When running commentary follows every boy and girl walking home from Xiangming High School under the stare of each hunching granny in the shikumen alleyways, there aren’t enough ways out of these urban labyrinths, but when the girl next door hits sixteen there aren’t enough ways in, now that the voice coming through the paper thin wall of a shared childhood goes silent, permanently lowered into only soft knocks of a hand fan, gentle rummaging through a drawer of cosmetics, and occasional hushed conversations on a mobile phone. Worse still, the longer he listens, the quieter it all becomes. With all the open neighborhoods, all the communal kitchens, all the women doing dishes on Fuxing street, all the people stepping through each other’s lives every day, the one place he wants to be is one apartment away, one little wall away, and a forbidden universe. Nothing identical was ever so different, no other tiny bedroom so large, no secrets more treasured than the unseen choosing of her cheongsam for the day, the turning of a textbook through a curtain of hair hanging over the desk in the light of her study lamp. The constant push and pull of tofu vendors and the bartering in the steam outside the window is silence beneath the pitter-patter of slippers on the floorboards that follow the exit from the shower–pink and fluffy or blue and flat, he doesn't know, but they have the same lazy skid as her voice at the end of a day, and their trip to that far corner is for lotion, surely, and the crossover is to pull the blinds, and the footsteps come back this way but stop briefly, every time, and he never knows for what. [Pete Bradt]