Chapter Four: The Price of a Song

Shen Yan did not photograph Tang on a stage. He built a cramped rented room with damp walls and two cheap headphones on a table—the place where, at twenty-two, she had been poorest and most fearless. Through the viewfinder, a younger Tang appeared barefoot on the concrete, smiling at someone beyond the frame. “Look at her,” Shen Yan said. “Not your younger self. The person you erased.” The shutter fell. The fourth division turned silver. Tang clutched her throat as if surfacing from deep water, then sang a perfect first line. There was no accompaniment or correction, yet her voice was so clear that the producer who had worked with her for twenty years turned away to wipe his eyes.