After a trip visiting family and old friends in China, my wife and I decided to make a stop in Japan for a short vacation. One evening, we went to a sento a little outside of Hiroshima in a small town known for its sake. The sento was simple, two separate baths—one for men and one for women—and an ice pool on the men’s side.

We had left our children at home in Wisconsin with my grandparents. I felt relieved, and guilty that I was so relieved, to be away from them. My daughter, now ten, had developed a tense relationship with me. When I searched for a word once, a word that I could not remember in English, she had said, “Speak English, daddy. We’re in America.” When I again stumbled, she said, “You’re a professor. How can you speak to college students without knowing English?”

My wife, an American-born Chinese, evaded this vicious treatment.

I kissed my wife before we went to our separate baths, and she told me to come out in three hours so we could arrive promptly at the hotel and have a good night’s sleep. In the locker room, I took off my clothes, folded them one-by-one, and placed them inside the locker. I sat on a stool and rinsed myself underneath the shower, picking up the bar of soap and lathering my underarms and crotch. The only other man showering was an elderly gentleman who kept his eyes closed the entire time.

The bath was pleasant with the cool winter air, and the water fragrant as if they had left flowers in the water. Naked, I stepped carefully to the end of the pool and placed my head against the stone, eager to shield my wrinkled body from the eyes of others. But everyone else was focused on themselves or their friends. Nobody even noticed me.

Through the bamboo wall, I could hear two women talking in English about whether the convenience store would have white chocolate soon.

Through the mist of the bath, I saw a face that seemed familiar, but could not quite pin it. We had the spark of recognition at the same time, that gradual of familiarity and then the sudden perceptive pulse. His face evolved from surprise to anxiety to a crude sort of acceptance at my existence here in this small bathhouse in Japan. I could not have known the emotions shown on my face, but I imagined they were similar. My hands instinctively went to my genitals to cover everything, and this made a small splash that unnerved me.

It was my old friend, who had lived a floor below me in Beijing when we had both been political science students at Peking. Back then, he had given himself the English name Alex, and insisted everyone call him that. The last I heard of him, he had moved to South Korea to study the changing dynamics between China and North Korea.

From what I remembered, Alex had been anti-government and had even started a secret pamphlet about the Party’s oppression of its people, how the Party was straying from its original values. Once in class, he had challenged a professor for being a puppet of the Party. I liked how he had smoked cigarettes openly in the dorms and dressed in a leather jacket even during the spring.

He waded over and we shook hands. I was thankful the herbs made the water misty and obscured both our bodies from sight. His chest had a little tuft of black hair and he still looked thin, but the skin hung on him more than it had many years ago. I remembered him as a handsome fellow, someone who was popular with the women, but who preferred to keep to himself. We had spoken in Chinese in the past, so I was now surprised to hear him speak English to greet me.

“Wow, we both got older,” he said, but his face remained pensive, unsmiling.

“I can’t believe it’s you!” I reached out to touch him, and he let me, but his pose was unenthusiastic as if he were speaking to a lingering student during office hours.

“Neither can I.”

“What are the chances?”

“It’s great to see you again.” He spoke with familiarity this time. His face looked ruddy in the heat, perhaps he had been in the bath a long time or he had been drinking, but he was still unusually handsome. Age had not stymied his good looks. He sat down next to me, and we enjoyed the heat of the water. Alex had reached out to me a few times after I moved to America while he remained in Taiwan, but my life then was so busy that I had not responded. Our relationship disintegrated not out of any malice, at least not on my part, but because I became engrossed in the rush of immigration and academia, of life being lived.

“How are you now? Don’t you live in America?” he asked with a wrinkle of his brow.

“I do. We live in Wisconsin now. It’s in middle America.”

“You’re married?”

“I am.”

“Good for you.”

I remembered we had once gone out for dinner when my first girlfriend broke up with me. I had drunk too much and eaten too little. We sat at a little ramen bar with lights hung up around the stall. He had urged me to date foreign women instead; Chinese women were too “uptight” and “traditional.” Alex did not want a conventional woman. He said he had slept with a Black American woman and found her much more attractive than any Chinese woman.

“How did you meet?” he asked.

“We met not too long after graduation when we were both doing research in California. I got the position in Wisconsin after. It’s hard to find a job in the cities. But the position isn’t too bad. The students are okay. I meet some kids from the mainland every once in a while.”

“I hear the people are bad there. Bad personalities. Look at how they treat Black people,” he said. I opened my mouth to respond, but he quickly said, “Why are you in Japan?”

“I was visiting some family in Beijing, and we stopped in Japan for a short vacation. You know, I went by our old dorms back at Peking. They look different now, more modern. The government did a little upgrade. I hear it’s no longer four men to a room.”

A young, Japanese man beside us spoke in a whisper to the elderly man I had seen in the showers. They both chuckled for a moment and then grew quiet. Alex rolled his eyes. “That’s the thing about Japanese people. They’re always polite, have a nice smile, but you know they’re saying bad things about you behind your back. That’s just the culture,” he said, leaning in so close that his hot breath raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

He told me he had been in South Korea for a few years. He almost married a Korean woman, but he ended up in the US, teaching Eastern philosophy at a prestigious college in New York City. He was still not married, and no longer planned to be.

“New York City. How exciting!” I said.

Alex shrugged and said, “Not too exciting. A lot of crime in Chinatown.”

“Why are you in Japan?” I asked, turning the question on him, feeling a little indignant at his apathetic tone.

“I’m here to relax. The Japanese know how to do hospitality right.” He massaged the back of his neck with his hand, an act that struck me as arrogant, but I could not pinpoint exactly why.

“I’ve got this spot on my back that I can’t reach. Would you mind scratching it?” he asked me.

I nodded and went over to scratch his lower back. Oddly enough, having his back turned to me was even more intimate than scratching it. All I could think about was his naked penis in the water. “Keep going,” “A bit harder,” he said until I had my nails into the skin and the spot was becoming pink and raw.

He gave a murmur of pleasure when I scratched so hard I worried that the skin would break and leak blood into the bath.

“What did you think of China while you were there?”

“It was fine,” I said, averting the question, not wanting to open up any anti-government rants he may have harbored over the years. I wanted to relax and reminisce, not engage in the political discourse we had in our youth.

“Where do you think China will be in the next five years? The next ten years?” he pushed.

“I’m not sure.”

“Where do you want it to be?” Alex pressed me. “Not up for our old debates? Be honest now, friend.” While he spoke, I noticed how his shoulders still seemed lean and powerful, as if the thick fat of age had not yet touched him there. His face was old, yes, but old in the way distinguished, successful men were.

I considered his question. My fingers were becoming shriveled. “China has become an autocracy in the past few years.” “You really think so?”

“Xi really knows how to squeeze them. Remember how we talked about democracy? You remembered the conversations we used to have. How the Party opened up discussions with citizens. They were thinking about democracy, you could tell. They were becoming liberal.”

“It’s hardly liberal now,” he remarked, dropping a stone from the edge of the bath into the water. Little waves radiated out.

“It’s a shut-up country now. A dictatorship. They’ve swung in the opposite direction and they’re all done with democracy and liberalism. They monitor the people. You know, when I was there, they had cameras on the streets watching everyone. They figured it was too much, too Western.”

“I haven’t been back to China for a few years now.”

I continued. “I only go back for my family. You can’t trust the research coming out of China anymore. It’s all censored. So everything that comes out is coming out of the Party.”

He rubbed his neck, and I heard the cracking of the muscle. It was a strong noise, the noise of a body that still functioned in all the ways it should. My own wrinkles seemed to pout in the water.

“China’s become different from where I thought it would have been. I’m glad I’m an American now,” I said. I leaned into the water until it was up to my neck, and exhaled so that my breath shone briefly in the cool night and then vanished.

His lower lip jutted out the way it used to before he debated, so I could tell he was disturbed. Had he gotten upset when I had stopped responding to his messages? Did he resent me for that? Did he think that yes, yes, now he had come out on top and who was I but a professor in Wisconsin while he was working in New York City? He seemed to consider my comment, swam around in a circle—his knees must have been touching the smooth stones at the bottom of the pool—and came back to me.

“Why are you saying these bad things about China without saying any of the good?” he said. His brow was furrowed; his hand clenched tightly in a fist. “When you say that, you make all of us look bad.”

“I’m being honest.”

“China has lifted hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty.”

“I know that.”

“Really, almost no other government has been able to do that.”

I thought back to an argument we had had with a South Korean student in our university days. He had spoken fluent Chinese and written beautiful essays on the dynamic between China and North Korea and the rising militarization of North Korea. He had kept to himself for most of the year, but we once took him out drinking after exams ended. It had been a hot night, summer in Beijing had a lush humidity, and we went out to a student bar. A wealthy classmate offered to pay for all of our drinks, so we chugged beers until our faces were hot and our mouths open.

We discussed the Party and whether we would soon be like America. It was only a few years after Tiananmen, and things were moving quickly. Many of the students said that there was no justice in China. The system was broken. We needed to have democracy even within the one-party system. The political science department at Peking had been left-leaning for the past few years, and egged on by our professors, we let loose in the bar.

We pressed the Korean student on his thoughts, a “foreigner’s thoughts,” I remembered Alex saying. The Korean student parroted our words, saying that Korea was now looking toward the West instead of China for more democratic principles. Alex raised an eyebrow. With a long, hard look—the bar had quieted—he slapped the Korean student on the face in one, severe stroke. The Korean student, shocked, almost cried. “I was just repeating the things you said!” he yelled.

“Do you know when you bitch about your parents to other people? Everyone’s done that. Have you ever done that?” Alex said.

“Yes,” the Korean student said tentatively. The fan circled above us.

“Only we can say those things about China. It’s like when you speak about your parents. Only you can say bad things about them. But your friends cannot.” A cavity opened up in my forehead. Clarity. I was angry as well. I remembered the sweat dripping from my upper lip. The Korean student left the bar shortly after. I saw him in class the following year, but he avoided me and spoke to no one.

When I looked back on that memory, it reminded me of the Americans who drove their trucks with American flags attached to the rear or Americans who wore only eagle t-shirts. But I found those people, often overweight and uneducated, far from my Chinese peers who had gone to the top university and written long essays on philosophy.

I then thought of the time I read an essay by a student who wore wife beaters to my class. He had been obsessed with Teddy Roosevelt and the Open Door Policy. His papers were riddled with spelling errors, and he possessed a dogged unwillingness to take criticism. He dropped out the next semester, and last I heard was working at a supermarket. Now in the bath, I ran my wet hands through my hair. The moon was a faded crescent shape. My body in the heat and my head in the cold for too long gave me a headache. When Alex touched my shoulder, I was briefly reminded of the top corner of my college dorm room, which held a small spider web that slowly expanded until a strand of its web dipped above my pillow and I was forced to remove the entire thing. The elderly Japanese man climbed the steps out of the pool, his shriveled ass briefly in view.

“Do you feel that way about America? That only you can say certain things about the country?” I asked him. He had kept a photo of Tiananmen Square taped inside the cover of his journal.

“Not yet,” he said. We were silent. My calf muscle tensed in the water and I stretched it out. He closed his eyes as if he were falling asleep, but I saw him swallow every few seconds. I left him at the corner of the bath and walked to the ice pool. I dipped in, starting with my toes and then up to my hips until my face was submerged. The numbing felt good, because it reminded me that my body had warm blood and could be numbed. When I emerged, I was shivering. Alex was still in the bath with his eyes closed. I felt an urge to cover my penis with my hands, but I was not sure why.

I shuffled over and tapped him on the shoulder. “It was good to see you.”

“Good to see you as well. Be careful,” he said.

“I will.”

By the time I came out of the locker rooms, my wife was waiting in the lobby. She was reading a book. I would probably never see Alex again. Even if I was in New York, I would not call him, and I could see no reason for why he would ever be in Wisconsin. We had a flight back to America next week. Dinner was scheduled with the Thompsons on Thursday. They held influence across the humanities and social sciences departments at my university on tenure, research grants, and teaching schedules. I had been trying to get dinner with them for over six months. But it all seemed small and insignificant now.