At one point, I had more than 30 cats in my Beijing compound. They were all rescues. In some cities in southern China, like Guangzhou, there is a famous dish called Dragon and Phoenix that often contains cat and snake meats. It’s a mad local custom, and there are people who capture neighborhood cats in other cities and send them south. In 2009, I was working with an N.G.O. called China Small Animal Protection Association — really just a group of kids, because even that kind of nonprofit can’t really exist in China — and we seized a truck filled with 400 cats in tiny cages. I couldn’t take all of them, so I took 40. And they were all different. It doesn’t matter how many cats you have — each has its own character.