by Qiu Xiaolong
‘The would-be chief inspector talked to me about the problems for intellectuals like you. He even quoted a new popular saying: “The one making atomic bombs in the lab earns less than the one selling tea-leaf eggs on the street.” That’s so unfair, he said. He maintained there’s nothing wrong with giving help to young students in one’s spare time, and earning a little money on the side. I could not agree more. A lot of things should start to change in China’s great reform.’
Could Chen be such an important man? So much so that his visit to her had actually prompted Comrade Tang to take Xiaojun to her private tutoring class, and to have the banquet arranged in her honor. She could not help wondering about it. Luckily, she had not said she hardly remembered Chen.
But she was increasingly inclined to believe the scenario that his visit to the lane could have been a cover for some secret mission.
In that case, it made sense for Comrade Tang to try to find out from her as much information as possible. What he was doing was not just to curry favor with Chen through her. Some of the lane residents mentioned by Chen during that visit, she began recalling, had been punished or jailed years earlier for political reasons, for which the neighborhood cops could have been held accountable. But what had happened to those people had happened long before Comrade Tang’s arrival here. Nor did she remember Chen raising any specific questions about this neighborhood cop sitting beside her at the banquet table.
‘Did he mention anybody else in the lane?’ Comrade Tang said, raising the wine again. ‘Say, somebody like old Hunchback Fang?’
She had no real grudge against Hunchback Fang, though he had made her private tutoring difficult at the beginning. But Hunchback Fang had recently got into some sort of trouble, and she was no longer worried about the neighborhood security activist.
‘Yes, he mentioned Hunchback Fang in passing. He must be familiar with other people in the neighborhood—’
But another phone call came in for Comrade Tang. He was speaking into the receiver with abated voice. Such a busy police officer he was, that was perhaps another reason why he chose the banquet private room here with a phone on the wall.
Then it reminded her of a mystery connected to Huyan – and to Hunchback, too – that she had heard of years earlier in the lane. Or rather, it was more like a double mystery, so to speak, she thought in frenzied confusion.
The first part of the mystery had come up more than a decade earlier. Dong, one of the lane residents Chen mentioned during that visit, had his attic raided one early May night by the joint force of the neighborhood police and a bunch of neighborhood security activists. No one knew exactly what had happened that night except for vague gossips about ‘the red-curtained window’ of the attic. So it was most likely about something suspicious happening there with Dong and his then girlfriend Lanlan. The two young people were staying alone in the attic, still single at the time, though shortly afterward they got married instead of being punished or reprimanded. Nevertheless, something like a ‘political stain’ in terms of bourgeois lifestyle was said to have been left in the archives of Dong and Lanlan.
And not until more than a decade later did the second part of the mystery come up, with some more clues leaking out about what had happened that long-ago night. With the Chinese society in rapid transition, the neighborhood security activist Hunchback Fang got into trouble, to the surprise of the lane, for his once ‘politically correct’ insistency on adhering to Mao’s class struggle theory, and on treating his neighbors as potential class enemies. After all, it was no longer the age of class struggle, not like in Mao’s time. So it might not have been totally out of the blue that following Comrade Tang’s suggestion, the neighborhood committee produced a long list of his wrongdoings throughout those years of ‘relentless class struggle’.
Among them was one about that nocturnal raid led by Hunchback Fang and the then neighborhood cop Peng into that attic of ‘red-curtained window’. As it turned out, Hunchback Fang had long targeted Dong because of his problematic family background. According to some unverifiable source, Dong’s father would have been officially announced as a ‘rightist’ but for his untimely death in the suspicious incident, and Juqing changed his surname to Dong – her maiden name – as a gesture of complete cutting off from his father. As a result, Hunchback Fang had long kept Dong under a close watch in secret, what with the mysterious black bag always slung across his shoulder, with the occasional red light flickering through the attic window, and more than anything else, with the phone message shouted out loud and clear by the neighborhood phone service people under Dong’s window one afternoon – ‘Red curtain as usual.’ It immediately raised the class struggle alert level for Hunchback Fang. Having seen a movie of a KMT secret agent sending signals in the depth of night, he suspected Dong of sabotaging the socialist revolution in a similar manner, with the red signal blinking through the window to some other secret agent lurking elsewhere. So he reported this to the neighborhood cop, with all the imagined details added into it. That night, the raid turned out to be much ado about nothing – not even a red curtain for the attic window, but a red bulb for the picture development there.
More than ten years later, Comrade Tang’s sudden announcement about removing Hunchback from his post-retirement position in the neighborhood security sounded so harsh, like a nail being hammered into the coffin for the old activist. So why?
After all, so many people had acted like him at the time, following Mao’s class struggle theory wholeheartedly. And the night raid had caused no irrecoverable damage. The two young people got married, ironically, because of the raid. The neighbors were confounded with the belated severe punishment.
Could it have been because Dong – now Huyan again – had gained some fame as an amateur photographer? It was said that one of his pictures had won an international prize. But it was not likely. He still worked at the tavern as a salesman. In spite of his mother’s talking about moving to a larger new apartment somewhere else, they remained in the room at the end of the lane.
It then hit on Jiang that the emerging police officer surnamed Chen could have been the one behind all this. As a rising Party cadre in charge of ‘rectification of wronged cases during the Cultural Revolution’, he must have heard about the story of the ‘evidence of youth’, and talked to Comrade Tang about the mystery of the red curtain. Comrade Tang would have been more than eager to comply, needless to say.
And that eventually made it possible for Dong to change his name back to Huyan?
Having finished the phone call, Comrade Tang was coming back to the banquet table, grinning from ear to ear.
She sat at the table, eating mechanically, with fragmented details resurfacing in her memory, continuing to gulp iced water to keep her mind functioning, and picking her words like in the pre-Han dynasty Hongmen Banquet, which had since become synonymous with a culinary occasion full of unknown dangers.
It was a long, drawn-out dinner, with the slender waitress serving one special dish after another, flitting around like a butterfly, with the host and guests toasting each other non-stop, guffawing, and with the would-be chief inspector being mentioned a couple more times.
Finally, as the last course of sweet sticky rice pearl soup with swallow nests was served on the table, Comrade Tang cracked his fingers for the bill. His face flushing like a cock’s swain, he rose and made for the phone on the wall with the bill grasped in his hand. The moment the call got through, he pressed the speaker button with a mysterious air.
‘Have you caught some guys in those private rooms, Little Hui?’
‘Quite a few of them in the “Red Dust Foot-Washing Paradise”,’ said Little Hui in a loud voice, presumably a young cop who worked under Comrade Tang.
‘Great,’ Comrade Tang chuckled, his finger deliberately beating on the phone. ‘I’m at Delicacy Heaven right now. Send a fat one over here. A really fat one.’
Jiang had heard of the foot-washing salon, along with the special service in its
so-called private rooms. In the name of socialism of China’s characteristics, no prostitution was officially permitted or acknowledged, but in the names of hair salon, massage parlor, karaoke club and foot-washing paradise, in reality a sex service industry had been booming. It was an open secret. For the sake of propaganda, the police would occasionally make a show of cracking ‘indecent practice’. So Comrade Tang must have been remote-commanding a police raid while feasting in the restaurant, like the general in the three-kingdom period celebrated in Su Dongpo’s poem: ‘In the midst of his laugh and talk, / the mighty enemy fleet is gone / in smoke and ash.’
But what was the point of having a really fat one sent over to the restaurant?
Less than twenty minutes later, the opening of the private banquet room door presented a middle-aged man as thin as a bamboo stick, the very opposite of a ‘fat one’, wearing gold-rimmed glasses, a gray wool blazer, dress pants, looking like an important intellectual, but crestfallen, with one brass button missing from the blazer, a large bruise shining on his left cheek, murmuring inaudibly with his blazer collar grasped tightly by Little Hui.
The cup in his hand, Comrade Tang rose again, handed the bill to the luckless one and said with a broad grin, ‘It’s your lucky day, you dirty old bastard. You are carrying your credit card with you, aren’t you?’
The man took over the bill, his right hand trembling, reaching into the blazer pocket, when he appeared to change his mind suddenly, and turned toward the phone on the wall, looking at Comrade Tang for his approval.
Comrade Tang nodded without saying a single word.
‘It’s me, Liu Bing of Gezi High School. Right now I’m with my friends at Delicacy Heaven, but I’ve forgotten to carry my credit card with me. Hurry over with yours and your son’s school transfer is guaranteed.’
It took just a couple of seconds for the people in the private room to figure it out. The ‘old dirty bastard’ must have been a high school principal or something like that, capable of determining the student admission or transfer, for which the desperate parents of students would be willing to do anything.
Comrade Tang moved back to the table, raising the cup to the others with another loud burp. ‘Bottoms up!’
Before a new bottle of Merlot was finished, there came a quiet knock on the door.
Looking up, Jiang was transfixed at the sight of another man stepping in timidly and pushing a bulging bag over to the ‘old dirty bastard’, who remained standing like a half-broken bamboo stick.
Recognition hit her like a basin of icy water. The newcomer was no other than Yiqiang, so the one taking the bag had to be the principal of that first-class high school to which her son was going to be transferred.
‘Sorry, we don’t have a credit card,’ Yiqiang murmured nervously, without stealing a look into the splendid private banquet room. ‘But here is fifteen thousand in cash. It’s all we have saved so far.’
‘Really, a fantastic dinner,’ Comrade Tang said to the guests, without recognizing the man handing over the bag of money in a hurry to the ‘old dirty bastard’ standing near the door.
‘Cheers!’
NINE
Chen awoke with a touch of self-annoyance. He had actually dozed off again after his mother had stepped out to the food market in the first gray of the morning, like so many years earlier.
For once, there was only a single dream scene he recalled, blinking at the attic ceiling. He is sitting in front of a huge computer, typing frantically, following a long list, Internet surfing and searching with bleary eyes until a bucket of cold water falls crashing on his head—
The old Chinese saying ‘A bucket of cold water falls crashing on one’s head’ meant a violent awakening, literally as well as figuratively, and the background of the dream scene shifted to the present day instead of those long-ago years. And just as in another old Chinese saying, ‘It is a long night that there are so many dreams,’ juxtaposing the past and present, the right or wrong in a chaotic jumble.
Years earlier, there was one detail, he suddenly recollected, from that visit to his middle school teacher Jiang before his becoming a chief inspector. She’d mentioned in passing the black family background of the amateur photographer in the lane. During the Cultural Revolution, Chen too had suffered a lot of discrimination because of his family background. Some of the ‘black puppies’ had since forgotten all about it, but some had not. In that case, the netizen in question – whether Huyan or not – could have shared or posted online something else like Reading Animal Farm. Chen sat up and modified the Internet search on his phone by adding several key words – ‘family background’, ‘Cultural Revolution’, ‘Red Dust Lane’ and ‘early years’ – one by one to the original ‘Huyan’ and ‘photographer’.
It did not take him long to locate a number of related articles, though most of them appeared blocked or deleted. One of the few surviving articles mentioned that someone called Huyan, a late Wenhui photographer, had been pre-labeled as a rightist for attacks against the Party government with his pictures just a couple of days before his suspicious death in an accident. Huyan was said to have left behind a wife and a young child.
So the Huyan nowadays in Red Dust Lane was no other than the late rightist’s son? Like father, like son. Apparently the son could have a motive. And it’s more than likely he would open up to the soon-to-be-ex-chief inspector.
He got up, feeling increasingly reassured of the necessity of his visit to Red Dust Lane.
After he finished the breakfast his mother had prepared for him, he left a note for her, saying that he had to leave for something urgent, which happened to be true.
Stepping out, he was surprised at the sight of his mother and Peiqin talking to each other close to the door. The two of them must have just met there, his mother carrying a bamboo basket of fresh vegetables, and Peiqin having with her a tote bag and a plastic bag.
‘I’m delivering our special breakfast dumplings for Aunty, and here she is, just coming back from the food market,’ Peiqin said, smiling, holding up the plastic bag before taking out a folder from the tote. ‘Also, some printouts for you. I got them via VPN. The new governmental regulation, you know. His works were exhibited and reviewed abroad.’
Again, Peiqin proved to be so thoughtful. In accordance with a new regulation, people who tried to visit websites outside of China could be punished for thoughtcrimes, though quite a number of people were known to be using VPNs in secret.
Given the trouble Chen was already in, he had to be careful. So Peiqin had done the VPN job for him. Hence the folder with more detailed info about the netizen in question from those websites blocked on the mainland. She’d carried the folder to his mother’s place because of something highly sensitive – too sensitive for her to email or hand it to him in the open with the omnipresent Webcops and surveillance cameras all around. In the meantime, she also managed to help his mother in whatever way possible.
‘Peiqin has come here so many times,’ his mother said, beaming, ‘taking care of things for me.’
‘You’re going to Red Dust Lane this morning, aren’t you?’ Peiqin went on before he could have uttered a word in response. ‘You’ll have another successful job done there, I’m one hundred percent positive about it.’
Was that just another hint about Huyan being the suspect in the investigation pushed by the Webcops? He thought so, but he refrained from saying anything in his mother’s presence. Perhaps there was something more about it in the folder.
‘You are leaving now, Chief. It’s so urgent, I know. I’ll help Aunty wash the vegetables before going to my restaurant. Don’t worry about it.’
So saying, Peiqin took over the bamboo basket from his mother and moved with her toward the old home.
In the early morning light, he felt bathed in an unexpected rush of gratitude.
‘Even if you know it’s something impossible for you to do, you have to try your best as long as it’s the right thing to do.’ His father’s Confucianist
maxim came echoing back to him. He was doing what he was supposed to do as a cop, as expected by these close to him, like Peiqin Detective Yu, Ling, Old Hunter, his mother, but also by some others like Old Root, Teacher Jiang, Little Phoenix, Mr Ma, and for that matter, quite likely Huyan as well. Chief inspector or not, it mattered not. He had no choice. Es muss sein!
Watching Peiqin help his mother step into the door, he turned; instead of going to Bund Park first, he was heading straight to Red Dust Lane.