7

A FOREST LAID FLAT

Somewhere in the canopy above me, hopping between moss-covered branches, was an animal synonymous with wonder. It was dawn in New Guinea—a time locals more poetically refer to as bird-singing hour—and a jungle of green separated us: enormous ferns with prehistoric-looking fronds, pencil-thin bamboo with emerald leaves, dangling vines as thick as my legs, broad-leafed epiphytes wedged into paper-thin cracks, palm trees that dropped roots like floating mangroves. I could make out the creature’s small whitish shape only occasionally. But its song was clear. It announced itself to the waking forest with a call that sounded like a lilting Southeast Asian language. A moment later its voice morphed into a seagull’s plaintive echo. Then it laughed like a kookaburra.

I had hiked into the forest with a twenty-eight-year-old guide named Fidelis Kimbeng, and he tilted his head to one side and whistled. A moment later the bird replied with a long descending note. “A bird of paradise,” Fidelis whispered. “I don’t know the name of the species, but it’s the one with no feathers. It’s trying to attract a female.”

It had taken me a week to reach that patch of forest. I had flown from Beijing to Singapore and then overnight to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. From there, a twin-propeller plane had taken me over a wild mountain range to Madang, a sleepy city on New Guinea’s northern coast, and I had driven through a fractured landscape of logging concessions. Finally, I had spent two days hiking through the densest jungle I had ever seen. After the effort, I was looking for some kind of destination, and I claimed the bird as my reward.

A light rain tapered off and as the sky brightened from tangerine to yellow, the jungle became animated: hundreds of birds began to call, a daily ritual of greeting and boundary setting. Fidelis had grown up in what Papua New Guineans call “the bush,” and he identified a half-dozen species by their songs: a hornbill’s deep baritone honks; the airy whistles—like someone just learning the skill—of a cuckoo; a soft cooing from a bird known in Pidgin, the English derivative spoken in Papua New Guinea, as balus: airplane. “We call it balus because it flies like an airplane, with its wings straight,” Fidelis said.

I had travelled to New Guinea—after Greenland, the world’s second-largest island—hoping to see a bird of paradise, and for the next hour I continued to stare through the curtains of greenery. Preparing for my trip, I’d read The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, and learned that birds of paradise had been New Guinea’s top attraction for centuries. Today, Wallace is best known for explaining the central concepts of evolution before Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, but in his own time, Wallace was more celebrated as a field biologist, and he had devoted long sections of the book to ruminations on various animals. (Wallace’s paper, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type”, compelled Darwin to put two decades of notes in order.) I had learned that when the first European traders reached Southeast Asia in the sixteenth century, locals presented them with dried skins from birds they called manuk dewata—God’s birds. Portuguese traders gave the birds another name: passaros de col, birds of the sun. European scientific élites changed their name again. They wrote in Latin, calling them avis paradiseus, paradise birds.

The hyperbolic-sounding names were a reaction not to the vocal range of the various species but to their plumage. New Guinea is among a handful of islands where few native animals hunt birds, and its thirty-eight bird of paradise species have tails that open into bright trains, fans, and—like peacocks—shields of shimmering feathers. Some have elegant wirelike tails the metallic blue-green colour of Northern Hemisphere hummingbirds. Many biologists argue that the plumage developed to impress mates, but it is unnecessary for survival, raising—at least for me—the possibility that the birds simply appreciate beauty. Wallace seemed to suggest as much when he wrote that their “exquisite beauty of form and colour and strange developments of plumage . . . furnish inexhaustible materials for study to the naturalist, and for speculation to the philosopher.”1

I stared into the canopy hoping to catch a clear view of the bird but constantly being distracted by other things. A large, black rhinoceros beetle seemed lost as it picked its way along the edge of a saw-toothed leaf. Fidelis pointed to a hornbill that lifted off from a low branch with the sound of a train leaving a station, each beat of its wings creating a deep baritone thump. A small beautiful insect with wide emerald spots and giant drooping antennae made a precarious ascent of my boot.

After two days in the forest, I already knew that its whole is more interesting that any of its constituent parts. In a world that has been largely developed and rearranged by man, the forests of New Guinea protect a biological time capsule, one of a few places left where large swathes of land have never met a chainsaw, bulldozer, or paved road, a wilderness where it remains possible to imagine the planet as it looked millennia ago. Largely, that isolation is a product of geography. The island—today split almost evenly between Papua New Guinea in the east and the Indonesian state of Papua in the west—is covered by rain-forest-clad mountains, sprawling swamps, fissured caves, and whitewater rivers. Like Australia, with which it was once connected in a single land mass called Meganesia, it is home to a wide range of deadly creatures: its poisonous snakes include both death adders and banded sea kraits; saltwater crocodiles can grow large enough to flip small boats; black widows are only slightly less appealing than bird-eating spiders (which, although not deadly, deliver an enzyme strong enough to liquefy a bird); mosquitoes—most dangerous of all—carry two strains of malaria. When a group from the British Ornithological Society set out in 1910 for a mountain range they could see in the distance, they managed to cover only 65 kilo-metres before giving up—on day 408.2

More indicative of the difficult geography were the communities that never left the interior. People have lived in New Guinea for at least 45,000 years and, at some point, a group made it to the higher, malaria-free mountains at the island’s centre. The rest of the world discovered their existence only in 1935, and as recently as 1961 anthropologists were able to make first contact with a group of highlanders, almost certainly the last time such a vast, previously unknown civilisation will be pulled into the modern world.

That isolation has preserved New Guinea as what Wallace called “the greatest terra incognita that still remains for the naturalist to explore”, a place that contained “more strange and new and beautiful natural objects than any other part of the globe”, and reaching it was the highlight of an eight-year trip he made to Southeast Asia between 1854 and 1862.3 During the trip he amassed a collection of more than 125,000 plant and animal specimens, many of them new to science, and New Guinea protected an oversized amount of that biodiversity: it covers only 0.5 percent of Earth’s land mass—an area equivalent in size to two Californias—but protects 6 percent of all species.4

Given the global loss of forests since Wallace’s trip, the island is even more important today. Harvard University’s Edward O. Wilson, probably the most famous modern-day naturalist, claims New Guinea as one of five “last true wildernesses on land”.5 Norman Myers, an influential British environmental writer, puts its forests among “less than 5 percent” of the tropics that still harbour “pristine wilderness”.6 When Jared Diamond, the environmental historian, first explored a remote section of its interior in 1974, he encountered animals that almost certainly had never seen a human. Not knowing fear, they were entirely tame: birds of paradise performed mating dances in front of him; unrecorded species of tree kangaroos sat and stared at the strange intruder.

Fidelis was tall and as chiselled by hard work as a model in an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue. He had a mop of spiky black hair and quick eyes that seemed to catch the jungle’s many nuances: a hidden bird’s nest, an edible plant, signs of wildlife that had moved on long before. He had grown up in a tiny village two days’ walk to the east but had studied in Port Moresby, and, a few years earlier, a group of Western scientists had hired him as a para-ecologist, a scientist trained to do tasks graduate students typically do in the West: collect specimens, run experiments, tabulate results. He had spent part of a year working with a Czech lepidopterist—an expert on butterflies and moths—and could identify dozens of species as they flitted through the canopy. The day before he had pointed out his favourite—Papilio ulysses, a large black-and-metallic blue butterfly named after the Greek hero of the Odyssey.

Like everyone who grows up in the forest, Fidelis also had a deep, almost intuitive, knowledge of the natural world. As we waited, he showed me a palm tree that can be used to make bows and the arrowhead-shaped leaves of a plant that can be eaten to break fevers. He told me how to find wild pigs and explained that drinking their blood helps set broken bones.

He also helped me parse the jungle’s unique aroma. After the sun had risen and the birds had quieted, saving their strength in the tropical heat, I commented on the thick smell of the forest, a combination of damp earth and decomposing leaves that seemed to define fecundity—the very scent of life. Fidelis stopped and sniffed the air, perhaps the way an American would if someone said a shopping mall’s odour defined commerce.

“Do you smell that sweet smell?” he asked.

I had noticed a pungent fragrance, like crushed fruit.

“Wallaby sperm,” Fidelis said.

Wallabies look like small kangaroos, and although they’re native to New Guinea it struck me as odd both that something kangaroo-like would live in the jungle and that their sperm would have a rich, pleasant smell. I must have looked sceptical because Fidelis proceeded to explain in Pidgin-inflected English: “When it sleeps with its girlfriend, it spreads out its sperm so it smells like this,” he said. “They will make a new wallaby.”

Just beyond where Fidelis caught the wallaby’s scent, he stopped at the base of a huge tree with coffee-coloured bark. Two metres around at the bottom, it rose eighteen or twenty metres in an almost perfect pillar and then began to throw out thick, dark branches. Nearer the ground, we examined an epiphyte kingdom clinging to its sides: long looping vines wove their way between patches of fungus, mushroom plateaus, and mats of light green moss; armies of insects marched within the miniature forest: jewel beetles that glowed metallic red, orange, and yellow; a dusky walking stick with paper-thin folded wings; tiny red ants with menacing pincers. Tilting our heads back, we peered through the understory at its wide canopy, a sprawling expanse lit yellow-green by the rising sun.

“Kwila,” Fidelis said. “This tree is very valuable.”

Kwila goes by other names—merbau in Indonesia, idil in the Philippines, komu in Thailand, Intsia bijuga in botany departments—and I had seen it before. Four years earlier Greenpeace had held a press conference in Beijing to publicise how kwila had been reduced from a range that once stretched across Africa, India, and Southeast Asia to small pockets, most of them in New Guinea. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature had listed the species as “facing a high risk of extinction in the wild in the near future”, and Greenpeace estimated that if logging continued at its recent pace, kwila would face commercial extinction within several decades.7

The sudden decline made the tree an arboreal version of tigers—its existence suggested a healthy forest; where it was gone, the forest was almost certainly degraded—and Greenpeace compared its exploitation with the demand for mahogany in the 1980s and 1990s. “Viewed by the wealthy as highly desirable for the production of expensive furniture, pianos and boats, mahogany in the Amazon was targeted by the logging industry to the point where it became officially considered endangered,” Greenpeace noted in a report. Because selective removal of a single species often results in clearing a vastly larger area, with as many as forty or fifty trees cut to remove one that is sought, “the over-exploitation of a single species can have knock-on effects for entire ecosystems,” the authors added. In the Amazon, “vast areas” of rain forest had been cleared to remove a single, valuable tree.8

The chief difference between mahogany and kwila was that the logging was driven by demand on different sides of the planet. For mahogany, it had come from Western, often American, consumers. With kwila it was driven by the world’s new rising superpower: “During the last decade, unprecedented economic growth, coupled with a shortage of domestic forest resources has driven China to become the world’s largest importer of tropical logs . . . (and) largest market for merbau products,” Greenpeace stated.

Many of China’s kwila imports were also illegal, often funnelled through a complex network of loggers who falsified documents, merchant ship captains who overlooked suspicious cargoes, and corrupt customs officials happy to let contraband slip through if their pockets had been sufficiently padded. In 2006, Chinese customs data recorded the import of thirty-six thousand cubic metres of Indonesian logs, one-fifth of it kwila, despite an Indonesian law prohibiting all log exports.9 “Despite the stringent measures adopted by the Indonesian government to combat illegal logging, destructive and illegal logging operations are pushing the valuable . . . species to the brink of extinction,” Greenpeace stated.

A few months after Fidelis and I stood at the base of the kwila tree, I was five thousand kilometres to the north, staring at a forest that offers a unique warning about the future of the world’s remaining wilderness. I had flown from Beijing to Shanghai and then ridden two hours through an industrial landscape of looping highways, sprawling factories, and cookie-cutter suburban towns. A bus dropped me off in a town called Golden Port and I took a taxi from there to a small park where, on a hazy February morning, I climbed a long flight of stairs through a forest of stunted pine trees. A government banner at the top of the hill read: “Everyone should have a civilised attitude and maintain a harmonious environment everywhere.”

A friend had suggested the park as the best place to see a forest that—if it were living—would be among the world’s most stunning, and I made my way to the edge of a monument with a clear view east. There, stretched out before me, was my first view of what he had called the “horizontal wilderness”, a place that in an area the size of a small university campus offers more spectacular tree species than any nation. Reaching along the Yangtze River’s southern bank were Mongolian scotch pines, Cambodian rosewoods, and Indonesian teaks. Ten-foot-diameter kevazingo trees from Gabon brushed against Douglas firs from British Columbia and white tulip pines from New Guinea. Malaysian Pacific maples pushed against Cameroonian boumas, a tree that can throw a canopy of flowers sixteen storeys into the air. All together, there were at least 221 species.

The log depot was called Zhangjiagang and I sat on the edge of the monument and squinted into the haze: in the distance a ship loaded with logs pushed its way up the Yangtze’s rust-coloured water. Closer in, tall orange cranes swivelled to pluck logs off a larger boat and deposit them on the river’s concrete bank. Front-end loaders took over from there, lifting each log and carrying it through six- and nine-metre-tall mountains of wood.

Nearer in, I could make out the next step of the trade: young men arrived on bicycles to count the logs and paint numbers on each—lot numbers, merchandise numbers, phone numbers. Buyers arrived and wandered through the piles. When they found something they liked, they pulled out cell phones and tried to close deals.

If I had stayed long enough, I would have seen the trade’s back end: long, flatbed East Wind trucks would carry the trees away, out the port’s gate and past the karaoke bars and snooker halls of downtown Golden Port. They would pass countless no-frills factories that make any of the million Made-in-China things we buy and finally pull to a stop at one of them. There, workers would unload the logs, cut them into planks, and stack the rough-hewn timber inside industrial drying ovens. If it were possible to see that far, I would have witnessed parts of the world’s last great forests slowly become everything that trees are made into: furniture and floorboards, window frames and mouldings, toys and instruments.

After my trip to Papua New Guinea, I had arrived in Golden Port with the same morbid fascination that draws people to view the aftermath of earthquakes, fires, and floods. As a journalist covering Asia, I had seen other examples of how China’s rising fortunes were damaging the world’s forests. In 1998, I was travelling in Tibet when heavy rains and glacial melting—exacerbated by record global temperatures—flooded the Yangtze, inundating millions of acres of farmland, killing thousands of people, and costing the state billions of dollars in damages. Over several days in Lhasa I watched television footage of People’s Liberation Army soldiers frantically trying to shore up dikes against the rising river. When the Yangtze finally subsided, a panel of experts convened by the central government blamed chronic de-forestation in China’s far west—the legacy of Mao Zedong’s science-bereft policies and rapid industrialisation unleashed by Deng Xiaoping—for raising the toll. With the authority vested in its single-party state, the leaders passed the National Forest Protection Program, a regulation that banned logging in more than half of the country’s forested areas.

That decision set the stage for the next chapter of damage as Chinese companies began to import large amounts of timber. Between 1998 and 2010, both China’s total consumption of wood and its timber imports roughly tripled.10 At first that growth was driven largely by Western demand: Chinese exports—roughly a third of them to the United States—grew ninefold; by 2009, China had captured roughly one-third of the world’s total furniture trade.11 By the end of the decade, however, China’s domestic market had become more important. In 2005, RISI, one of the world’s largest timber market research firms, estimated that 92 percent of wood products made in China were sold in China. Five years later, that figure had risen to roughly 94 percent.12

As with other commodities, I could personally see China’s growing material desires. In Beijing, upper-class families covered their floors with slow-growing tropical hardwoods. A friend’s husband spent the equivalent of $100,000 outfitting his office with redwood furniture, some of it probably made with kwila. Before the 2008 Summer Olympics, the central government created a brief stir when it tiled the interior of Beijing’s new National Centre for the Performing Arts with Brazilian rosewood, a species that had been listed as threatened in 1992 and, according to CITES law, could be traded only in “exceptional circumstances”.

China’s rising demand for paper and plywood was more important. The China Daily reported in 2005 that Shanghai residents used twice as much tissue and toilet paper as the international average, a sign that—as far as bodily needs go—Chinese aspired to the same double-ply comforts enjoyed in the West. Sino-Forest, a Chinese timber company, estimated that China would need roughly one billion cubic metres of wood—nearly three times the country’s total demand in 2010—to build, decorate, and furnish new housing units over the next five years.13

China’s growing hunger for meat and processed foods also reverberated globally. As China moved from being a marginal player in the world’s soy and palm oil markets to their biggest buyer, farmers responded by clearing large areas of rain forest to plant soybeans and oil palms. The rate of deforestation in the Amazon, the world’s largest rain forest, spiked after years of slow improvement. Josef Kellndorfer, a forestry expert at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, called a sudden rise in clearing centred on Brazil’s Mato Grosso state, the nation’s soy farming heart, a “wake-up call” for the conservation community. “There was this hope that [Amazon deforestation] would continue to go down and might even slow to zero by 2020, but now we see it won’t easily work out that way,” he told me.

As China’s demands rose, environmental groups began releasing regular reports tracking the country’s impacts. Forest Trends and the Center for International Forestry Research, two of the world’s most respected international forestry think tanks, warned in 2006 that—at recent deforestation rates—most of the last old-growth forests in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Indonesia would be gone by 2020.14 Chinese demand for Russian logs grew by a factor of twenty-one between 1997 and 2005, and the groups warned that Russia’s far-eastern forests—the world’s largest boreal wilderness—could be heavily degraded by 2025.15

Greenpeace held a press conference to point out that—in less than a decade—China had gone from importing a small amount of wood to importing half of all tropical trees globally, a large, if uncountable, portion of them felled illegally.16 Among a series of frightening statistics, the activists stated that China’s consumption of “industrial wood products”—a catch-all for everything factories make with wood—had risen 70 percent in a dec-ade. Yet the average Chinese citizen still used a fraction of the Western average. Numbers in the global timber trade are confused by varying definitions, but the group estimated that, on average, Chinese consumed one-eighth as much paper as Americans. If Chinese demand ever reached the U.S. level, China alone would require what was then the world’s total timber harvest.

As I learned more, I realised that China’s demand is surging even as the world’s forests have dwindled to a shadow of their former selves. Since humans became the planet’s dominant force of ecological change, we have cleared or damaged nearly half of the world’s forested areas and—looked at over centuries—the speed of change has accelerated rapidly: more than half of that clearing has occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and most took place after the Second World War, when peace in the United States, Europe, and Japan led to a consumer boom.17 During the last two decades of the twentieth century, 15 million hectares of forest—an area the size of Illinois or Croatia—were cleared each year, most of it in the tropics: since 1950 the world’s rain forests have shrunk by more than 60 percent; two-thirds of what remains is fragmented.18

As I thought about our growing planetary demands, it seemed unlikely that more than scraps of the last great forests would survive China’s rise. I came across a study by the World Resources Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental think tank, that found that less than a quarter of the planet’s remaining forests were large and “ecologically intact”.19 WWF warned that one-tenth of the world’s forests had disappeared since 1986 and that at current rates of deforestation more than half of the Amazon rain for-est could be gone by 2030.20

I called Bob Flynn, the international forests director at RISI, the timber consultancy, and asked how much Chinese demand could grow. Flynn replied that China’s “timber supply deficit”—the amount of imported wood (logs, panels, pulp, chips, and lumber)—had grown at an average annual rate of 16 percent from 1997 until 2010, considerably faster than its overall economy. He didn’t expect that Chinese citizens would ever use as much wood as typical Americans do, but only because there aren’t enough trees. “If we plug the numbers in for China and India reaching U.S. averages, our numbers would look so ridiculously high that no one would believe us,” he said.

But, he added, all of his previous forecasts about Chinese growth had been too conservative: “I think, yeah, we can’t have demand going up that much because something will slow it down. But then it does grow.”

A sentence in a Greenpeace report particularly caught my attention: “If developed countries do not curb their wood consumption and, similarly, if China does not slow down the growth of its wood consumption, future generations will be living on a planet without ancient forests.”21

At the end of my first full day at the Zhangjiagang port, outside a hotel that had been taken over by timber traders, I met a young broker whom I will call Wei Sicong. I was looking at a bulletin board covered with advertisements for various exotic species when Wei walked up to ask if I was looking to buy. He handed me his card. On one side it gave the name of his company. On the other, “Services: Every kind of wood.”

I had travelled to Golden Port to learn about the tropical timber trade, but after a day and a half, I’d had little luck. Environmental groups have written dozens of reports about the illegal wood moved through Zhangjiagang, and because most brokers avoid journalists, foreign reporters sometimes pose as timber buyers. I hadn’t wanted to misrepresent myself, but, tired after a day of trying to explain myself, I split the difference. I told Wei, whose name I have changed, that I was a writer. But I also said I had an uncle who might be interested in setting up a furniture factory. Since I was in Shanghai for the week, I’d decided to look into the business. Except for leaving a technical loophole with “might”, this was untrue.

But it also worked. Wei invited me into a cluttered office, poured me a cup of tea, and told me that if my uncle did decide to build a factory, he could supply the wood. He was twenty-four and had worked at the port for two years, and he laid out an instant business plan. For starters, he suggested my uncle should rent a nearby factory. Carpenters would be easy to hire since migrant labourers flock to Golden Port for jobs. He could supply the raw materials. He handed me two sheets of paper: the first listed 80 species of Malaysian trees; the second contained the names of 148 species from Papua New Guinea. He could get any of them.

I pointed out that under a 2010 amendment to an American law called the Lacey Act, exporting to the United States requires legally sourced wood. I had heard that much of what arrives in Golden Port might not be legal. But Wei waved off the concern. “Everything is possible here,” he said. “I have friends in the government, so we can get any paperwork you need.” As he saw it, the bigger problem was my uncle’s interest in furniture. “It’s very easy to make money, but you really should think about wood flooring,” he said. “That’s where the real money is.”

By the end of a few cups of tea, I had convinced Wei to take me with him when he inventoried his company’s stock, and he picked me up at my hotel early the next afternoon. We began our tour by driving through downtown Golden Port, which looked like most up-and-coming Chinese industrial cities. We drove along wide streets flanked by shops that testified to the country’s inequality: street-side stalls sold cloth shoes and shirts for a few dollars; just beyond them an office advertised services for wealthy locals seeking foreign visas and to enroll their children in boarding schools, part of an increasingly large wave of outwardly flowing Chinese wealth.

We passed through a large gate bearing the characters “Welcome to the Zhangjiagang Free Trade Zone”, turned up a smaller road, and, suddenly, were inside the horizontal forest. Small mountains of wood rose on either side of the car, each of the logs painted with a phone number and name. Closer now, I could see that most of the trees had also been marked with a three-letter code that identified its species: TUL for tulipwood, ASS for silver ash, SIL for silkwood maple. We stopped to photograph an African keva-zingo tree with a diameter taller than me. Traders had recently created a significant bubble in its price: a single nine-metre-long section could sell for the equivalent of $600,000, and Wei explained that buyers typically used the wood to make sculptures that might sit in corporate headquarters or the homes of newly minted millionaires.

Wei’s job that afternoon was to paint numbers on a stack of logs owned by his company, and as he worked I wandered through a pile of tan and cherry trunks. I knew from talking with experts that many of the trees had been felled in intact old-growth forests—generally the only places where loggers can still get such large-diameter logs—and I imagined them crashing through spaces that had never been cleared before. As bulldozers cut roads and men fired up chainsaws, countless animals would have retreated. Others would have become confused or hungry and wandered into newly established fields. Years earlier, I had seen dozens of juvenile orangutans taken from loggers in Indonesian Kalimantan: as workers cleared the forest for new palm oil plantations, they had killed the animals’ mothers and kept the infants as exotic pets.

I was thinking about the orangutans when a small yellow-and-white plastic tag caught my eye. It was stapled to the end of a blood red log and emblazoned with the image of a bird with outstretched wings and an enormous tail that I recognised immediately as a bird of paradise, the symbol of Papua New Guinea’s exports. Next to the tag, scrawled across the wood, were three letters: KWI, kwila.

Wei had told me the night before that kwila was his most profitable product. Good, thick logs sold for as much as $800 per cubic metre and, depending on a salesman’s bargaining skills, a single tree could be worth $5,000. “Kwila is the tree I can really get rich off,” he said.22

As Wei worked, I stood transfixed by the sight of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of kwila logs that might have come from near where Fidelis and I had listened to a real bird of paradise four months earlier. The forest we hiked in was ringed by logging concessions, and on my way back to the local capital I’d followed a line of trucks to a much smaller port. Near where fishing boats bobbed on the Bismarck Sea, I’d asked a worker where piles of logs would be shipped.

The man wore a T-shirt that read: “I only drink beer on days that end in Y”. He’d smiled widely and pointed across a soft white beach, as if casting a stone into the Pacific.

“China,” he’d said.