For the entire second year of high school, after evening study hall let out at eleven-thirty, I would head to a barbecue stall near the school gate for a late-night snack. My classmates complained that the owner grilled everything too tough and played music that was impossible to listen to — they preferred another place a bit farther down the road. I was never much of a joiner to begin with, so this gave me a perfectly legitimate excuse not to eat with them. I always went alone.

The stall was called Qiangzi BBQ, but the owner's name was Baogui. I found that endlessly amusing — a man named Baogui running a barbecue stand under someone else's name. It had the feel of a setup from a romance novel, though the only thing I could imagine Qiangzi and Baogui actually doing together was picking fights with the dogs at the edge of the village. That peculiar, inexplicable sense of humor was probably one of the reasons I kept coming back. Maybe Baogui really did grill things too tough, because more often than not I was the only one at the stall past midnight. Once I asked him why he didn't pack up and go home earlier. He said: I know regulars like you will show up. And there's nothing for me to do at home anyway — I'd rather wait here.

Baogui spoke no Mandarin. His accent sounded like it came from somewhere deep in the mountains of southwestern Chongqing, which reminded me of my great-grandmother, who had passed away years before. When he wasn't grilling, he would sit under a streetlamp reading Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu — sometimes volume two, sometimes volume four. Jazz played in the background. I knew nothing about jazz and didn't find it particularly beautiful, but after enough nights of listening, I stopped minding it. To me, Baogui was one of the strangest people I had ever met — and yet utterly harmless. I couldn't fathom what a barbecue vendor who didn't speak Mandarin could possibly be getting out of Proust, or why he'd turned a sidewalk food stall into his own private jazz bar. And yet there it was — these quirks existed in him, strange but never unsettling. Every night, sitting there with my skewers and the jazz drifting through the air, I'd wonder about the kind of person Baogui was. What his story might be. Gradually, a thought took shape in my mind: I wanted to rob Qiangzi BBQ. I had no idea what would happen, couldn't begin to imagine how someone like Baogui would respond to a robbery. But that very uncertainty was irresistible. Whenever the idea surfaced, I felt a rush I couldn't quite name.

One afternoon, I mentioned it to two older students who were repeating their senior year. They thought it was a great idea and said they'd come along. It all came together quickly — no real planning, just a pair of sunglasses and some hats, and an agreement to make our move after evening study hall. That night, instead of spacing out and listening to music like I usually did, I sat down with a stack of old math exams and worked through the final problems — the kind I normally couldn't even parse, let alone solve. I don't know what came over me, but I worked through two of them back to back. I felt invincible. I was born for moments like this, I thought. The moment study hall ended, the three of us put on our disguises and marched toward Qiangzi BBQ, riding high.

The robbery went smoothly. Baogui offered no resistance. But he asked us to take volume three of In Search of Lost Time with us, as a kind of trade. One of the older guys laughed and said: We already took everything — what trade? Baogui replied, quite earnestly: Just read it, when you have the time. That's all I'm asking. We hesitated, then agreed. Which meant it wasn't really a robbery anymore — it was an exchange. And so the three of us walked away with Baogui's two-hundred-odd yuan in earnings for the night and a battered copy of Proust. After that, I never went back to Qiangzi BBQ. Gradually I found my way into the social circles I'd always kept at a distance. What's strange is that this was, by any measure, one of the most outrageous things I've ever done — and yet I forgot about it almost immediately. I can't explain it. Not once, during later late-night meals with friends, did I stop to think about why I was no longer eating alone. Baogui and his stall simply vanished from memory, as if someone had drawn a thick black line through that whole passage of my life.

In college, for reasons I never fully understood, my dorm room was often empty except for me. I stopped going out for late-night snacks on my own — even when I was genuinely hungry, I'd just sit there on the edge of my chair, staring at nothing. One evening I noticed three worn-out volumes of In Search of Lost Time on my roommate's bookshelf, and suddenly Baogui came back to me — the stall, the jazz, all of it. The feeling was extraordinary, like eating pineapple cake by moonlight. I went online and looked up that year's Chongqing college entrance exam, the final math problem. I couldn't solve it. Later that night I wandered out to every barbecue stall in the area around the dorms, but I couldn't find that urge to rob anywhere. The smoke rolled off the grills in thick columns; you could smell the cumin and chili powder from half a block away. But none of them were like Baogui's Qiangzi BBQ, none of them were like those Chongqing sidewalk stalls. I couldn't say exactly what the difference was. I only knew I didn't want to rob them. And I knew that if I tried, I wouldn't be able to solve a math problem first.

I find myself wondering, from time to time, whether I'll ever again come across a barbecue stand I want to rob.