Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. She held a bowl in one outstretched hand. Her eyes were studying the gravel on the road, not rising to the gaze of passersby who occasionally dropped a coin into her bowl. Her mother was dead, her father was missing, she had no siblings that she knew of, she had only a red gown and a bowl. When the bowl filled with money at the end of the day, as it often did, she would take it to a nearby shop and exchange it for rice and broth.
Sitting under the eaves of the shops and shanties in the crowded corridors of her section of the city, the girl would scoop rice from the bowl into her mouth with much slurping and smacking, uncaring that there were people passing by who regarded her with unease, or guilt, or lust, or indifference.
When her stomach was full and her voracious appetite sated, she walked the seven blocks to the parking lot that contained her 2007 BMW convertible and she drove away into the sunset, tapping her tiny begrimed foot in time to the music of Tito Puente.