When Red is Black - [Chief Inspector Chen Cao 03]

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “Heavens, can there be so much to learn about a bowl of noodles?”

  Chen was amused at the shocked expression on his partner’s face. “And the xiao pork is a must too. The pork sort of melts in the noodle soup, and then on your tongue. It comes in a separate side dish. Very special, and inexpensive too. You ought to go there this weekend.”

  “You should have interviewed Mr. Ren, Chief. There would have been a lot for you to say to each other.”

  “A frugal gourmet,” Chen repeated, putting the last shrimp into his mouth. “I don’t know what sort of man Mr. Ren is, but, according to your description, he no longer lives in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution.”

  * * * *

  When Chen reached his home, he found a short note from White Cloud on the table. “Sorry, I have to leave for school. Lunch is in the refrigerator. If you need me this afternoon, please call me.”

  The meal she had prepared was simple but good. The pork marinated in wine might have come from some deli, but the hot and sour cucumber slices mixed with transparent green bean noodles looked fresh and tasty. There was also an electric pot of rice, still quite warm. That would make a good dinner, Chen decided. Closing the refrigerator door, he tried not to think about the Yin case. At this stage, it was a matter of routine to go on interviewing her neighbors, which was what Yu had been doing, and which, if he had been working on the case, he would be doing too.

  What else could he possibly do?

  He stared at the New World business proposal, and the business proposal stared back at him.

  * * * *

  Chapter 8

  Q

  inqin had called home, saying that he would sleep over at the apartment of a schoolmate. It was not that often that Yu and Peiqin had a night by themselves. In spite of his frustration with the day’s investigation, Yu decided to turn in early with Peiqin.

  It was a cold night. They sat under the quilt, leaning against the pillows propped up against the hard headboard. It took quite a while for the warmth of their bodies beneath the old cotton-padded quilt to make the cold of the room endurable. His feet brushed hers; her toes were soft, still slightly chilled. He put his arm around her shoulders.

  In the soft light, she looked like the same girl she had been the first time with him in Yunnan, on that cool creaking bamboo bed, in the shadow of the flickering candlelight—except for those tiny fishtail-like lines around her eyes.

  But Peiqin had something else in mind this evening. She wanted to tell him the story of Death of a Chinese Professor. She put the novel on top of the quilt; a bamboo butterfly bookmark stuck out of it.

  Yu did not read much. He had tried several times to get into The Dream of the Red Chamber, Peiqin’s favorite, but he gave up, invariably, after three or four pages. There was no way for him to relate to those characters who had lived in a grand mansion hundreds of years ago. In fact, the only reason that he had made the attempt was because of Peiqin’s passion for the book. As for the books about the Cultural Revolution, he had read only two or three short stories, all of which struck him as totally untrue. If there had been such foresighted heroes to question or challenge Chairman Mao in the early sixties, Yu reflected, the national disaster would not have started in the first place.

  With Yin’s case on his hands, he had thought he had no choice but to read Death of a Chinese Professor from beginning to the end. Fortunately, Peiqin had already undertaken the assignment. She had told him a little about the book and this evening wished to give him a detailed account.

  “What I’m going to recount,” Peiqin said, folding her legs, “is perhaps influenced by my own point of view. I will focus on the role of Yang, since you are familiar with Yin’s history, and then I will dwell on the love affair between the two.”

  “Wherever you want to start, Peiqin,” Yu said, taking her hand in his.

  “Yang was born into a wealthy family in Shanghai. He went to study in the United States in the forties, where he got a Ph.D. in literature, and started publishing his poems in English. In 1949, he hurried home, full of passionate dreams for a new China. He taught English at Eastern China University, translated English novels, and wrote poems in Chinese before he suffered a major setback during the Anti-Rightist Movement in the mid-fifties. Suddenly condemned as a reactionary Rightist, and deserted by his friends and relatives because of his Rightist status, he stopped writing poems, although he continued translating such books as were approved by government, like the works of Charles Dickens and Thackeray, about whom Karl Marx had made favorable comments, or those of Mark Twain and Jack London, some of whose works showed an anti-capitalist tendency. He was then transferred to the Chinese department, in an effort to prevent him from disseminating ‘decadent Western ideas’ in English at a time when most of the Party officials did not understand a single word of English.

  “At the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, Yang turned overnight into a target of revolutionary mass criticism. He was forced to denounce himself. His college years in the States were described as years of espionage training, and his translations of English and American literature as attacks on proletarian literature and art in socialist China. In the early seventies, with more and more new class enemies being discovered in the course of the unprecedented revolution, Yang became a ‘dead tiger’—it was no longer so much fun for revolutionary people to beat him up. Like other ‘bourgeois intellectuals,’ he was then sent to a cadre school in the countryside. It was there that he met Yin.

  “They were both cadre students, but there was a marked difference in their political status. Yang, a Rightist with serious problems in his past, was at the bottom. Yin, a Red Guard who was charged with ‘minor mistakes’ in the Great Revolution, was made a group leader, responsible for supervising members of the group to which Yang belonged.

  “At this time, some still believed in everything Chairman Mao said, even there at the cadre school. A well-known poet wrote in ecstasy about the cure of his insomnia through physical labor in the fields, as a result of following Chairman Mao’s instruction. Some were disillusioned, however, in spite of Mao’s ‘newest and highest directions’ set forth in those endless Party documents. After a day’s hard labor, a few of them started thinking. Theoretically, after having successfully reformed themselves through hard physical labor and political studies, the cadre students should have been able to ‘graduate’ and have new jobs assigned to them. After a couple of years, however, they knew they had been pretty much forgotten. It seemed they were never going to be allowed to go back to the city, even though they were no longer at the center of the revolution.

  “Yin, too, found reason to reflect. No longer so sure about the correctness of her actions as a Red Guard, she realized that she had been used by Mao. She tried to think about her future. As an ex-Red Guard, her prospects were bleak, she admitted to herself. If she were ever to return to her college, it would not be as a political instructor. She was no longer in any position to give political talks.

  “Then she began to notice Yang. He worked as a kitchen helper. It was not considered a burdensome job; he gathered firewood, prepared rice and vegetables, and washed dishes. There was a local peasant chef responsible for the cooking. So between meals, Yang had time to read books in the kitchen—English books—and to write, too.

  “The cadre students were not supposed to read anything except Chairman Mao’s work or political pamphlets. But there had been an unusual event the previous year: Chairman Mao had published two new poems in the People’s Daily, and an English translation was required. Mao’s Poetry Translation Office under the Central Party Committee in Beijing, or someone in the office, remembered Yang and consulted him with respect to a few words. There was one especially difficult phrase—’Don’t fart.’ That was exactly what Mao had written, but the official translators were worried about its vulgarity. Yang was able to find some reference to that word in Shakespeare, which put their minds at ease. Thereafter, Yang was allowed as a special case to read Engl
ish books, for the school authorities anticipated that there might be other important political assignments in the future.

  “Yang suddenly fell sick. Due to ill nourishment and hard work, not to mention the effects of the persecution he had suffered for many years, what began as flu soon turned into acute pneumonia.

  “Most people in the group were old and weak. They were experts on physics or philosophy, but were hardly able to take care of themselves. There was no hospital nearby, only a clinic with a ‘barefoot doctor.’ Her class status was that of a full-time farmer working in the rice paddy, still barefoot, with no medical training in ‘bourgeois colleges.’ So, as the group leader, Yin took it upon herself to take care of him. She worked in his place in the kitchen, made food for everybody, and prepared special meals for him. She managed to have antibiotics sent from Beijing. As he gradually recovered, she continued to help him in every way possible, exercising the little power she still possessed in the cadre school on his behalf.

  “In the meantime, she started to study English on her own, and to consult him with questions from time to time. President Nixon’s visit to China had already taken place. On one of the official radio stations, an English study program started. It was no longer politically incorrect for people to learn English, although it was rather unusual for students in a cadre school where people were supposed to keep washing their brains as their top priority.

  “Yin’s visits to Yang gave rise to gossip. She visited him frequently, to the great inconvenience of his roommates. Their dorm room was small and cramped, with three bunk beds in it. When she sat talking with Yang, the other five roommates felt obliged to leave, to walk around outside in the cold. It did not take long for people to see that their ‘English study’ was a pretext. They talked about much more than her English problems. While looking at an English book on the table, it was noticed, they held hands under the table.

  “She may have started with a vague notion that knowledge of English might come in handy some day, even for a downtrodden man like Yang, but in her studies with him, she soon started to see a new prospect.

  “They covered not only language, but literature as well, for there were no textbooks available in the cadre school. Yang had to use novels and poems as teaching materials. Yin had filled her college years with political activities; she had learned little in the classroom. From him, she now absorbed the knowledge she had not gotten previously. Reading an English novel, Random Harvest, she picked out one sentence, ‘My life began with you, and my future goes on with you—there’s nothing else.’ She repeated it to Yang with tears trembling in her eyes.

  “On the epigraph page of For Whom the Bell Tolls, which Yang had translated, she read a passage, ‘No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main . . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind. And therefore never need to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’ Yang told her that it was a quote from John Donne, who had compared separated lovers to the two points of a compass in a celebrated love poem. Having read ‘A River Merchant’s Wife,’ she understood the Chinese poem ‘Changgan Song’ for the first time. In a short story by O. Henry, she found the significance of life in a solitary leaf painted on the wall, and when Yang compared himself to that leaf, she stopped him with her hand over his mouth.

  “That was the point of no return for her: she found all the meanings unknown to her before, with him—it was him. This was a passion she had never experienced before, a passion that gave a new meaning to her existence.

  “And for him, the affair came as a vindication of humanity despite all the political calamities that had befallen him. In his bookish way, he fought for love as one of those ideals he had striven for all these years. At one point of his life, he had been disillusioned but now he was filled with conviction.

  “Love might have come late, but its arrival made all the difference.

  “The cadre school was located in a marshland in Qingpu. There was no library nor any movie theaters nearby. Instead of staying in the dorm room, they started to walk out, openly, arm in arm. For lovers, to be is to be with each other.

  “Yang was in his mid-fifties. Except for a pair of broken eyeglasses, he looked like an old farmer, weather-beaten, white-haired like an owl, and with a pronounced suggestion of a stoop. As for Yin, she was still in her early thirties. Though not a beauty, she was animated with passion, blossoming beside him. To people’s confusion, it was she who clung to him with abandon.

  “His white hair shone against her rosy cheeks, just as described in a well-known proverb. But that proverb was commonly considered to be negative, with an implication that such a couple was unsuitable. What the lovers saw in each other was, of course, a matter of opinion. They were both single. There was nothing legally against them being together, but that was the least of it since, at the very beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao had called for the demolition of the bourgeois legal system.

  “Still, it should have been no one else’s business. But it turned out to be.

  “She was not popular. Some of the people in the school had suffered mistreatment by her when she was a Red Guard. Also, the cadre school authorities were upset. A political scandal might develop. Instead of reforming themselves in the cadre school, they had fallen in love. It was politically outrageous, for the concept of romantic love was a political taboo in the early seventies. It implied a decadent detraction from one’s dedication to Chairman Mao and the Party.

  “They did not try to keep their love affair a secret, which proved to be too naive of them.”

  As Peiqin started leafing through the book, Yu said, “Yes, there’s not a married couple in the eight modern revolutionary Beijing operas—with the exception of Madame Aqin, whose husband is conveniently away on business. It is all political fervor, there are no personal feelings in those operas.”

  “Here is what I was looking for,” Peiqin said, shifting to a more comfortable position. “Let me read a few paragraphs to you.”

  They were in a world where there was nothing they could take for granted. No certitude. No reliability. No conviction.

  Except him in her, and her in him.

  After a day’s labor, he would sometimes read poems to her, in Chinese, and then in English, behind the cadre school pigsty, or on a ridge in the rice paddy, their hands soil-covered, a broken loudspeaker repeating Chairman Mao’s quotations in the air, black crows hovering over the deserted field.

  The Cultural Revolution was a national disaster, they realized, in which each and every individual was smashed to pieces, “burned to ashes,” as in a revolutionary slogan. For them, however, it was as if they had been reborn out of the ashes.

  “A terrible beauty is born,” he said. “There will be a new future for the people, for the country.”

  He especially liked a poem entitled “You and I,” written by a woman poet named Guan Daosheng in the thirteenth century. The passion was expressed quite directly, as was seldom seen, according to him, in classical Chinese poetry.

  You and I are so crazy

  about each other,

  as hot as a potter’s fire.

  Out of the same chunk

  of clay, the shape of you,

  the shape of me. Crush us

  both into clay again, mix

  it with water, reshape

  you, reshape me.

  So I have you in my body,

  and you’ll have me forever in yours too.

  After having finished reading the long quote in an emotion-suffused voice, Peiqin said “But such a passion was hardly comprehensible in the cadre school. What’s worse, it was a passion viewed by one of the school leaders as a brazen challenge to the Party authorities.

  “So a mass criticism meeting was held. Yang was marched onto a temporary stage and denounced as a negative example of the reactionary intellectual who resisted ideological reform by falling in love. Yin’s lot was hardly better: in addition
to a serious inner-Party warning, she was ordered to stand barefoot beside him on the stage. She did not wear a blackboard; she bore a halter of ragged shoes around her neck, a time-honored symbol of shame, of being worn out after being used by numerous men, like the dirty shoes.

  “There is a famous quotation by Chairman Mao, There is no groundless love or hatred in this world. There must have been a reason for the two ‘black elements’ embracing each other, their revolutionary critics said. It must have been out of their common hatred of the Cultural Revolution, the critics concluded.

  “Yin and Yang remained defiant, continuing to meet each other, whenever and wherever possible, despite the repeated warnings of the cadre school authorities.

  “He was then put into an ‘isolation room,’ deprived of all contact with the outside world and Yin. He was ordered to write confessions and self-criticisms all day long. He refused to do so, declaring that there was nothing wrong in one human being loving another. After a week, he was marched out to work for extra-long hours in the rice paddy during the day, then sent back to the isolation room to write in the evening.