He is reading a novel. In it is an unimportant detail about curtains: “The curtains are hemmed. It took me several hours to sew them by hand, but it was worth it. The white linen brings an astonishing freshness to the entire room. I always knew carefully chosen curtains could work miracles upon a window.”

It occurs to him that he has almost never looked closely at a curtain, even though curtains occupy a central place in his vocabulary. Whenever he wants to describe something gentle, he says it is like a silk curtain, or a nurse's fingers—in any case, the sorts of things a man thinks about when he climbs onto a banquet table. The sorts of things he thinks after swallowing baijiu, releasing a trembling haaah from his throat, then shaking the empty glass downwards to prove he drained it in one.

The first curtains he ever owned—it is difficult to say whether he has seen any uglier. He thanks them for working a miracle in reverse upon his windows.

Seven years ago, he had a place of his own for the first time. While clearing out the previous tenant's relics, including a foot massager (he smelled it before deciding to throw it away), he discovered the living-room curtains had not been changed in twenty years. In fairness, they blocked light very well. Their dirt helped. Every time he pulled them open, they produced the grainy atmosphere in which one might film Once Upon a Time in America.

On Taobao, he found a seller offering custom curtains and home measuring. Across the cover image, the words SHANGHAI CURTAINS appeared in heavy black type; someone with poor eyesight might have mistaken it for a funeral business. The looping advert showed a white SUV—implying that the owner of the car was the seller—slowly approaching the gates of an expensive residential complex. He chose the seller because the price was low: only fifty yuan. After placing the order, he discovered that fifty yuan was merely the fee for measuring.

A man and a woman came to his home. The woman said they had been in the trade for twenty years and he could trust them completely.

Where were you before? he asked.

Beijing, she said.

Then why did you come to Shanghai?

We couldn't keep going there.

He really ought to have asked a follow-up question.

She asked, you don't want these old curtains anymore?

He said no.

The man and woman took one side each and pulled at the same time. The old curtains fell.

Rags! she said, treading on one thing to praise another.

For the new ones, she asked, do you want a single colour?

He said, as long as they look good.

When it comes to looking good, she said, I have to make a recommendation. We can combine two colours…

He believed her. And of course, on a technical level, she was not wrong.

Afterwards, every guest who entered his home gave a small exclamation. Naturally, they did not say the curtains were ugly, though several of them did. Most, if they commented at all, used words like avant-garde or distinctive. It was a colour combination one would see only on a circus performer's trousers. Pull apart the dark-green pleats and fragments of yellow sprang out. The curtains blocked light very well, especially the light inside the room, because one never wanted to switch it on.

Why did he always trust custom sellers on Taobao? During the same period, he commissioned a knife bag, leaf-shaped bookmarks, and a PowerPoint presentation. Every time an order arrived, he begged them to stop customising things and give him the greatest common denominator instead.

When he outsourced the PowerPoint, the seller added at least seven or eight workers to the WeChat group one after another, each subcontracted by the previous subcontractor, causing the surplus value of the final producer to become extremely high. After at least two hours of “Okay” travelling back and forth, the producer returned a file resembling homework from a computer class at a university for the elderly. Put it this way: if he typed blindly onto a blank template, the result would look better.

He berated the unfortunate producer. Remove every one of these boxes!

Okay, dear.

Shouldn't the typefaces and sizes be consistent?

Okay, dear.

After many such exchanges, he lost patience and asked the producer, why is it still so ugly?

At this point, one of the producer's supervisors or upstream contractors spoke. Dear—this person reminded him—this is the forty-five-yuan service package (two yuan less for 88VIP members). What exactly were you expecting?

Meaning: Ugliness is a form of retaliation, like going on strike.

He moved again, changed cities. After moving, he tore down the living-room curtains and installed no new ones. He simply displayed the interior of the flat naked. Perhaps because he never felt he belonged here, he made no demands for privacy. He did not want to block the light. He even hoped a torch beam would strike his body, the way the police department summons Batman.

He liked to wear very little and lean beside the window, watching to see whether a passer-by might look up and discover his belly. (Well, again, a passerby with the slightest curiosity to look up.) Another line from the novel: “Her gaze travelled upwards from below. Her eyes disclosed little: she controlled the field of vision. The world did not enter her; she entered the world.”

He had argued with his mother about curtains many times. Two years after his father died, his mother remarried. One day he came home and discovered every piece of furniture had been replaced, including the curtains in his room.

As he tried to digest all this, his mother began an incessant account of the interior's soft-furnishing upgrade: how they had wavered between minimalism and rococo (if they could not even agree on that, what was left to discuss?); how they had bargained at the furniture shop until the owner, desperate to clear his stock, had been reduced to tears (by this account, the sale happened because the owner's psychological defences collapsed).

Look at the details of this renovation. Look at the floor. This table. And now look at the curtains in your room?

You lift your head, your gaze travelling upwards from below. A pale-lilac curtain. For the sake of the demonstration, the window has already been opened, and the wind gently fills the fabric.

As stated, he does not like to mention nurses' fingers. But that was what he thought of then.