Just barely. To look around Gulangyu Island was to be reminded that Fujian had been a tropical jungle and wanted, in the worst way, to be a tropical jungle again. If humans ever walked away from it, or stopped fighting it back with pruning shears and bucksaws, the creepers and lianas, the root systems, runners, spores, and seed pods would, in the space of a few years, overrun everything they had ever built. She did not know the detailed history of the place, but it was obvious that something like this must have happened to Gulangyu during the time of Mao, and that post-Mao real estate developers had gotten to the island just in the nick of time. From place to place you could still see an old Western-style building that was being torn to pieces in slow motion by foliage, rendering it so structurally unsound that only rats and wood-munching bugs could live there. But quite a few of the old buildings had been rescued—Olivia imagined a D-day-style invasion of the island, gardeners with saws and shovels parachuting out of the sky and storming the beaches—and were being liberated from the thorny or flowery embrace of climbing vines, deratted, reroofed, fixed up, and condoized. Her apartment was small but nicely located on the top floor of what had once been a French merchant’s villa and now served as home to a couple dozen young professionals like Meng Anlan. Her bed looked out onto a small balcony with a view across the water to the brilliant downtown lights of Xiamen, and during those nights when sleep eluded her, she would sit up and hug her knees and stare across the water, wondering which of those scintillae was the screen of Abdallah Jones’s laptop.