Death of a Red Heroine

by Qiu Xiaolong

  Back home, he was exhausted and famished. He had had only a bowl of green onion instant noodles in the morning. There was nothing but half a dry loaf left in the refrigerator. He took it out and brewed himself a pot of coffee, using three spoonfuls. That was his dinner: bread that tasted like cardboard and coffee strong enough to dye his hair. Then he took out the case file, though he had already read it several times. After a futile attempt to find something new, he took out the magazines he had borrowed from the club in the morning. To his surprise, there was a poem by Chief Inspector Chen in Qinghai Lake. It was entitled “Night Talk.”

  Creamy coffee, cold;

  Toy bricks of sugar cubes

  Crumbling, a butter blossom still

  Reminiscent of natural freedom

  On the mutilated cake,

  The knife aside, like a footnote.

  It is said that people can tell the time

  By the change of color

  In a cat’s eyes—

  But you can’t. Doubt, a heap

  Of ancient dregs

  From the bottle of Great Wall

  Rests in the sparkling wine.

  Zhang could not understand it. He just knew that some images were vaguely disturbing. So he skipped a couple of stanzas toward the end, to reach the last one.

  Nothing appears more accidental

  Than the world in words

  A rubric turns by chance

  In your hands, and the result,

  Like any result, is called history . . .

  Through the window we see no star.

  Mind’s square deserted, not a pennant

  Left. Only a rag picker of the ages

  Passes by, dropping scraps

  Of every minute into her basket.

  The words “mind’s square” suddenly caught his attention. Could that possibly be an allusion to Tiananmen Square? “Deserted” on a summer night of 1989, with no “pennant” left there. If so, the poem was politically incorrect. And the issue about “history,” too. Chairman Mao had said that people, people alone make the history. How could Chen talk about history as the result of a rubric?

  Zhang was not sure of his interpretation. So he started to read all over again. Before long, however, his eyesight grew bleary. He had to give up. There was nothing else for him to do. So he took a shower before going to bed. Standing under the shower head, he still thought that Chen had gone too far.

  Zhang decided to sleep on his misgivings, but his brain kept churning. Around eleven thirty, he got out of bed, turned on the lights, and donned his reading glasses.

  The apartment was so quiet. His wife had passed away at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Ten years, the living, the not living. It’s more than ten years. Then the telephone on the nightstand rang.

  It was a long distance phone call from his daughter in Anhui. “Dad, I’m calling from the local county hospital. Kangkang, our second son, is sick, his temperature is 104. The doctor says that it is pneumonia. Guolian has been laid off. We’ve got no money left.”

  “How much?”

  “We need a thousand Yuan as a deposit, or they won’t treat him.”

  “Give them what you have. Tell the doctors to go ahead. I’ll express mail it to you the first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Thank you, Dad. Sorry to touch you like this.”

  “You don’t have to say that.” He added after a pause, “I’m the one to blame for all this—all these years.”

  So Zhang believed. For whatever had happened to his daughter, he held himself responsible. Often, with unbearable bitterness, at night he would recollect the distant moments of taking her to school, hand in hand, back in the early sixties. A proud child of a revolutionary cadre family, a bright student at school, her future in socialist China was rosy. In 1966, however, all that changed. The Cultural Revolution turned him into a counterrevolutionary, and her into a child of a black capitalist roader family, a target of the Red Guards’ revolutionary criticism. As a politically discriminated-against educable educated youth, she was sent to the poor countryside in Anhui Province, where she worked for no more than ten cents a day. He could never imagine what had happened to her there. Other educated youths received money from their families in Shanghai, or came back for family reunions at the Spring Festival, but she couldn’t. She had no family; he was still in jail. When he was finally released and rehabilitated in the mid-seventies, he could hardly recognize his child, now a sallow, deeply wrinkled woman in black homespun with a baby on her back. She had married a local mine worker— a survivor’s choice, perhaps. In those years, a mine worker’s monthly salary of sixty Yuan could have made a world of difference. There she soon became the mother of three. In the late seventies, she passed up the opportunity to return to Shanghai, for Party policy forbade any ex-educated youth like her from bringing her husband and children to the city with her.

  Sometimes he felt that, by torturing herself, she was torturing him.

  “Dad, you shouldn’t blame yourself.”

  “What else can I do? I have not taken good care of you. Now I’m too old.”

  “You don’t sound well. Have you overworked?”

  “No, it’s just the last task before my retirement.”

  “Then take care.”

  “I will.”

  “Next time I come to Shanghai, I’ll bring a couple of Luhua hens for you.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “The folks here say Luhua hens are good for an old man’s health. I’m raising half a dozen. Genuine Luhua.”

  Now she was sounding more and more like her poor and lower-middle-class peasant self again.

  A click. He heard her putting down the phone. And the empty silence. She was thousands of miles away. So many years had passed since he talked to the daughter in his heart.

  Slowly he moved back to the desk. The file was still lying there, and he turned to the notes he had made during the meeting, going over everything again. Stretching out across the desk to get a cigarette, he found only an empty pack beside the pen holder. He reached into his pocket. The only thing he found, however, was something he did not immediately recognize.

  It was a number on a piece of paper crumpled into a small ball. He must have put it there himself—it was in his own handwriting. Why? He was lost. For a moment, he felt he was much closer to Wu Bing, alone, lying unconscious on a hospital bed. All his life, Comrade Wu Bing had fought for the cause of communism. And what then? A vegetable, unable to do anything to protect his son from being targeted as a suspect. His opposition to the direction of the investigation, Zhang hastened to tell himself, did not stem from the kinship he was feeling with Wu Bing. Nor was it the young people coming to the fore, upstarts making tons of money, or Chief Inspector Chen challenging his authority. To build the investigation on such a biased concept about HCC was part of a social trend questioning the correct leadership of the Party.

  What if Wu Xiaoming had committed the murder? Whoever had committed the crime should be punished, of course. But then, would that be in the interests of the Party? With such a social trend, news of the investigation would certainly add fuel to the fire.

  Zhang could not find an answer.

  It had never been difficult, however, for him to find an answer in the early years when he had first joined the Party. In 1944, a promising college student, he went to Yan’an without finishing his studies, experiencing all the hardships of a donkey-back trip. Life there was harsh—sharing a Yan’an cave with four other comrades, working twelve hours a day, and reading by candlelight. After three months, he could barely recognize his reflection in the river. Gaunt, unshaven, undernourished, scarcely any trace left of a young intellectual from the big city. But he believed he had a satisfactory answer in the changed reflection. He knew he was doing the right thing for the country, for the people, for the Party. And for himself, too. Those were the happy years.

  In the following years, though Commissar Zhang’s career had not been too smooth, he had
never doubted the answer.

  But now—

  Finally he decided.

  He would write a report to Jiang Zhong, an old comrade-in-arms who still held an influential position in Internal Security, thus leaving the question to the higher Party authorities. They should know how to handle a sensitive case like this, whether Wu Xiaoming was guilty—or not. In the best interests of the Party.

  He also enclosed a copy of “Night Talk,” underlining some words in the poem. He felt it was his responsibility to share with the higher authorities his concern about Chief Inspector Chen’s ideological ambiguity. In spite of his efforts, he was not sure what Chen had tried to say in the poem, but what really mattered would be the interpretation of the reader. If anyone could associate the “square” in the poem with the one in contemporary politics, then it should not have been written at all. So with the investigation, people’s responses would be a matter of crucial concern for the Party.

  Commissar Zhang was not unaware of the possible impact his report might bring to bear on Chief Inspector Chen. But then, it need not necessarily mean the end of the world for a young man.

  Chapter 22

  Guangzhou.

  Chief Inspector Chen stood under the sign at the railroad station, which was swarming with travelers from all over the country. The economic and cultural center of South China, Guangzhou was fast becoming a second Hong Kong.

  Ironically, Guangzhou had a much longer history according to a travel guide in Chen’s hand. It had come into contact with Western barbarian businessmen when Hong Kong was still a fishing village. For thirty years after 1949, however, since Guangzhou was so near to Hong Kong, it had been put under special ideological surveillance, and as a result, its cultural and economic development lagged. It was not until Comrade Deng Xiaoping toured the southern provinces in the early eighties, pushing forward the Open Door Policy, that things began to change. With the rapid rise of free markets and private business, an economic revolution transformed Guangzhou and its surrounding cities. Guangzhou, like Shenzhen, a neighboring special zone city of commercial skyscrapers, became “special”—in the sense that most of the orthodox socialist codes were not applied to it. Now the advantages of socialism were redefined in terms of a better, more prosperous life for the people. Foreign capitalists and investors swarmed in. Its close connection to Hong Kong was further accentuated by a newly built railway.

  That explained why so many people came to Guangzhou, including Xie Rong, Chen reflected. At one end of the station, travelers were lining up along the platform, waiting for the new Guangzhou-Hong Kong express train. The local newspapers were full of discussions about a country with two systems. Peddlers were shouting “Hong Kong roast goose” and “Hong Kong barbecue pork,” as if everything, once labeled “Hong Kong,” immediately became more desirable.

  The issue that Chen was musing over was not, however, how to get to Hong Kong like those excited people on the platform. After 1997 when Hong Kong came under Chinese rule, he would probably visit there, and Hong Kong would still be capitalist in theory. At this moment, he had to find a place to stay in Guangzhou—a place within the bureau’s socialist budget.

  His budget plight had been further complicated by Commissar Zhang in the special case group meeting, where Chen had given a number of reasons for making the trip. Actually, there was one he had not mentioned. Maybe it was not that important, but it was there. He had intended to keep himself busy working on the case, so busy that he had no time to think about his own personal problem. And for that, an investigative trip away from Shanghai for a few days was just the thing. But in Guangzhou Chen found the budget situation worse than he had expected. Owing to price reforms, a small, shabby hotel room in a not-too-inconvenient location would cost forty Yuan per day. Chen had already used one hundred fifty Yuan for the round-trip train ticket. The remaining two hundred Yuan was inadequate even for five days. As a chief inspector, he got a maximum of five Yuan for his standard meal allowance, but a tiny bowl of shrimp dumplings and noodles eaten at a sidewalk stand would cost him more. The only solution was to find a cheap guesthouse with a small canteen.

  After spending twenty minutes at the station hotel service desk, he decided to make a phone call to Ms. Yang Ke, the head of the Guangzhou Writers’ Association.

  “Comrade Yang, it’s Chen Cao speaking.”

  “Little Chen, I’m so pleased that you’re calling me,” Yang said. “I recognized your Shanghai accent.”

  “So you still remember me?”

  “Of course, and the article you wrote about the movie, too. So where are you?”

  “I’m here in Guangzhou. And I want to say hi to you, a greeting to the well-known established writer from an unknown young writer.”

  “Thank you, but you’re not that unknown. And it is not common nowadays for the young to be respectful to the old.”

  A novelist in her mid-sixties, Yang had written a bestseller, The Song of Revolution, in the early sixties that was later made into a popular movie, showing Daojin, a revolutionary goddess, as a young heroine. Chen was too young to see the movie when it was first released, but he kept clippings from several movie magazines. Both the novel and the film were banned during the Cultural Revolution. When the movie was re-released afterward, Chen hastened to see it. To his great dismay, it was not at all the movie he had dreamed of. The story struck him as a stereotyped propaganda, the colors of the movie unreal, the heroine too serious, stiff, moving about with gestures familiar from revolutionary posters. Still, Chen wrote an essay arguing for the historical merit of the novel.

  “What has brought you here?”

  “Nothing particular. People are all saying that Guangzhou has changed a lot. So I want to see for myself, and hopefully find something to write about.”

  “Exactly, that’s why so many writers are coming here. So where are you staying, Chen?”

  “I’ve not decided yet. In fact, you’re the first one I’m calling in Guangzhou. The hotels seem quite expensive.”

  “Well, that is just what our Writers’ Home is for. You’ve heard of it, haven’t you? Let me make a call for you. Just go there. The location is excellent, and you will receive a huge discount.”

  “Oh yes, now that you remind me.”

  A guesthouse had been made from the original building of the Guangzhou Writers’ Association, a virtue made out of necessity. Nominally an unofficial organization, the Writers’ Association had always been funded with government money to support professional writers and activities. In recent years, however, the funding had undergone huge cuts. As a last resort, Yang had turned the office building into a guesthouse, using the profit to support the association.

  “You know, that’s the very argument I made to the local authorities to get approval. Since Guangzhou’s changing so fast, writers will come here to experience life, and they have to stay somewhere. The hotels are too expensive, and our Writers’ Home charges about only one-third their price for the members of the Writers’ Association. It’s in the interest of socialist spiritual civilization.”

  “What a wonderful idea!” he said. “The Writers’ Home must be a great success.”

  “See for yourself,” Yang said, “but I won’t be able to meet you there today. I’m leaving for a PEN conference in Hong Kong. Next week I’ll arrange a welcome meal on behalf of the association, Guangzhou branch.”

  “Don’t bother, Chairman Yang, but I certainly would love to meet you and other writers.”

  “You joined the National Writers’ Association a long time ago. I voted for you, I remember. Bring your membership card with you. The people there need to see that, for the discount.”

  “Thank you.”

  Though he had been a member of the National Writers’ Association for several years, Chen still could not figure out how he had been enrolled in the first place. He had not even applied for membership. His poems were not popular among some critics, nor was he such an ambitious writer as to look forward to seeing
his name in print every month. Perhaps he had been selected for membership in part because of his position as a police officer. It was in accordance with part of the Party authorities’ favorite propaganda: Writers in socialist China came from all walks of life.

  It did not take him long to arrive at the Writers’ Home, which was not exactly a dream house as it had been described in some newspapers. Located at the end of a winding road, it displayed a classical colonial facade, but its surface was broken and pockmarked. In contrast to the other new or recently refurbished buildings on the slope, it looked modest, even a bit shabby. Still, its position on a hillside provided a splendid view of the Pearl River.

  “My name is Chen Cao,” he said to the front desk clerk, producing his card. “Comrade Yang Ke suggested I come here.”

  On the card, beneath his name, was his title, POET, in golden characters. The card, originally designed by the Writers’ Association, did not indicate his professional title as CHIEF INSPECTOR—an omission he had insisted on.

  The front desk clerk looked at Chen’s membership card and said, “So you are the well-known poet. General Manager Yang has just called. A very quiet room is reserved for you. Full of light, too, so you can concentrate on your writing.”

  “General Manager Yang?” Chen was amused at the new title of the elderly novelist. He was also pleased that, for once, his poet’s card would stand him in good stead.

  “Number Fourteen.” Chen looked at the receipt. “That’s my room number?”

  “No, that’s your bed number. It’s a double room, but right now you are the only one there. So you can have the room to yourself. All the single rooms are full.”

  “Thank you.”

  Chen crossed the lobby to the gift shop for a copy of the Guangzhou paper. Tucking it under his arm, he made for his room.

  It was a corner room at the end of the corridor, quiet, and peaceful, as the clerk had promised. And reasonably clean. There were a couple of narrow beds, nightstands, and a small desk, the top covered with cigarette burns—reminders of a writer’s hard work. The room smelled of laundry soap—like new shirts that have been hung in old closets. The bathroom was the smallest he had ever seen. The toilet flushed with a tarnished brass chain hanging from an overhead tank. There was no air conditioner. No TV either. Only an old-fashioned electric fan stood at the foot of the bed, but it worked.