You were the only Pamela. You worked as a translator and spoke in deliberate, precisely enunciated English. You were pretty, with a smart bob and unblemished skin a fashionable shade of pale. And there you were sitting on the stool next to me, drinking straw-yellow SNOW beer and crying at the only gay bar in town.

An older girl had broken your heart, you told me between sobs. You called her your ex-girlfriend, although I wonder if she would reciprocate the term. You used to lie to your friends about where you were going and meet her in bathroom stalls and darkened corners. You told your parents you were too busy to have a boyfriend, but of course, you would get married—to do otherwise would have been unthinkable. And then one day she wasn’t there and she wouldn’t answer your calls. So you bought bootleg DVDs of The L Word and watched every episode, then watched them again. You kept coming back to this place, hoping that maybe you would run into her by chance.

You asked me why on Earth I had come to Wuhan instead of somewhere cool, like Beijing, or beautiful, like Chengdu, where the pace of life is gentler and alleyways still harbor tree-shaded teahouses. You had lived in Wuhan all 22 years of your life, a fact you confessed with a twinge of shame. Wuhan is many things—the capital of Hubei province, the site of a violent uprising against the Cultural Revolution, a transportation hub where bullet trains snake through a white station resembling a space hanger—but it has never been a place that many are proud to call home. Less than a century ago, Wuhan was three cities, Hanyang, Hankou and Wuchang, which the government decided to artificially merge into a metropolitan area larger and less cohesive than Shanghai. The result is a ten million-person concrete sprawl on the Yangtze River where traffic-choked roads run between the districts like sutures across a wound.

Like many second-tier Chinese cities, signs of seismic change were inescapable in 2010. Over the course of a week, whole bridges would rise up from the rubble and scaffolding would envelope skyscrapers like a parasitic mold. One morning, I woke up to a knock on my door and a crew of construction workers entered, demolished my kitchen, then left the gutted apartment two hours later without a word. My neighborhood—which has since been obliterated to make way for a subway line—still had dirt alleys lined with chain-smoking elderly men, their bare, distended bellies on display as they played mahjong. A few blocks away loomed a cavernous, vacant luxury shopping center, where a pair of shoes cost more than most Wuhanren earned in a month. A permanent dome of industrial-grade smog hung over the city, so dense that it could be seen from miles away. On cloudless days, the sky was never blue, but rather a brighter shade of ash illuminated with a diffuse light, as if one were viewing the sun from underwater.

In the months leading up to my departure for China, I had been living my own double life. I spent my days waiting tables at a French restaurant in the suburbs and my nights with another waitress in the city. For the first time in my life, I found myself lying on a daily basis—who I had seen, where I had slept.