We decided to move first.
It was not the obvious choice. The obvious choice, the one that survival instinct and three lifetimes of painful lessons had wired into me, was to wait: to gather more information, to build more certainty, to make sure every piece was in place before committing to a direction that could not easily be reversed. In most of my lives, that caution had been correct. In two of them, it had been the thing that killed me — not action, but the gap between action and inaction, the moment when Min Wei had moved and I had not yet finished deciding whether to.
No Songyi made the argument for moving first in his characteristically understated way. He had come back two weeks after his initial visit, this time with a small leather-bound notebook that contained, he explained, a record of every formal interaction he had personally witnessed between Min Wei and officials in three different ministries over the past four years.
