Zheng Jianguo
"Early seventies, close-cropped grey hair, the posture of someone who spent decades sitting up straight behind a government desk. Wears the same style of grey button-up regardless of season. Crosses his arms when skeptical, which is often, and less often than it used to be."
Biography
Zheng Jianguo spent thirty-eight years in a district civil affairs office in Tianjin, processing paperwork he describes, without much affection, as "important, in the way filing cabinets are important." Since retiring he has kept homing pigeons on his apartment roof and developed several specific, unrequested opinions about the correct way to make hand-pulled noodles. He joined the poetry club at his daughter's insistence and made a point, for the first several sessions, of reminding everyone he was not "a poetry person." He still says this occasionally, usually right before saying something that proves otherwise.