea. And well, opium is a very fun distraction but it has a bad tendency to eat one's life."

"So I've been told. I've never had the pleasure to use it myself."

"--I would strongly recommend you wouldn't. Even if you only ever use it once, there are people with... a strong interest in you using it more than once, let's say."

"I wouldn't. I prefer my pleasure more... organic."

"Before I met you, I would have said all those people going 'life is so much better than opium' were a bit self-deluded, but now I can see I was the self-deluded one."

"And yet you chose life over opium."

 "Life lasts longer. And you get to say you've Done Something, maybe even Something Good With Your Life."

"Choosing meaning over bliss?"

"Meaning and not dying in a literal gutter."

She laughs. "But you would be so happy in the gutter!"

"It's got a certain artistic appeal."