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Molly Aitken reads her story “This Is How It Happens,” from the February 9, 2026, issue of the magazine. Aitken is the author of two novels, “The Island Child,” from 2020, and “Bright I Burn,” which was published in 2024. She won the 2023 Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction.

For Kleber Mendonça Filho, filmmaking is an act of both provocation and preservation. Mendonça was born in 1968, in the early years of a ruthless military dictatorship—a time when cinema, like much else, was harshly constrained. His mother, Joselice Jucá, was a historian who studied Brazil’s abolitionist movement, and she taught him that filling gaps in the cultural memory was a way to expose concealed truths. In Mendonça’s work, memory functions as a tool of defiance.

His relationship with film is inextricably linked with his home town, Recife—a port city where attractive beaches and high-rise developments coexist with sprawling favelas and rampant crime. In his youth, Mendonça was fascinated by the city’s grand cinema palaces. He carried a Super 8 camera to the tops of marquees and shot dizzying images; he spent hours in projection booths, learning the mechanics of how films reached the screen. Over time, Mendonça watched those theatres fall into decline, an experience that he likened to being aboard a ship as it wrecked. But even as Recife lost its allure, he made the city a fixture of his films—a way of vindicating its place in history. His first narrative feature, “Neighboring Sounds,” takes place on a street where he lived as a child, a setting that he spent years documenting. Later, he made “Pictures of Ghosts,” a documentary about Recife told largely through its cinemas.

In Mendonça’s work, political commentary coincides with art-house aesthetics and elements borrowed from genre movies—science fiction, Western, neo-noir. Questions of justice and truth often play out through dark comedy. “Neighboring Sounds,” an unflinching portrait of class hierarchy in Brazil, came out in 2012 and was widely acknowledged as one of the best films of the year. It was followed in 2016 by “Aquarius,” which depicts a woman’s crusade against wealthy developers seeking to demolish her seafront home. “Aquarius” was celebrated at festivals around the world, winning prizes everywhere from Sydney to Cartagena. As Mendonça’s international reputation grew, the hard-right President Jair Bolsonaro took office in Brazil, and Mendonça used his platform to denounce the country’s democratic erosion.

His latest film, “The Secret Agent,” is set in 1977, during the era of military rule. The protagonist is a scientist named Armando Solimões, played by Wagner Moura, who has been fending off the efforts of a government-linked businessman to take control of his lab in Recife. Now Solimões is on the run, scrambling to get his young son out of the city before hitmen can catch them. The film is both an indictment of authoritarian repression and an absurdist thriller, with set pieces involving a reanimated human leg and the hulking corpse of a tiger shark. Mendonça uses these surreal flourishes to reimagine the country of his youth—a place where gruesome crimes were committed by people determined to obscure the evidence. I recently sat down with him to talk about “The Secret Agent,” which has been nominated for Best Picture and Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, and about the power of reclaiming the past. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I want to start with Recife, the setting for this film. How does your home town fit into the history of filmmaking in Brazil?

A hundred years ago, in the silent era, just before sound came, a small group of filmmakers in Recife collaborated to make thirteen feature-length films. Only six survived. The media has always been concentrated in São Paulo and Rio, two thousand kilometres away in the southeast—not only cinema but money, radio, and television. Recife is in the northeast. It had one of the first law schools in Brazil, and many names from literature and music. But not much happened from the nineteen-twenties until the nineteen-seventies, in terms of filmmaking.

In the seventies, local artists began to use Super 8 cameras to make films, and that also became an interesting moment in filmmaking. Many of those films have survived. Then, in the nineties, something really interesting happened: we had a music scene which became very strong. That’s when I was leaving college, and it really pushed me toward developing my own projects. In the past thirty years, we could draw up a list of maybe twenty-five filmmakers, men and women, who are part of a very interesting film scene in Recife. Their films are all very personal and unusual, but they also managed to establish a communication with audiences—not ever becoming blockbusters, but becoming a thing.

How has Recife traditionally been portrayed in films?

We almost never saw Recife on the screen. There was one film from 1983, shot partly in Recife—a historical film by Tizuka Yamasaki, a filmmaker from the south. But that was it, really. I grew up watching telenovelas made in Rio, and of course Hollywood films. So the connection between reality and the projected image simply did not exist in terms of Recife. But, in 2002, when I was in the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, I saw a film by a filmmaker called Claudio Assis. For the first time, I saw Recife in wide-screen and color, and I thought, I’m finally seeing the city I know.

After that, more films were made in Recife. “Pictures of Ghosts,” the film I did before “Secret Agent,” it’s really like a family album of the city, taken from so many films—from films done a hundred years ago to Super 8 films done in the seventies, maybe some newsreels done in the fifties. And then, in the past thirty years, so many shorts and features have been shot in Recife. That’s when we began to develop what I call a microclimate of local audiences really, really supporting local films. They would play all the local films and there would be lines around the block.

Many years ago, you were among those moviegoers in Recife.

My mother was the real cinephile. I was always being taken to the cinema as a young child. We spent almost five years living in England, where my mom did her Ph.D. research, and England played an important part in my life, showing me different filmgoing experiences. But then I went back to Recife in 1986. I was eighteen, and I rediscovered the city in a completely different way. The downtown was peppered with movie palaces.

You studied journalism and became a film critic. If you had an interest in films, why not make them?

There were no film schools in Recife at the time, and journalism brought me closer to film. From the first day, I got to meet new friends who were also cinephiles, and they dreamed of making films and writing about film or music. And then, slowly, I drifted toward an idea of cinema. I also used the equipment in the school to develop little short video projects. Today, you can make something interesting with a telephone. But, at that time, I needed a Super VHS editing suite with a camera, which I didn’t have. So that’s how I began.

Tell me about a typical early short.

“Lixo nos Canais” was about television—my own take on Brazilian television at the time. Not very sophisticated, but it had some acid. It was kind of sarcastic about the state of television and how it humiliates people, how it’s prejudiced, how it portrayed women and Black people. Grotesquerie was the norm.

Was there a moment when, after years as a critic, you decided that you were ready to make your first film?

I was very happy as a critic, because I wrote a lot. I saw a lot of films and my work had a readership. Of course, I made many people very unhappy, because I would write about Brazilian cinema. I had a youthful desire to propose changes, which is something that I do not regret. I think I was quite tough on a number of films.

What needed to be reformed, in your view?

The diversity of subject matter, the way films were shot, the complete absence of any cinema outside of São Paulo and Rio. Upper-class directors making films about very impoverished regions and communities—the classic themes, hunger and violence in the favelas. You could tell the filmmakers were not really familiar with those things. They just made the films.

So all of that came without a filter. And then I became quite known—and respected and despised—in some circles. Slowly, especially with the arrival of digital, I began to really make my short films, and I spent about ten years making short films, which became very successful. I always had someone saying, “Yeah, this is really cool, but when are you gonna make a real film?” And, in my mind, a short film is a real film. I once wrote that some features should open for short films, rather than the reverse.

But then something happened: I saw “Do the Right Thing,” by Spike Lee. And that really did something to me, because I had never seen an American film, a New York film, with new faces, a new way of looking at people in society. It was set in one block, one street. And this is something that I found very attractive. That’s probably when I began to think about a story. I finally sat down in 2007 or 2008 to write “Neighboring Sounds.” Sure enough, there was a lot of “Do the Right Thing” in “Neighboring Sounds”—and, of course, a lot of myself.

Talk about how working as a critic has informed your filmmaking.

I never compartmentalized criticism, filmmaking, going to the cinema. In my mind, it was all the same thing: watching films and writing about them and trying to understand what culture is trying to say. I think that probably explains why I was so hard on some films. Because I really think that each film or book is a reaction to life in society. So I think trying to understand what artistic expression or even the industry is trying to say is an interesting way of understanding cinema. And for me, that’s doing cinema. There was never a boundary for me.

You’ve described memories of your mother, the historian, returning home with a Panasonic tape recorder and a box full of cassettes. What did her craft teach you about oral history?

She talked a lot about how interested she was in listening to people. Let’s say that you’re going to write a story about a hotel. Normally you would interview the manager, because the manager is in a position of power. She would interview the guy at the door and the waiters and the cleaning lady. And then maybe, if she had time, she would interview the manager.

This is something that I only came to realize when I was making “Pictures of Ghosts,” because I really allowed myself to actively remember my mother. I found this amazing piece of television from the archives, where she gave an interview about history and oral history. She wasn’t a filmmaker, but her interviews were very much like films, because, once you sit down and listen to them, it’s very much like a documentary. She did a series of interviews, from 1979 to 1981, with the surviving filmmakers from the nineteen-twenties. These interviews, they’re precious. They are voices from the past.

I remember one day—it must have been 1980 or 1981—she came home and said, “I just interviewed Jota Soares, the filmmaker.” And I was just a kid. I was into films, so I was a little impressed, but I had no idea of what it meant. When I listened to the interview, four years ago, it was so moving. That’s one of the ideas in “The Secret Agent,” the idea that there is somebody listening in the future.

How did listening to those recordings contribute to the making of “The Secret Agent”?

It’s everything. It’s happened three times in my life as a screenwriter, twice with my own projects: I tried to write a script—great idea, great starting point, but I couldn’t make it work. My heart wasn’t in it.

I found the heart for “The Secret Agent” making “Pictures of Ghosts”—the power of things that survive and are kept in archives. Because the archive is somebody’s proof of life. When you hear a voice recorded in 1977, that person was alive in ’77. She was in love. She had dreams or desires, or she had to deal with the traffic. Sometimes, listening to these old tapes, it’s so moving, because sometimes you hear a truck in the background. Oh, that’s a truck. How many people were in that truck? What was it carrying?

And then things just get more complex because my mother died quite young. She died at fifty-four. So there was this whole thing of someone who’s not here anymore, but her voice still is, and her work still is.

Probably the strongest feeling of time travel that I have ever felt is making films and working with archives. Because time travel, as far as I know, doesn’t really exist. There is no DeLorean, no time machine. But, when you’re holding a cassette tape, it’s the actual cassette tape that was recorded in 1977 or 1974. I felt that a number of times when I went to cinematheques. You go into the restoration department, see the big scanner and the negative, and you go, “That’s the camera negative that was on the set in 1951.” It’s a historical artifact.

I worked for seven years on “Pictures of Ghosts”—a film that does not have a script. It was all driven by discoveries. This wonderful friend, a researcher who has been working with me, Karina, she calls one day and says, “I think I found 35-mm. images of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis on the Duarte Coelho Bridge.” And I go, “I think I have the film.”

All of those finds, these discoveries, they put me in the right state of mind to write “The Secret Agent.” A lot of “The Secret Agent” comes from the power of history. And the power of history has nothing to do with the way people remember history.

You met Wagner Moura at Cannes when you were a critic. And you said that the part of Armando was written for him.

It was written for him out of my admiration for him as an actor, as a person. Wagner is a good man. We happen to share many points of view on Brazil and on life. And we don’t have a problem expressing ourselves. I find myself with a microphone and somebody asks me a question, like, “What do you think of Bolsonaro?” And I say, “I don’t think he’s a good idea for Brazil.” That becomes a huge controversy—because major newspapers at the time were reluctant even to describe Bolsonaro as “far-right.”

Wagner has had his fair share of backlash and attacks from the right. And so have I. You can’t make a film and shut the fuck up—say, “Nothing to add.” “The Secret Agent” takes you many different places, but it’s very firmly grounded in historical reality. Yes, there is a cat with two heads, but that is Brazil in 1977, from the décor to the clothing to the cars to the atmosphere. So you build on realism, and then you can blur the lines on other elements.

At the beginning of the film, you describe that historical era as a “period of mischief,” which I thought was an interesting choice, considering that the word “dictatorship” is never mentioned in the film. Why?

It’s a literary way of beginning the film. I really like the classic credit roll in the beginning of a film, or maybe a card in the beginning. “Casablanca” has that. “Star Wars” has that. Of course, with Star Wars, you’re being welcomed into a completely crazy, woo-hoo world that came out of George Lucas’s mind. But I think that for a film that takes place in 1977 to start once again with the card, “There was a dictatorship taking place in Brazil”—I thought that I should really avoid that and instead grossly underplay, almost in a poetic way, the seriousness of what we were going through.

The Portuguese word is . . .

“Pirraça.” It’s a wonderful word, quite old-fashioned. It usually means someone who’s teasing someone else, in a mean-spirited way. Someone who has the power to play a prank on you. And that prank might go overboard.

I never planned the script for “The Secret Agent.” I did not have a map. I’ve seen some by colleagues and friends—it almost looks like algebra. The script wrote itself, in a way. I was sometimes surprised at some of the twists and turns that it took.

No outlines?

There were no outlines. The script stemmed from the desire to dramatize some situations and also the desire to shoot those scenes. I was salivating at even the thought of shooting the whole sequence in the registry office, with all those public servants, the wooden floors and the telephones. I just love that whole universe.

You’ve said that the film isn’t about memory—it’s about forgetting. And, in this conversation, you’ve suggested that we live in a post-truth era. How is that collective amnesia playing out in Brazil?

Unfortunately, it’s a very strong part of Brazilian life. TV has traditionally belonged to one group—the Globo group. And they have dictated, in a way, behavior and perception of truth, of politics. Globo always supported the military dictatorship, right from the beginning. In 1984, when people were fighting for general elections for the first time after the coup, Globo ignored almost a million people in downtown São Paulo. And that’s the way that society is framed, I think, in Brazil. My mother being a historian, she was always telling me where to look. But many people are not like that. And I think that we migrated from just manipulation of power to something that is completely out of control.

In a country that, for political reasons, has erased, or tried to forget, or tried not to remember important aspects of history, the mere fact of remembering something might land you an accusation of being a communist or a radical, just because you are saying, “But that’s not how it happened.” And I think there is a strong resistance against reality.

It’s happening in the U.S. It’s happening in Brazil and in Europe. There is a group of society, usually from the far right, and they are fighting reality every day. They wake up in the morning and go to sleep fighting reality. We are now entering Philip K. Dick territory—memory implants. You don’t actually have to implant a chip. You can actually choose whatever reality you want to choose.

In Brazil, we had Bolsonaro saying that COVID was nothing—“Get off your asses and go to work today. It’s nothing. If you’re an athletic type, like I am, nothing will happen to you.” It was a very dark period we went through. I’m just happy that it’s over. The right seems to be lost now. Bolsonaro is in jail. And it feels we are making more sense now as a society.

Under Bolsonaro, there was a concerted effort not to have your film submitted to the Academy.

Back in 2016, there was a clear act of sabotage against “Aquarius.” The month we premièred at Cannes in competition, the Ministry of Culture had been extinguished, because Dilma Rousseff was impeached. It was all a cynical coup d’état. [Rousseff, a former guerrilla turned politician, had been elected to succeed the longtime leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. She faced corruption charges that her supporters argued were politically motivated.] The voting in Congress was broadcast live on a Sunday afternoon—one of the most grotesque moments in Brazilian history, because it really was about the anger from the right at being shut out of power through democratic elections since 2002. Bolsonaro himself, as a congressman, dedicated his vote for impeachment to the guy whose unit tortured Dilma in prison when she was twenty-two.

So, a few weeks later, we went to Cannes with “Aquarius.” [Kleber began to cry, then continued.] Sorry. We went to Cannes, and we did a protest on the red carpet—just holding bits of paper. We went into the theatre. Two hours and twenty minutes later, we came out, and we understood that there was a firestorm in Brazil because of the protest.

The far right just became very mad at me. And then the people who took power, who extinguished the Ministry of Culture, they were the ones who got to pick which Brazilian film to submit for the Oscars. Friends and colleagues withdrew their films in solidarity, saying there was only one film to be picked that year. And then they picked the most unknown, most mysterious film. It was a scandal.

How has “The Secret Agent” been received? Not just in Brazil but in countries like Spain, where people are also still grappling with questions of historical memory.

I went to San Sebastián, and I talked to cinephiles and critics. They feel that it’s very strong for the Spanish, particularly because of Franco. Spain still has many families that would rather not talk about what happened.

And many mass graves.

Yeah. It’s a very strong theme in Spain. It’s a very strong theme in Chile. Dilma was the one who put together a truth-and-reconciliation committee, which Bolsonaro immediately hijacked when he came into power.

Brazilian society isn’t particularly pragmatic. Some societies will say, “This is what we have to do, and we will do it.” Brazil is more, like, “Oh, I don’t know, let’s just move on and let’s not talk about unpleasant things.” I’ve heard that in family circles. I’ve heard that from politicians, and I heard that from Bolsonaro. But he didn’t put it as nicely as I just did. He said, “Only dogs look for bones.” ♦

When Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, in 2002, one lawmaker bragged that the United States was finally “meeting the enemy’s agility with our agility.” At the time, the issue of who the enemy was didn’t cause much political disagreement in Washington; it was generally understood to be Al Qaeda, or groups like it. Early skeptics questioned the wisdom of giving a single federal department a monumental budget as well as broad policing and surveillance powers, but caution was largely cast aside. Agencies within the department, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.), which includes Border Patrol, received lavish bipartisan support. Twenty-four years later, their mission and their conduct have exceeded the worst imaginings of even their sharpest critics. With Donald Trump in the White House, and a servile Republican majority in Congress, ICE and Border Patrol are turning into the President’s personal army, targeting immigrants, Democrats, and, as the recent events in Minnesota have shown, just about anyone who crosses their path.

The situation is no less shocking for having been at least partly predictable. For decades, ICE and Border Patrol have operated with fewer constitutional constraints than typical law-enforcement agencies when they conduct searches and make arrests; in instances of abuse, oversight has tended to be far more lax, leading to a culture of freewheeling unaccountability. The consequences were on display from the start of D.H.S.’s incursion into Minneapolis, which began in December, under the name Operation Metro Surge. On January 7th, Jonathan Ross, an ICE officer and an Army veteran, shot and killed Renee Good, a mother of three. Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse, was killed when two C.B.P. agents fired at least ten shots at him, including six while he was lying motionless on the ground. Witness accounts and phone videos make clear that neither Good nor Pretti, both of whom were U.S. citizens, posed any immediate danger to the agents. Nevertheless, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of D.H.S., said that they had engaged in “domestic terrorism.” She was following the White House line. Stephen Miller, a top adviser to the President, told agents after Good’s killing, “You have immunity.” Pretti, he later wrote on X, was “an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.”

These lies were the basis of the government’s legal response, prompting half a dozen federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. agent in charge of the Minneapolis field office to resign. State and local authorities, blocked from conducting their own inquiries, were accused by the Justice Department of conspiring to oppose Trump. Shortly after Pretti’s killing, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz, offering three “common sense solutions” to end the federal siege. One of them was to turn over the state’s voter rolls. “Is the executive trying to achieve a goal through force that it cannot achieve through the courts?” a district-court judge asked D.O.J. lawyers.

On Tuesday, in the face of mounting national outrage, the Administration came as close as it could to admitting fault without actually doing so. The President demoted Greg Bovino, the commanding agent in charge of the roving patrols that have besieged Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis. The night before, according to the Times, Noem had to defend herself in a two-hour meeting at the White House. Miller wasn’t there—“he knows just how and when to disappear,” a former colleague once said. But he has since acknowledged that the two agents involved in the Pretti shooting “may not have been following” protocol.

The idea that this response would be enough to temper the political fallout from Operation Metro Surge is a sign of the unbridled impunity that reigns in the White House. Three thousand federal agents remain in Minnesota. A parallel operation, run by Citizenship and Immigration Services—the D.H.S. agency responsible for administering the legal-immigration system—has targeted fifty-six hundred refugees in the state for potential “fraud.” The federal government had previously granted these people legal status. But more than a hundred of them, according to a lawsuit by the International Refugee Assistance Project, were arrested by ICE and sent to jails in Texas, where they were re-interviewed, as though the legal process they’d already gone through meant nothing.

No other aspect of Trump’s crackdown has shown any sign of changing, either. D.H.S. agents in masks and unmarked vehicles have been abducting immigrants with legal status and detaining and harassing citizens who look or sound as though they might not be U.S.-born. A recent ICE memo, obtained by the Associated Press, stated that agents can now enter people’s homes to make arrests without a warrant from a judge. The agency has always relied on administrative warrants, signed by its own officials, to carry out deportation orders. But this authorization marks a radical departure from legal precedent, and a clear affront to the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal searches.

On Wednesday, a federal judge issued an injunction to block the refugee arrests in Minnesota, but whether D.H.S. will comply is anyone’s guess. According to a recent ruling from the chief federal district-court judge in the state, ICE violated nearly a hundred court orders in January alone—and that was just orders relating to Operation Metro Surge. The Administration has ignored other federal injunctions, going back to March of last year, and it has serially lied about aspects of its operations in court, bringing rebukes from judges across the country. “After nearly thirty-five years of experience with federal law enforcement,” one of them, a Trump appointee on Long Island, wrote, “I have never encountered anything like this.”

Tom Homan, the Administration’s “border czar,” has been dispatched to Minneapolis to oversee the situation. His current title is itself revealing. The White House is bringing the border to the rest of the country. Politically, in light of the institutional history of D.H.S., this gives the Administration broader license to claim that it’s facing down foreign threats; practically, agents on the ground are engaging in exceptionally aggressive forms of policing.

Last year, at the Administration’s behest, Congress tripled ICE’s budget, making it the most heavily funded law-enforcement body in the country. After the killings in Minnesota, Democrats have threatened to block further funding unless the Administration agrees to impose modest restraints on agents’ conduct, such as forcing them to remove their masks and raising the legal bar for the use of warrants. These are rearguard actions that are long overdue. On Thursday afternoon, Senate Democrats reached a deal with the President to forestall a government shutdown while they negotiate the details. The inevitable retrenchment came hours later: Bondi issued orders to arrest four people for disrupting a church service in Minneapolis. Two of them were anti-ice activists; the others were journalists reporting the story. ♦

Your story “This Is How It Happens” revolves around a young Scottish man in the early nineteen-eighties, who is befriended by some followers of Rajneesh and travels to Oregon to join the commune there. The story was inspired in part by the experience of two of your family members. Can you tell me a bit about them and what you borrowed from their lives?

My uncle and my grandmother moved from Scotland to join the Rajneesh commune in Oregon in the nineteen-eighties. I don’t know much about their experience there. It all happened before I was born. What I do remember is a photo my granny had of Osho, the guru, dead and laid out to be viewed. I remember other photos, and her referencing the guru with affection. In a way, it was just part of the fabric of my childhood, and because I was a young child I can’t even vouch for how accurate these memories are. No one ever explained the family ties to the Rajneesh to me. Not because my family wanted to keep me in the dark but because it was just normal for them. Normal doesn’t need an explanation.

It was many years later, when I was in my twenties, that my sister phoned me, and said, “There is a Netflix documentary that explains everything.” That documentary series was “Wild Wild Country.” I found it shocking. For me, the Rajneesh had just been a quirky experience of my family, not the sensationalized cult portrayed onscreen.

I didn’t use my family’s history in “This Is How It Happens,” really, because I still don’t know it completely, and I never will. Some of my family’s stories are so bizarre they would not be believed if I put them in fiction anyway. I also did not want to sensationalize the story. I wanted it to be personal, and small, close to Malcolm, the main character, so that the reader would be present for his intimate experience. So for these reasons, the narrative is my own. The story is an attempt to understand why a person might join a group like the Rajneesh. It’s also about the love I had for my grandmother, and the hole she left when she died. Many people are described as larger than life. She really was larger than life.

The protagonist of your story, Malcolm, is not a natural convert. He’s straitlaced and inexperienced, reeling from the turbulence of his family life and in search of stability. Why is he so easily pulled out of the existence he’s been struggling to establish?

It is funny that you say Malcolm is searching for stability, because he does find it with the Rajneesh, who, to many, would probably be judged as unstable. Malcolm is feeling disconnected from his community and his father, and, without being very conscious of it, is searching for meaning. This is possibly why he adopted a cat. His life is mundane, but, beyond that, he is grieving. The Rajneesh offers him a way to exist in his body that is grounding. They offer physical intimacy, friendship, and a life that is more aligned with nature and with other people. In some ways, I disagree with the term “natural convert,” because I think most of us would be natural converts if a group found us in a state of vulnerability and provided comfort or answers when we needed them.

One thing that has been missing from Malcolm’s life is physical affection from his father. He feels that kind of love from and for the other men at the commune. But again his contact with the paternal figure—the guru—is unfulfilling, impersonal. Is this journey of his, in a way, a quest for a father? Or a better family?

It is my impression that the men of my Scottish grandfather’s generation were not physically affectionate—although I do remember my grandfather giving me a lot of wonderfully beardy kisses on the cheek. My grandfather fought in the Second World War. Understandably, he never talked about it. The story doesn’t reference it directly, but Malcolm’s father is from this generation of men who went to war, many of whom were barely men when they left. For me, Malcolm is trying to heal some of his father’s pain, and by proxy his own, through his relationships with the men at the commune. It was important to me that these relationships remain brotherly and sweet. You are right that the guru’s distance is disappointing, in a way that Malcolm can’t articulate and that reverberates with his relationship with his father. In my mind, although Malcolm is not aware of it, he is searching for a deep human connection. He gets it, to an extent, with the men in the commune, and fleetingly with the women he has sex with. Perhaps also with the children for whom he provides some care, and who are even hungrier for connection than he is. I don’t think the story gives a definitive answer as to whether he will get the lasting intimacy he is seeking. He gets it in short bursts from many people, and in the end, briefly, from his father.

It’s interesting that his own attempts to be paternal—to the cat he adopts—are also rejected, or met with hostility, in a way that feels unjust to Malcolm. Was the cat always a character in the story?

I never planned to have a cat in this story. He just appeared and would not leave. At one point, I attempted to cut him out of the narrative, and the story felt flat, almost without depth or meaning, which is a lot of responsibility to put on one angry cat. Incidentally, Malcolm’s cat is based on one that my sister adopted. This cat grew up in the dodgy Leith highrises. To avoid being scratched, I, like Malcolm, had to take flying leaps from my sister’s bed when I was cat-sitting. We were all fond of this cat, because she engendered so much chat among us. My brother-in-law affectionately called her Feline Hitler.

We know that the commune in Oregon came to an ignominious end. Have you imagined an afterlife for Malcolm?

For me, that final contact between him and his father felt like such relief, such completion, I was incapable of imagining anything beyond it. In that one sober moment of touch, I felt as though I had resolved some of the male struggle with lack of intimacy. I could not possibly move past it, and nor could Malcolm. Yet nothing is really resolved for them, so I wanted to let that moment last, in a way it can only in fiction, never in real life. If I don’t imagine a future, Malcolm can stay in that brief instance of getting what he needs.

You told me that you put off writing this story for a long time. Once you started, did you write it quickly? And what made you choose to write it in the second person and in the present tense?

This story was brewing in me for about five years, but, once I sat down, it took me only a few hours to write the first draft. I always knew that it would be in second person and present tense. I chose present tense to make Malcolm’s experience feel immediate—as much as that is possible in fiction, anyway—to make the reader, and myself, stay present for Malcolm. Second person was a similar choice. I wanted the reader, and myself, to feel entangled. A lot of us judge people who join groups like the Rajneesh, but we all want community and friendship and love and excitement. To me, the Rajneesh encapsulated so much of what seemed free and hopeful about the nineteen-seventies and eighties. A possibility of living differently from the previous generation. I think I would quite likely have joined, and suspect that many readers would have, too.

You’ve written two historical novels—one set in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Ireland and one set in the mid-twentieth century. “This Is How It Happens” also takes place before you were born. What is the attraction of setting your fiction in the past?

When I wrote “This Is How It Happens,” I sent it to a writer friend with an e-mail saying, “See, I can write contemporary fiction.” She disillusioned me. The eighties are pretty much as close to the present day as I have ever reached in my prose. I think that what draws me to writing fiction set in the past—aside from my love of history and the power of fiction to allow time travel—is the ability to hide myself. I can pour my rage into a medieval Irish “witch,” as I did in my novel “Bright I Burn,” and no one can accuse me of being shrill. I can immerse myself in research, and imagine day-to-day lives that are wildly different from my own, and not recognize myself in these stories until I am finished. “This Is How It Happens” is probably the closest I have ever come to writing anything that obviously touches my own life, and really my life was only marginally touched by the Rajneesh. Even so, the story feels quite exposing, especially given where I am publishing it, but perhaps this is a sign that I am becoming braver. Perhaps next time I will write a story set in 2026. ♦

It is a Wednesday or a Tuesday, just one of those nondescript midweek days in February when all you have to look forward to is a weekend spent in bed attempting to stroke your feral cat. It is 1982. At least this you are sure of. You are leaving work, your suit still damp from the morning’s downpour, the skin on your palms peeling. You are clutching two supermarket bags, tins of cream soup and tuna knocking against one another. The rain is hard and your anorak is cheap. You are on your way to Stockbridge, to your parents’ house, which only your father inhabits now that your mother is gone. There you will find, no doubt, a cold potato salad gifted by a kind neighbor, the lingering smell of pipe smoke in the hall, and a delighted expression on the dog’s face when your father opens the front door. You walk slowly, looking down at your sodden loafers, and so it is her toes you see first, bare against the gray slabs of the Edinburgh street, each nail painted orange. She is wearing an orange skirt, and an orange jumper, too. Behind her, there are four more people, all dressed in various shades of orange. Their ages range from about twenty-five to sixty, and yet their faces remind you of the youthful hilarity and sweetness of a school photo: all snaggleteeth, mad hair, and crooked glasses.

The barefoot one darts forward and drops a wet leaflet into one of your shopping bags. She is around your age, the youngest of them. Despite the rain, her neck is grimy. You imagine getting a soapy rag and scrubbing at her.

“Nice mustache,” she says. And then, “Anything good in there?” She is pointing at your shopping bags.

Cream cheese. Wine. A bunch of excessively perky daffodils you bought for your father.

Already she has turned back to the others: the man with a dark beard and a hunter’s eyes; the woman in her fifties with dank gray hair; the young man with a shaved head who keeps whispering to the others; and the tanned, ageless one.

Now the man with the beard and the eyes approaches you.

“Come back with us.” He holds out his hand. You want to take it, but your hands are flaking with eczema so, instead, you pass him a shopping bag, realizing too late that, in doing so, you have accepted that you will now either lose your shopping or follow it home with him.

Their place is a typical New Town flat: soaring ceilings and peeling floral fifties wallpaper. It is so similar to the wallpaper in your father’s home that at first your instinct is to run. The barefoot girl, who calls herself Ma, takes your bag from the bearded man, and holds out her free hand for the shopping you are still clutching. You give it to her and watch as she tosses your father’s daffodils into the kitchen sink. She crows over the tins of tuna.

“Four!”

Back at your flat, your cat will be yowling for those tins, but you try not to think about him. There are two people here who weren’t on the street. They look a little younger than you and Ma. You find that you like them. Ma puts the red wine to one side, ignores the shortbread, and scoops a glob of cream cheese onto her fingertip. You copy her and she laughs.

“Be yourself,” she says.

She’s one of those rare things: a woman who is not nice.

The others are hurriedly opening your food. They eat it without thanking you. The one with the beard and the eyes says that his name is Jitendra. You wait for him to ask your name, but he doesn’t. He complains that the wine isn’t white. You apologize and he nods, pours himself a large glass anyway, and tells you that you are handsome.

You sit beside Ma on the floor, clutching a mug of tea. You won’t drink it. The milk is off—you could tell when she poured it. Silk scarves have been thrown over the many lampshades, and a candle is burning low on a coffee table. The whole place is a fire hazard. The air has that sickening smell of dried fruit. It reminds you of the long car journeys you used to take as a child, your parents’ arguments and silences, your father quietly leaving the holiday home in the night, your mother laughing, then crying, then forgetting to cook dinner, so you ate bread and apples and befriended a stray sheep.

Ma strides about the room, waving incense. You want to laugh. You think about what it would be like to kiss her. You feel that you have kissed too few people in your twenty-six years. That time in the work tearoom when a girl pressed her dry mouth to yours and bluntly professed her love—you mumbled words of thanks and scurried off to an early lunch. You knew that she was the type of girl you were meant to take home. Your father would have congratulated you on her looks. Your mother would have complained about how ordinary she was and made your visits difficult. You knew you did not have the stamina for her. She would want things from you.

You take a few inexpert drags on the spliff that Jitendra passes to you. They all start chanting. You are too self-conscious to join in. You can’t help but watch Jitendra. He looks a little like you, except that he has dark hair, hair that makes you think about the comb in your pocket. He sits cross-legged, and he sways, easeful, relaxed. You are not like him at all. The ageless one and a young man with glasses leave for an adjoining bedroom and have sex quietly, but not quietly enough. The others chant for a full hour. Toward the end of that hour, you stop checking your watch and find that you are swaying slightly, that the chant is reverberating in you, even in your feet.

It was probably two months ago that you went alone to the cinema to watch that documentary. You assume that these new acquaintances are part of the same group, because the people in the documentary also wore orange, when they wore any clothes at all. You remember sitting beside the others in the cinema, so rigid and repulsed and turned on.

They stop chanting to eat crackers, and eventually to sleep. You lie down on one of two sofas, and to your surprise you feel comfortable. Ma crawls toward you and plants her palms on your cheeks. Her mouth tastes foul.

Sunrise reveals cobwebs everywhere. You have slept. Right now your cat is probably shredding your bedspread in a ravenous rage. It is time to leave. Jitendra and one of the young ones are up and dressed as if they have jobs to get to, like you; Jitendra even wears a navy suit. He tells you that he is a doctor. You consider asking him to pay you back for your groceries, but don’t. You tell Ma your address, but don’t expect her to remember it, never mind to actually brave the streets of Leith, with the junkies and prostitutes. You chose your flat because it was affordable, and because, up until the age of nineteen, when you moved out of your parents’ house, nothing much had happened to you. At your office, you shuffle papers, send a fax, make tea, open another packet of biscuits, and hand them out. Everyone smiles without quite meeting your gaze, and you realize that you can’t describe in any detail what your colleagues look like—not even the girl who kissed you in the tearoom.

After work, you walk over to your father’s house to apologize for not appearing the night before. The garden is a soup of mud and trampled grass. As you expected, he isn’t there, so you leave a note saying, “Tea at Jenners on Sunday. 11:30.”

That evening, Ma coos to your cat. She finds it creepy that you left the plastic cover on your sofa. She says that your flat is oppressive, that she feels unwelcome in the kitchen, but you notice that she feels comfortable enough to empty your fridge, eating what she can and putting the rest in a plastic bag to take away with her.

You ask her what her childhood was like.

“Normal. Why?”

You imagine that she had three older brothers and they were all violent.

You meet your father for that tea in Jenners. He looks like himself, clipped mustache, tweed suit, a smoker’s fingernails. He does not shake your hand. Immediately, he begins a monologue about your dead mother: how she hated him when they first met (and on many occasions after they married), what a good lover she was, how irrational she was, how much he adored her. You try to avoid eye contact with the other customers. Your neck feels hot, and you hate that your father has this effect on your body.

“We were like a pair of kittens, climbing all over each other,” he says.

You know you will carry this horrifying image with you for the rest of your life.

“Your shirt is very orange,” he notes, putting his tea down, but he goes straight back to the subject of your mother, and you press the crumbs from your scone into the pad of your finger.

You have sex with Ma without kissing her mouth. She doesn’t mention the eczema all over your body. She is wearing an orange silk slip, a dicey choice for February, especially as you keep a fire going only in the little sitting room, because that’s where you and the cat spend most of your time. She tells you that the slip was her grandmother’s and that she made the dye from tree bark she stole from the Royal Botanic Garden. Over the next few weeks, she starts dyeing your white clothes, too, and one day all your dark suits have vanished. You find your best black slacks in a charity shop at the top of Leith Walk and have to repurchase them at an embarrassingly low price.

Ma has told you that she’s “with” Jitendra. You have come to like him. Her Indian name, Ma Maryam, like Jitendra’s, was given to her by the guru. She refuses to tell you the name on her passport. She says that she will change it legally as soon as she has the cash. Perhaps Ma is a student or a trainee something, like most of the others. You haven’t asked.

Jitendra gives you answers to all your questions. A few times, he massages your shoulders as he speaks to you, and you notice that you feel loose, relaxed even, around him. With him you talk, and with Ma you have quite ordinary sex.

You stay at their flat more and more, stopping at home just to feed your cat. In the mornings, before Jitendra goes to his practice and you to the office, you sit with your cups of tea and play draughts. You don’t know exactly when it happens but you find that you are one of them. You haven’t been to the barber in weeks. You have a beard for the first time in your life. You sense that you will soon be let go from work—there have been comments about your wardrobe, and how often you are late—but it doesn’t bother you, even though you know it should. You will have to give up your tiny flat, but you will just move into theirs. It has plenty of room. It will be fine. The only thing that concerns you is your cat. You are not sure how they will treat him. They are careless. No doubt one of them will bring home a plant that’s poisonous for felines. It would be just like them to—on a whim, without checking with you—become indoor-plant people.

One evening, you manage to persuade Ma to get into your bath, because you have seen the state of the bathtub where she lives. She reappears pink and soft and far too young-looking. You realize you prefer her dirty.

Since you started wearing orange, your cat has been treating you with disdain. Sometimes you don’t see him for days. He hisses and spits from under your bed, and you are afraid to get out in the morning because there is no doubt in your mind that he will scratch your bare ankles. You take flying leaps off your mattress, and hurt your knees. Not for the first time, you despair at having somehow chosen a beast that is so vicious—but when you got him, as a kitten, he seemed like all the others.

Your father leaves a message on your answering machine inviting you to a whisky evening. You don’t phone him back.

Out of nowhere, Ma says to your cat, “I used to ignore my father, and now he’s dead.”

It is the most lucid thing she has ever said.

Ma tells you, “We’re leaving you soon,” and you struggle not to cry, because you have not even managed to quit your job and move in with them yet.

Ma does not invite you. Jitendra doesn’t, either, not even when you ask him about it. You had thought the two of you were close. You don’t cry. You get a pint with an old school friend, but that is a mistake because all he wants to talk about is your parents, and how much he misses them, your mother—he is so sorry about your mother. You drink too fast and wake up in the morning on your sofa, your feet bare and covered in scratches.

At your father’s house, the dog tumbles out the door to lick your ankles. Your father looks tired, and you remember that you didn’t go to his whisky evening. You are holding a cardboard box with a few air holes punctured in the top.

“I forgot you had a cat,” he says, “Come in. Come in.”

You follow. The dog bounces near your feet. You reel off your instructions: feed the cat twice a day, never allow him out of the house, don’t attempt to trim his nails—you will regret it.

It’s just two weeks, you tell the cat.

The kitchen is uncannily clean. When you were a child, the place was always in a relentless state of disarray. There were always raised voices of one kind or another, always dirty cups in the sink and random forks on the sofa.

“Holiday, then?” He lights his pipe.

“With some friends.”

You open the flaps of the cardboard box, and the cat streaks out, leaps up onto the kitchen counter, and begins lapping from the dripping tap. It’s as if he had always lived in this house.

“Don’t worry,” your father says, blowing smoke over your head. “I’ll take care of him.”

Oregon: heat ricocheting off solid soil; flies crawling into ears and over toes; stacks of newly planed wood, smelling of sap, ready to build with; warm apples; sex; too much beer; too little rice; filthy children on the verge of killing a butterfly or a mouse.

You are different here. Yes, definitely different. Your Scottish skin is mottled with freckles; the eczema has retreated somewhere, you hope for good. Here you are touched by everyone, skin on skin, almost constantly.

Tonight you are in the meditation hall. You haven’t opened your eyes. You mustn’t, because it would break the magic. No one has used that word with you—magic—but that’s what it is, inexplicable and, at times, terrifying. Despite yourself, you open your eyes, gaze into your lap, and find an erection poking up at you. You wonder whether you can make yourself come without moving, without touch. It feels like an extreme effort to orgasm in this heat. You will let the erection go on, or wither on its own. You have been having sex with so many women. Some who were once lawyers or doctors or scientists. Some younger, like Ma, who were teachers or waitresses or still just daughters when they came here. You have had so much sex that you got a rash—not eczema, it was something else, and you had to leave this place, which you have helped to build, and get a bus to another town to see a doctor who did not know you. To him, you said out loud your new name. It feels like yours now, even though you’d never heard it before your guru presented it to you. You queued, along with many others, just to have a few brief moments with him. You haven’t admitted this to anyone, hardly even to yourself, but you were underwhelmed by the reality of him. Softer, feebler even, than you expected. Nothing like the sharp-eyed creature you saw at a distance.

You think of the evening after you graduated from university. Your father had been drinking at dinner; so had you. You were sitting beside him on the sofa, and then you were getting up to leave, and his arms shot around you and grasped you tight and held on. The next morning, after breakfast, you realized that he had been hugging you.

It’s been almost a year, and you rarely think about your cat now, except when you see the white scars on your tanned feet. You know that some people here have sent postcards home, but you have not. There is no point, really. What would you even say, except to ask after the cat?

You have not seen Jitendra since you arrived. You asked Ma when you first bumped into her again, and she shrugged and said that he’d gone back to his family. Sometimes Ma serves you dinner or sits near you in a circle around a fire on a summer night, but beyond that you barely interact with her. You have not had sex with her once since you got here. Often she is with the children; you know that she uses a damp cloth to wipe their faces and hands, and even sleeps in the house that is meant only for children, regularly bellowing at them to “be gentle.” You can’t help noticing that none of them seem to cut their nails. All of them are covered in scratches at different stages of bleeding or not bleeding. In Scotland, Ma did not seem like the maternal type, but here she is ordinary, mundane even. She blends in. You, on the other hand, you are so beautiful now. Your body is bigger; you take up more space. Your skin is smooth, except for the calluses on your hands from sawing wood. Everyone loves you here. Most days you are pretty sure of that. Everyone touches you all the time. For the first time in your life, you experience long, intimate hugs with other men, men who have no interest in fucking you; you have no interest in fucking them, either. But you slap each other’s shoulders after building a new chicken coop. They also wrap their arms around you after meditation. A man kissed you on both cheeks when you woke up shouting one night. At first, it was bizarre and glorious, but now the feeling of this love has become comfortable, lived-in. You are so deeply proud of all of them, and they are proud of you. What you are all doing here is extraordinary. You find yourself reaching for them, too, embracing them, telling them you love them. You find yourself looking up at the sky constantly, even when the sun is blinding.

One evening, you tell a group of children about the pet sheep you briefly had on holiday as a child. A tiny boy pulls your sleeve and says that he wants a sheep. You have no idea where to buy a sheep in Oregon. You don’t tell them about your cat. They don’t seem old enough somehow. You take to rolling the youngest children in blankets and carrying them around over one shoulder. You sense a ravenous need in them to be held. Even some of the older children beg you for a turn, so you enlist other men to help you. You see the brief joy on their grimy faces afterward and wonder if any children have run away from here. You ask yourself who would look for them, if they did, and if they would ever be found. You want to meditate, to empty yourself again. But then the next child comes to you, and says, “Please, big man, hold me.”

It’s morning. You haven’t slept, but you’re not sure why. The light is red and the trees purple; the tarmac is warm beneath your bare feet.

You haven’t spoken to Ma in months, but she’s running toward you, empty arms waving.

“Your dad is here,” she says.

You go back to the house you share with some people, smoke a cigarette, eat some peanuts, weed a greenhouse. Stop. You just stop.

You go to the guru’s private garden, because sometimes you weed there. Your father is in the garden, kneeling beside him. The guru speaks into your father’s ear, his hand patting and stroking your father’s shoulder, and you feel a lethal rage, because there you are deadheading his fucking roses, and you have never been touched by him, never touched him, not once.

“Malcolm,” your father shouts.

You sit on the sun-blistered grass together. His nose is smeared with a white strip of sun cream.

Ma is walking up the road toward the guru’s big house.

“See that girl with the shoes on?” you say.

“What made you think it would work with her?” your father asks.

“What makes you think it didn’t?”

“Hah.”

You know he’s thinking that Ma is like your mother. You are both thinking that it has been three years now without her. Neither of you expected it, not of her. Without ever speaking about it, you had both assumed that she would go noisily, in a freak hiking accident or a plane crash. Not with the quietness of a disease already in her brain; not drugged and almost constantly sleeping. Within a week, she could not speak. Before that, wherever she went, tender and trampling through your lives, there was always the sound of bangle against bangle on her wrists.

You look down at your strong, freckled arms, your hands in your lap. You look up at the sky, its blue mottled by clouds.

You don’t ask how your father found you. Your parents always seemed to know someone in every city. The endless dinner parties. The constant chatter and music. You suppose it was only a matter of time. You laugh.

“How’s my cat?”

“She’s dead.”

“He’s dead.”

A warm hand takes your hand, and you think how nice it is, in the end, to be touched by a man like your father. ♦

Doyers Street is a one-block strip in Chinatown that starts off perpendicular to the Bowery and then curves ninety degrees, like a lowercase “r,” to terminate against the bustle of Pell Street. A notorious battleground for gang fights in the early nineteen-hundreds, it has, in recent decades, scrubbed out the bloodstains and redefined itself as a beloved, city-grid-defying idiosyncrasy, narrow and wonky and overflowing with atmosphere. Shops and restaurants on Doyers come and go, but as far back as the fighting days it’s been anchored by Nom Wah Tea Parlor, which claims to hold the title of New York’s oldest dim-sum spot. Its sign, once a bright burgundy and gold, is faded; the interior has seen better days, and the legendary egg rolls—I say this with love—have, too. But what Nom Wah does best is, simply, remain: it’s the colossus of Doyers Street, the past that has made it into the present.

A new establishment, Lei Wine, opened last June, right next door, and it serves as a potent counterpoint. Modern, sleek, restrained, Lei is the first solo project from the restaurateur Annie Shi, a partner in the chic European-inflected West Village restaurant King and its midtown sibling, Jupiter. Shi, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, grew up in Queens; she’s spoken about taking inspiration for Lei from her mother’s cooking and her father’s Chinatown social life. With mahogany wall panels and folktale-inspired murals, the restaurant evokes elements of traditional Chinese design, while its moody, candlelit interior and austere tableware (including chopsticks with riveted, bistro-style handholds) place it firmly in the aesthetic of the here and now. High shelves run around the walls in the tiny, table-packed dining room, clustered with bottles from Shi’s meticulously curated wine list; if a customer requests a bottle that’s out of reach, a server might grab a ladder that rests against the wall by the door—fire-engine red, the brightest shock of color in the otherwise low-key room—and climb nimbly over diners’ heads.

A fire-engine-red ladder allows staff members to reach bottles from above diners’ heads.

Lei’s menu is brief and tight, featuring mostly snack-size dishes, both chilled and warm, and two or three larger plates that, while still relatively petite, flirt with the notion of a main course. It is unmistakably Chinese in approach and ingredients, if not necessarily traditionalist in its execution. The kitchen (tiny, all electric, led by the chef Patty Lee, an alumna of Mission Chinese) seems to operate on ambitious principles of beauty and control. The presentation is starkly, artistically minimalist: three tiny bowls of pickles (cucumber, radish, celery); a precise triangle of aged-daikon omelette. Raw celtuce, a lettuce cultivar bred for its sweet stem rather than for its leaves, is cut into neat rectangles of a luminous parakeet green, interleaved with strips of jiggly kombu jelly, and plated atop a vermillion pool of Yongchun red vinegar. An ovoid shao bing—a flaky laminated pastry freckled with sesame seeds—provides a sharp contrast in temperatures: the bun is oven-hot and puffy with steam, the thick slab of butter tucked inside still fridge cold. You can, if you like, get a side of cured lardo, ethereal slivers laid out on a white plate, but the logic of the pairing eludes me: the oily bing and milky slick of butter already form a symphony of richness, and I was happier to eat the lardo on its own, letting each translucent fairy wing of fat melt on my tongue.

Softness and subtlety are recurring motifs, a striking departure from the current trend among modern Chinese restaurants toward forceful, fiery flavors. This can, at times, be a little bit boring: that omelette, for instance, a Taiwanese-informed riff on the tortilla española, was anodyne as baby food, and barely revived by a drizzle of scallion oil. But the kitchen’s quietude can also reveal moments of startling sophistication, as with a scallop crudo under a tangle of dried lily buds, the floral strands musky and tart against the fish’s supple sweetness. Cat’s ear noodles, toothsome little swoops of fresh dough, are tossed in a northern-Chinese-inspired ragout of braised lamb that’s scented oh-so-gently with cumin. A little pile of three bite-size pieces of zhū xiě gāo—a chewy Taiwanese black sausage made with pig’s blood and sticky rice—looks like nearly nothing, the exteriors coated to a bland beigeness in crushed peanuts, but it’s maybe the boldest dish on the menu, its mochi-like savoriness shot through with a sharp, controlled flare of heat.

If you go to Lei looking for dinner, this parade of composure might not send you into raptures. But Lei isn’t really a restaurant; it is, quite pointedly, a wine bar, and it’s at its best when you approach it as one. It would be ideal to drop by for a nightcap after a meal somewhere nearby—a solo bowl of noodles at Maxi’s, or a riotous group dinner at Uncle Lou—to close the evening with a glass of bubbly and Lei’s zingy multi-citrus shaved-ice parfait, one of only two desserts on the menu. Shi’s bottle list encompasses an idiosyncratic mix of classics and oddballs, including stroppy Austrian natural whites alongside multi-thousand-dollar Burgundies, funky low-intervention oranges from Greece, a few bottles from the Japanese winery Coco Farm. The by-the-glass list skews a little less adventurous, with crowd-pleasing, apple-juicy pours—I was disappointed not to see any Chinese options, despite some on the bottle list—but the staff regularly opens interesting offerings from the bottle list that you might catch a pour of. One evening, I was lucky to try a glass of a thrilling Portuguese white (the 2022 Malvarinto de Janas, from the Sintra-based producer Quinta de San Michel) that was muscular and gravelly, with surprising notes of coconut. It’s the sort of wine you don’t usually end up drinking, unless someone who really knows her stuff is running the show. Moreover, it’s the sort of wine that is set off, so prettily, so evocatively, by food that’s confident enough to speak quietly, and share the stage. ♦

A citrus shaved-ice parfait is one of only two desserts on the menu.