It must have been the summer of 2000 or maybe 2001 when I saw Ensign Wang guide a hedgehog across the road. The location, which I’m sure of, was the Y-shaped junction of Second and Third Avenues and Eleventh Street. The hedgehog was covered in short grayish-white bristles, and its tiny feet stuck to the newly laid tarmac. Ensign Wang loomed over it, legs firmly planted to block its way, blowing a tin whistle and waving the little yellow flag of a volunteer traffic officer. The hedgehog was too low to the ground to see any of this, but it seemed to grasp the message. Slowly turning its pointy face, it scurried eastward, hopped up onto the curb, and vanished into the undergrowth, abandoning Ensign Wang and the gridlocked streets.

I told Jade and her family this story the night we got engaged. I’d met Jade when I wandered into a bar while backpacking in Nice, saw a Chinese girl, and went over to talk to her. She was with a couple of female friends, all three of them already drunk. When she opened her mouth, her Northeastern accent was the same as mine. We found to our astonishment that we’d been born in the same place, Shenyang, and even at the same hospital. Three months later, at a seaside restaurant, a gentle breeze blew as Jade helped me translate the story of Ensign Wang and the hedgehog. Again and again, her French stepmother made a startled expression just a moment after her husband.

I was five and in my last year of preschool when I first learned that Ensign Wang was Eldest Uncle and Eldest Uncle was Ensign Wang. He was married to the eldest of my ba’s three sisters; my ba was an only son. My parents were both doing overtime at their respective factories, making parts for a giant float⁠⁠⁠—one tires, the other ball bearings⁠⁠⁠—to represent our province at the National Day celebrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Grandma was too busy smoking her pipe and playing mahjong with her old-lady neighbors to bother with picking me up from school, so instead she sent Ensign Wang, who happened to be at her place bringing her some anchovies.

I saw him outside and called, Hello, Eldest Uncle. He nodded in acknowledgment. An astonishingly tall man, he had to stoop to take my hand. In a rumbling voice he said, Don’t call me Eldest Uncle. Call me by my name, or else call me Ensign⁠⁠⁠—even our commissar calls me that. I said, It’s rude to call older p-p-people by their names, that’s what my ma says. Ensign Wang said, Manners are for common people, you don’t need them with me. I married your aunt, but that doesn’t change who I am. I said, Shouldn’t you be at w-work? Ma and Ba both are, and Ma says playing mahjong is Grandma’s job. Ensign Wang laughed. The hand that wasn’t holding mine held a cigarette, from which he now took a drag. I’m a military man, he said. I’m on family leave. I said, Oh, what kind of m-military man? He said, A navy submariner. Why are you stuttering?

We made the rounds of Youth Avenue and Eighth Street, stopping for a bowl of hand-pulled noodles. Along the way, Ensign Wang told me about the strange underwater creatures he’d seen from his submarine. I’ve forgotten most of them, except one that, despite its name, wasn’t actually a fish⁠⁠⁠—a giant cuttlefish that had wrapped its arms tightly around the submarine, holding it upright like a popsicle, when they were 3,800 meters underwater. Everything inside was flung around, and the crew tumbled one after another toward the nose. He said, Doesn’t that sound terrifying? I said, I don’t b-believe you. He said, Everything I saw was just like in that novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by some French guy named Versailles. I used to think it was all made-up too. I’ll dig up the book when I get home and bring it for you next time. I said, Why didn’t you shoot a t-t-torpedo? Ensign Wang’s tobacco pouch was empty by then. He said, Our submarine only had nuclear weapons. If we’d fired, all the fish in the Pacific would have died, and the humans wouldn’t have lasted long either.

The sky was dark by the time we got back to Grandma’s house. I looked at the clock; it was nearly eight, and school finished at four thirty. Ma was back from work, and when I walked in the door with Ensign Wang, she grabbed me and said to him, Brother-in-Law, it’s been more than three hours. Did you take my son to Beijing? Ensign Wang laughed and said, Don’t forget to put the anchovies in the freezer, Ma. As he left, Ma grumbled to Grandma, Are you trying to kill me? You sent a lunatic to fetch my son. He’s not a lunatic, said Grandma. He’s a perfectly good man, the doctor said so.

I found out only later that when my ma called Ensign Wang a lunatic, she’d meant it literally⁠⁠⁠—he really was a mental patient. After that, I started noticing how, at our New Year’s family get-togethers, when my dad would book us a karaoke room at a local hotel, Ensign Wang would grab the microphone and refuse to let go, even sticking it in his pocket when he went to the bathroom in case someone tried to snatch it from him. Ensign Wang was happy when he sang, which meant he behaved himself. He had a good tenor voice, and did especially well with Yang Hongji’s or Jiang Dawei’s songs. He also liked drinking and writing poetry, and he played a mean game of chess⁠⁠⁠—he could do it while reading a book, moving the pieces with his feet. I’d seen his poems, though I didn’t understand them. They all had to do with the ocean.

As for his illness, I’d hear the story from Grandma every New Year’s Eve dinner. Ensign Wang had joined the navy when he was nineteen so he wouldn’t get sent down to the countryside, but despite his efforts he still got caught up in the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. There were a couple of years in the middle of all that when his ship’s crew was split into two factions, with the captain and the commissar each leading one. Not wanting to offend anyone, Ensign Wang refused to take sides. He was allowed to keep his allegiances murky because everyone understood his temperament: timid, earnest, stubborn. Yet because he was the best at his job as well as the most educated, both sides wanted to recruit him⁠⁠⁠—only they never could tell which way he was leaning. That was the root of the problem. One night, in his six-man bunk, Ensign Wang began talking in his sleep. In his resonant tenor voice, he called the captain a two-faced backstabber, then sneered that the commissar was a treacherous little rodent. Unfortunately for him, one of his bunkmates was an informant for the captain, and another for the commissar. They went to fetch their paymasters, who stood around wide-eyed, along with the other five men, listening to him curse and swear till dawn. The next day, the entire company canceled training and the factions came to a temporary truce to summon Ensign Wang to a struggle session. The captain said, Ensign, it turns out you’re a hypocrite, a traitor embedded within our forces. To think your father was an old revolutionary, with a hundred battles to his name. How will you ever look him in the eye? The commissar, like most commissars, was a man of few words. All he said was, Ensign Wang, you’re in for a world of punishment.