Becoming Inspector Chen

by Qiu Xiaolong

  ‘Like in an old proverb, we practice sword to the cock’s crow,’ Chen said, his steps quickening at the recollection of an ancient legend. In the third century, a young hero practiced sword the moment a cock started crowing at dawn.

  ‘Well, people play tai chi sword in the park too,’ Yingchang commented.

  The park was an attraction in itself. In spite of its small size, the location made it popular to Shanghai people. Its front gate faced the Peace Hotel across Zhongshan Road and its back gate adjoined the Waibaidu Bridge, a name unchanged since its construction in the colonial era, meaning ‘foreigners cross the bridge for free’. At the Bund’s northern end, the park opened to a curving promenade above the expanse of water joining the Huangpu and Suzhou Rivers, along with a panoramic view of vessels coming and going against the distant East China Sea.

  In the school textbook, Chen had read that at the turn of the century the park had been open only to Western expatriates, with red-turbaned Sikh guards standing at the entrance, and a large sign on the gate saying: No Chinese or dogs allowed. True story or not, it was included in the history book for the sake of patriotism education.

  But Chen found it difficult to keep himself in high spirits, in spite of the ancient proverbs or the legend of the park.

  In a small clearing called ‘tai chi square’, he soon came to the realization that tai chi did not become him. It emphasized slow rather than fast movements, subduing the hard by being the soft in accordance with the ancient Taoist yin-yang principle. He was too young, and too restless. While others made rapid progress, he stumbled, wrecking one pose after another. With him, ‘a white crane spreading its wings’ actually turned into ‘a white crane breaking its wings’.

  As for his friends from Red Dust Lane, they did not come to the park just for the sake of tai chi. Meili began to meet with a married man nicknamed ‘horse face’, a melancholy-looking man with a long face, carrying a Japanese camera with an unmistakable suggestion of being fashionable. She posed for him with a Hong Kong umbrella twirling in the sunlight, leaning her upper body precariously over the water, her cheeks flushing, her smile blossoming into the flashing camera. Yingchang had his eye on a girl in a different tai chi group. Without having learned her name, he nicknamed her ‘graceful’, in reference to her pose in tuishou, a push-hand exercise he practiced with her palms to palms, pushing and being pushed in a slow, spontaneous flow, their bodies moving together in a seemingly effortless motion. The moment she became aware of his ulterior motive, however, she rotated her left forearm to ward off his advance, and he lost balance, staggering, falling flat amidst people’s laughter.

  Chen saw no point in continuing to spend his mornings like that. Standing by the river, he recalled several lines from a Song dynasty ci poem, scanning the mist-mantled horizon in the distance: ‘East flows the grand river, / the celebrated names rising and falling / through waves upon waves / for thousands of years …’

  Like another Chinese proverb, there’s no story without coincidence.

  To the left of the tai chi square, Chen saw a young girl sitting quietly on a green-painted bench holding a book in her hand, her shoulder-length black hair occasionally rumpled by the breeze from the river. She read in absorption, paying little attention to the people moving around. Behind her, the glistening dew drops clung to the verdant foliage, like myriad bright eyes waking up to the morning light in curiosity.

  It was an uncommon scene. A popular political slogan those days declared that ‘It’s useless to study’, an ideological notion that underlay the movement of educated youths to the countryside. Judging by the red plastic book cover, it would most likely be a copy of the Selected Works of Mao in her hand. However, she had on the bench a smaller book, which she picked up from time to time.

  Usually, she arrived among the earliest regulars in the park around six, where she stayed until eleven. In all probability, she was another waiting-for-recovery youth out of school, out of work, just like Chen.

  People could not help casting looks in her direction. Yingchang, too, came to walk around that bench, like a lone crow circling a night tree. According to his close-range observation, the smaller book was an English–Chinese dictionary, and the book in her hand turned out not to be the Selected Works of Mao, but an English textbook, for which she used the red plastic cover for camouflage. It was not too difficult to understand such a trick. Red-armbanded park patrollers could storm over at any moment demanding: ‘For what purpose are you studying English in the days of Cultural Revolution?’

  That posed no question to Chen, though. For the future, in which she believed, he believed.

  The girl appeared to be more than strikingly attractive, wearing a long red jacket, like blossom against the verdant foliage around her, her large, clear eyes looking up from the book, radiating with an inner beauty.

  For him, she made the scene of the park.

  The morning was enveloped in a light mist. Chen saw the young girl glance up from her books. Their eyes met for a second. She was wearing a pink sweater, silhouetted against the white clouds drifting over the river. Aware of his gaze, she hung her head low with a shy smile, like a lotus flower swaying soft, supple, in a cool breeze. It somehow reminded him of a short poem by Xu Zhimo:

  Softly, you hang your head low,

  like a water lily,

  shy, trembling in a cool breeze,

  farewell, farewell,

  with sweet sadness in your voice

  S A Y O U N A R A.

  Then he saw a stout, gray-haired old man shambling over to sit beside her on the bench. It was not uncommon for people to share a bench in the park, but she seemed to start reading with the old man nodding beside, murmuring and pointing at her open book, almost imperceptibly, when no one else was around.

  So the old man was giving instruction in her English studies. Those days, English teaching in a public place could have appeared suspicious. Hence the deceptive appearance of the two – like strangers who happened to be sitting on the same park bench.

  If she could choose to study English for the future, what about him? He felt so ashamed, all of a sudden, about wasting his time like that.

  So he decided that instead of admiring her from a distance, he too was going to consult the old man with questions in his English studies.

  But English textbooks were not available in bookstores or libraries those days. He managed to get a set of the College English from his uncle, who had succeeded in transforming himself into an ordinary worker, but who had managed to hide all the college textbooks in a cardboard box under the bed.

  Early the next morning, Chen came to the park with a copy of the first-year College English textbook, and chose an unpainted wooden bench not far from the girl’s.

  The change in the morning routine kept him away from his tai chi friends, who came up with all sorts of interpretations for the abrupt shift on his part. In their eyes, he must have fallen for the girl on the green bench, but instead of openly approaching her, he was making just a pathetic attempt to catch her attention. Yingchang took the initiative on his behalf, which turned out to be unsuccessful. Without giving any details, Yingchang simply dubbed her as ‘Ice-and-Frost Cold’, a negative nickname suggestive of her unapproachableness.

  ‘That’s not what I mean, Yingchang,’ Chen protested, ‘not at all.’

  But that made him even more nervous about approaching her. Whatever the motivation for his shift from tai chi to English, he just hoped that he would be able, one of those mornings, to speak to her in a language understandable only to themselves.

  His mother became worried about his longer stays in the park, but his father calculated that it might prove to be propitious for the young man, elaborating on his favorite theory of five elements.

  ‘The character for his name Cao is similar to Zao, which means dryness. Too much soil and fire, no water at all,’ his father said feebly, sick in detention. ‘But Bund Park, a place in close association with water, could prove to be be
neficial.’

  In the park, the old man sitting beside the girl on the green bench, surnamed Rong, was a retired English teacher. The outbreak of the Cultural Revolution had cut short his teaching career, and he’d ended up coming to the park, practicing tai chi, and offering help to young people there instead. He readily took Chen as another student.

  Mr Rong made a point, however, of talking with only one of his students at a time, wary of being seen as a teacher in the park. There was no chance for the girl and Chen to sit together on the same green bench. But that was fine with Chen. No hurry for that.

  The knowledge of her being there in the same park, with the book open on her lap, made it possible for him to progress in leaps and bounds. He kept marveling at the subtle change in her in the morning light. One moment she was a graceful ‘bluestocking’ nibbling at the top of a black fountain pen, the next she was a vivacious young Shanghai girl wearing a light green jade charm with a thin red string over her bosom, curling her sandaled feet underneath her. Behind the bench, a European-style pavilion with its white verandah stood out in colorful relief.

  It took him less than two months to finish the first volume of the College English. Mr Rong was so impressed that he chose to spend more and more time with him. He was catching up with the girl, he thought.

  Then one morning at the beginning of early September, to his surprise, she did not come to the green bench as usual.

  He did not think too much of it, not initially. Unlike in school, people did not have to appear in the park each and every morning.

  But a week passed without seeing her stepping light-footedly across the cobble trail to the green bench. What could have happened to her? There was hardly any way for him to find out.

  Another week. Still no sight of her. He became worried.

  He asked Mr Rong, who did not know anything about her sudden disappearance. He did not know her address. Perhaps somewhere close to the park, that was about all the old man could tell Chen.

  Once again, the group from Red Dust Lane were eager to offer their interpretations about her evaporation into thin air, as well as about its possible consequence. Waving a cigarette like a magician’s wand, Yingchang predicted that Chen would now come back to tai chi.

  But Chen went on with his English studies as before, glancing up from the book from time to time at the unoccupied green bench.

  Weeks, then months, passed. Not far from the park bench, the river flowed on, with white gulls hovering above the waves, their wings flashing against the gray light, as if soaring out of a half-forgotten dream. More than once, he did not leave the park until the dividing line between the Huangpu and Suzhou Rivers became invisible in the gathering dusk.

  One day she would come back, he believed, to find him still sitting there on the bench close to hers. They would then speak to each other in English.

  The members of the Red Dust group began to drop out, one by one, like leaves with the arrival of the autumn wind. None of them turned into a martial arts master.

  Chen was the only one left in the park when he started studying the third volume of the College English. Mr Rong, too, appeared less and less because of his high blood pressure in the cold weather, but Chen managed to continue studying by himself.

  One afternoon, he mounted a flight of stone steps to the bank. To his right, he saw a white-haired man practicing tai chi, wearing a white silk martial arts costume, loose-sleeved, red-silk-buttoned, moving in perfect harmony with the qi of the universe, striking a series of poses, the names of which Chen still remembered: grasping a bird’s tail, spreading a white crane’s wings, strumming the pipa lute, parting a wild horse’s mane on both sides …

  Would he have turned into such a master had he persisted in practicing tai chi, he wondered, breathing in the familiar tangy air from the waterfront.

  Standing there, he opened the book in his hand. It was an English novel titled Random Harvest in which there were still a considerable number of words he did not truly understand, although he managed to follow the storyline. It had been made into a movie, he had heard, with a romantic title for the Chinese version: Reunion of Mandarin Ducks. The water birds were symbolic of lovers in classical Chinese culture.

  This, as well as some other English novels and poems, had opened for him a brave new world that was unknown and unimaginable before.

  A fitful wind was tearing at the pages of Random Harvest. It was not a good spot for him to read. He closed the book with a sigh. Looking over his shoulder, he suddenly saw her again – still in the pink sweater, sitting on the same bench, the bush behind trembling eerily in the breeze.

  Halfway down the steps, he had to acknowledge to himself that it was another young girl, carrying a genuine Little Red Book in her hand.

  The morning in the arms of Bund, her hair dew-sparkled …

  He thought of the ending of the English novel in which Paula ran over the hills toward Smith in England, and prayed that the miracle could prove to be real in Bund Park, too.

  Evidence of Youth

  Dong Haiming was born with a passion for photography, as people usually said in Red Dust Lane. It came from his father, a Wenhui photo journalist killed in a car accident in 1957 while on duty, just one day before his being officially labeled as a ‘rightist’ for picturing the seamy side of socialist China. Some of his colleagues even suspected that it had been a suicide staged as an accident for the benefit of his young wife Juqing and their little son.

  Dong was just turning two at the time. At his father’s funeral he was a toddler, dragging his step, tugging at the black-creped sleeve of his mother, who held in front of her bosom a black-framed picture of his father as she walked, sobbing, back into Red Dust Lane.

  Following his father’s death, his would-be rightist status was rumored to have been kept secret in the governmental archive. And Juqing changed her son’s surname to Dong – her maiden name – instead of that of his father. Without getting to the bottom of the reason for her doing so, the neighbors supposed that it was understandable for a young attractive woman like her to think about marrying somebody else and moving out of the lane.

  More than a decade later, Juqing remained a widow in the lane, and Dong was state-assigned a job at a seedy tavern near the intersection of Henan and Nanjing Roads. It was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, with Chairman Mao’s revolutionary campaign slogan of ‘the educated youths going to the countryside for the re-education from the poor and lower-middle class peasants’ resounding all over the city. So Dong had to consider himself lucky getting such a job in Shanghai, ladling out the yellow rice wine, Shao sticky rice wine, double rice wine and Maiden Red wine from those ancient earthen urns stacked against the discolored, mildew-covered wall.

  When he returned from his first day at work at the tavern with despondence written on his face, Juqing presented to him an old, leather-cased ‘Seagull’ camera, the only thing of value left behind by his father.

  The Seagull flashed unexpectedly brightly against the drabness of his job. Dong kept the camera a secret from the lane. For one thing, a camera those days was commonly regarded as part and parcel of bourgeois extravagance. And besides, it was something of too great an emotional value for him to share with the neighbors at random. He made a point of carrying it with him concealed in a small black shoulder bag.

  But the camera also proved to be more and more of a white elephant for him, with his monthly pay barely enough for a dozen rolls of film, not to mention the expense of picture development and enlargement at the studio. Providentially, he discovered among his father’s things a time-yellowed photography booklet, the information from which enabled him to convert the attic into a darkroom whenever he needed.

  It turned out to be an easy job of two or three simple steps: pull up the ladder, cover the attic opening with a sliding board and the window with a deep-colored curtain, and change the bulb to a red one when everything was ready. It surely saved a lot of money for him. When it was too late at night, he
would simply sleep on the floor of the attic/darkroom without climbing down the squeaky ladder. He did not want to wake his mother. He actually enjoyed a sense of privacy there, though it was not comfortable for him to lie, tossing and turning, on the hard floor.

  Like other young people, he started dating in due course, falling hard for a pretty girl named Lanlan from Treasure Garden Lane, which was three or four blocks away on Jinling Road.

  Juqing was overjoyed. After the death of her husband, the only meaningful thing for her to do in the world of red dust, she declared to her neighbors in the lane, was to see Dong get married and have his own family. It was by no means easy, though. They had just one single room of twelve square feet. The attic, in which no one could stand up straight without hitting his or her head against the darkened cedar beam, did not count. A pretty young girl would have balked at the prospect of climbing up the shaky ladder and dating him there, with any possible sound audible to the would-be-mother-in-law below. Still, Lanlan proved to be the one that came over a second time, and then a third …

  There’s no knowing what she saw in Dong. According to Dong himself, Lanlan too was really interested in photography, but the neighbors wondered about it.

  The topic of marriage still too far in the future, Dong and Lanlan had a more immediate problem on their hands: a private space for their budding affair.

  Billing and cooing with Juqing in the room was far from desirable. So they ventured out to parks, all of which turned out to be overcrowded, with at least two pairs of lovers nestling up against each other on one single bench, and with the red-armbanded park patrols prowling in high alert, ready to pounce on any ‘suspects’ who might get carried away in the passion of the ‘bourgeois lifestyle’, huddled and hidden in the shady corners. Those days, people displaying pre-nuptial intimacy such as a kiss or a hug could have been charged with criminal behavior. As a last resort, Dong dragged Lanlan up the ladder, precariously, into the attic.