The Hungry Ghost Murder

by Chris West

  ‘Professor Xiao is busy,’ snapped the receptionist at the Department of Economics.

  ‘I only want a few minutes of his time,’ Bao replied gently.

  ‘So do about a dozen other people.’

  Bao gave a sigh of regret and produced his police ID.

  ‘I’ll just go and get him, Inspector.’

  *

  ‘Ping Li. One of our best students. She’s not in any kind of trouble, is she?’

  ‘No, but we do need to interview her urgently. She might have been a witness to a serious crime.’ People still fell for that old one. Even, it seemed, economics professors.

  ‘She’s in Shandong province at the moment. Wushui village.’

  Bao had never heard of it, and asked Xiao to locate it for him on a map. It was deeper in the uplands than Nanping, but not so far that a motorbike or moped couldn’t make the journey. The approach to Nanping was from the north, across Snake Pass, not along the road. Nobody in the village would see her on her way to the Secretary’s villa.

  Bao told himself not to jump to conclusions, and asked for more details about Ping’s research topic.

  ‘The effect of the Cultural Revolution on economic growth,’ the professor answered. ‘Li reckons that the more fanatical the Red Guard activity in an area, the worse the subsequent growth.’

  Bao nodded.

  ‘Some people have been arguing the opposite recently,’ the professor went on. ‘For all its ills, those events cleared away a lot of dead wood, enabling young, dynamic entrepreneurs to flourish in the subsequent decades. But Li was adamant. I like students with passion. Too many are just grinding out theses to get good jobs.’

  ‘Have you got her address?’

  The professor tapped at a computer on his desk. ‘Main Street, Wushui. Only Street, Wushui, I imagine.’

  ‘And her home address?’

  More taps. ‘Flat Forty-nine, Building Twelve, Hong Kou Park. Nice part of town.’

  ‘Do they have a telephone?’

  ‘Home and work numbers for both parents.’ The professor read them out. ‘If you want to call Wushui, you have to ring Party HQ. It’s the only telephone in the village.’

  A machine in the corner began humming. ‘Ah, that’s the fax I’ve been expecting from Harvard. You must excuse me, Inspector.’

  *

  Bao got to Hong Kou Park early – he’d called and made an appointment to meet Ping Li’s mother – and killed the time contemplating the memorial to the writer Lu Xun that stands there: a bust of the author and an inscription on the plinth in Chairman Mao’s imperious calligraphy. The inspector thought of Ah Q, the pathetic character Lu Xun had created, a man who believed everything he was told. A thought came into his head, which he banished. No, Ming was like Ah Q in some ways.

  Building Twelve was down an alleyway, a lot less smart than the blocks right by the park, but still no doubt expensive. An entryphone had been installed. There was a lift. The stairs had carpet on them – until the third floor, anyway.

  Mrs Ping was waiting at the door. She was small and flat-faced – a southerner, not a bit like Xu Yifeng. ‘Li’s not in any danger, is she?’ she said.

  ‘None whatsoever,’ Bao replied.

  ‘Oh, good. She never mentioned a crime. When was this, again?’

  ‘About a year ago. New evidence has recently come to light. May I come in?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Ping hesitantly.

  A hall led into a large sitting room. The contents were modern, Western-influenced and not to Bao’s taste: pictures in frames, not on proper scrolls; furniture in light wood or metal (Bao’s was traditional and heavy); no books of substance, only ones with pictures in.

  ‘It would greatly help me if I could see a picture of your daughter,’ said Bao. ‘Given that she’s so far away at the moment. People have been known to impersonate witnesses.’

  ‘So there is some danger, then?’

  ‘It’s a formality. She’s a great deal safer in Shandong than she would be on the streets of a big city.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose she is.’ Mrs Ping seemed reassured by this thought. ‘Can I get you a drink of some kind, officer? Beer? Tea?’

  *

  ‘Professor Xiao speaks highly of your daughter,’ said the inspector, now ensconced on the sofa, sipping a cup of Five Dragon. The Pings had some taste, after all.

  Mrs Ping grinned. ‘We’re terribly proud of her. You know the reputation Fudan has. And to stay on to do postgraduate work. We didn’t pull any strings, you know.’

  Bao smiled.

  ‘She was always bright – as a toddler, at school. You want to see some photographs, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Bao. The proud mother went and fetched an album from the bookcase. Bao took it and opened it.

  There were no pictures of Li as a small child. The first page showed her in a Young Pioneer’s white shirt and red scarf.

  Or rather, it showed Xu Yifeng in these clothes.

  Bao stared at the picture for what seemed like a lifetime, then glanced up at Mrs Ping.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said.

  ‘People don’t always look like their parents,’ Bao replied hastily. ‘But – that’s not a Shanghainese face, is it? More northern, more like where I come from.’

  Mrs Ping smiled a bitter smile. ‘Li is not my daughter. Not biologically, though we love her as if she were.’ She paused. ‘Ping and I never had children of our own. Little Li was adopted. Back in the bad old days, in Heilongjiang.’

  ‘Heilongjiang?’ said Bao, feigning ignorance. ‘That’s way up north, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes…’ said Mrs Ping.

  ‘What happened there?’

  ‘I don’t like to talk about it.’

  Bao nodded sympathetically. ‘She’s very beautiful,’ he said, pointing at another picture.

  ‘She is … ’ Mrs Ping looked at him – and began to tell her story.

  17

  A mechanical roar rammed itself into the inspector’s ears. The Shanghai-Jinan sleeper was crossing the Yangzi River.

  The bridge seemed to go on forever, then suddenly peace returned. Bliss, for a moment, till Bao’s thoughts went back to the tale he had heard in Mrs Ping’s Shanghai flat. It hurt as much to recall it as to hear it for the first time.

  ‘My husband and I were students in the middle nineteen-fifties,’ Mrs Ping had said. ‘We were intellectuals and keen Party members. Then Chairman Mao launched that campaign: “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend” – you won’t remember it, Inspector: you’re too young. We were to criticize the Party and its leadership. China needed new ideas, and anyone who came up with good ones would be rewarded. We thought it was our duty to sit down and do this, the harsher the better, though we were actually quite moderate, because we were Party loyalists. We made our criticisms. We sent them in. We waited for replies. Then the official mood changed. Overnight. Anyone critical of the Party was a rightist. Mao said that five per cent of the population were rightists, and insisted that every institution produce lists of them. There were quotas – five per cent of each one’s membership exactly.

  ‘We weren’t the most obvious targets – some other people had been really scathing about the Party. But in the end those numbers had to be made up, so we found ourselves labelled anyway. We were ‘rightists’. Enemies of the People. Counterrevolutionaries. We were arrested, questioned, put in a detention centre then shoved into a cattle truck and sent – well, we didn’t know where, but we could guess, as it got colder and colder and colder. An Army lorry took us the last part of the journey, through endless pine trees and snow, to a camp with barbed wire, watchtowers and lines of huts. Naturally, my husband and I were split up. I only caught glimpses of him trudging off in a work party or at meals, queuing up for that revolting gruel we got every day.

  ‘Our work was logging. Cutting down the trees, lopping off branches, sawing up the trunks. Your brain slows down in th
at kind of cold. People got sent up trees to attach ropes and fell off. People got crushed by trees falling in the wrong direction. People fell into the big main saw – though I think most of those were deliberate suicides. Oh, yes, Inspector, there were plenty of those. The camp regime drove people to it: relentless self-criticism, in small groups, at huge meetings. Anyone who tried to defend themselves, or anyone else, would get picked on, beaten up, starved. You had to reduce yourself to nothing, to have no thoughts, ideas, dreams, values, anything human. And then the winter came.

  ‘We were supposed to keep working, but it was impossible. One day a whole party just vanished into a blizzard. We didn’t find their bodies till the spring, huddled together, a few hundred yards from the camp gates. So we sat and shivered in those huts, discussing People’s Daily editorials or making even more self-criticisms. Acknowledge your crimes! Acknowledge your faults! Submit to your superiors! Submit to the law!’

  Mrs Ping sighed. ‘Other camps, I found out later, were even worse. Our commandant was not a cruel man. He’d even got into trouble for falling behind on production quotas, while the real sadists just drove their work-teams to death. Some of the guards were sadists, though. Men and women. The trusty prisoners were almost all criminals who hated intellectuals. But you learnt to keep out of their way. We survived. Spring brought warmth – and knee-deep mud as the snow melted. Summer brought the mosquitoes. Enormous ones, that bit in a frenzy.’ She rolled up a sleeve, to reveal a series of blotches on her arm.

  ‘You longed for the cold to come and kill them off – till the cold came, of course, when all you dreamt of was warmth. However, the second winter wasn’t as bad as the first. The weakest ones had died already, so there wasn’t that perpetual presence of death. And we’d learnt survival skills – physical and mental. And I guess we’d forgotten more about our past lives and didn’t care so much. We’d mastered the art of living in a camp, which is to take one day at a time.

  ‘Years passed. You lose count. The food got worse during the great famine, but we still ate. One winter – I believe it was 1962 – was terrible. But we couldn’t work in those conditions, so we got through that. Then one day a small group of us, including me and my husband, were summoned to the commandant’s office. We expected some petty punishment, but he told us we were free. No reason, no lead-up. We couldn’t believe it! Then he added that there was no money for us to go back to our homes, and that there would be no accommodation or work for us when we got there, but if we wanted to stay on, we could move into small, private huts with better heating, eat proper food and get paid a few yuan a week. I’m not sure we actually had a choice, but we pretended we did, then said that we’d decided to stay.’

  Mrs Ping smiled. ‘You must think we were crazy to do this, but we were right. A few years later, the Cultural Revolution started and a whole new load of political prisoners arrived. A lot of them were old so-called rightists, coming back for a second stretch. We’d have been among them, but instead we had our huts, our food, a little freedom and some money. So many of the ’sixty-six, ’sixty-seven, ’sixty-eight returnees just gave up hope and died their first winter.

  ‘I don’t know when Li’s mother came. I do know she was very beautiful. The commandant saw her on parade one day, and simply ordered her out of line and into his office, where he made her a simple offer. I suppose you think she should have been all noble and refused – but you don’t know what it was like out there. I didn’t blame her at all. He treated her well, too. The other new arrivals hated her, of course, but half of them were soon dead anyway, so what did it matter? Aiya, that sounds so cynical, but I’m afraid I used up my supply of idealism after about three days in Heilongjiang.

  ‘Sometime later, ’sixty-nine I think, a group of Red Guards came and called a meeting where they criticized the commandant. I’m not sure why – maybe it was about that business with the quotas. Or maybe someone just had a grudge against him. It certainly wasn’t for keeping a mistress. He was a broken man after that, Yifeng said. A few days later, another group arrived and turned him out of his quarters. They arranged for a group of prisoners to be passing at the same time. Those fellows beat him to death.

  ‘Yifeng escaped and we took her in. She was pregnant. She said she wasn’t afraid of dying but she wanted the baby to survive. We told her we couldn’t protect her – but something inside me rebelled at this. Maybe I secretly knew what camp life had done to my own insides. I said we would look after her till the baby was born. She could stay in our hut. We’d lie to the new commandant and say she was one of us, and spread the rumour among the prisoners – people we despised anyway – that she was dead.’ Mrs Ping smiled. ‘The plan worked. Nobody bothered us, perhaps because we were paid manual labourers, perhaps because the prisoners who’d killed the commandant then went on the rampage and destroyed a whole lot of records. Yifeng had her little girl.

  ‘Of course, it had to come to light in the end. She only went out to get air and exercise at night. One of the Cultural Revolution prisoners spotted her and told the authorities, no doubt for a piece of mantou or the chance to write a letter home. Next morning a couple of Red Guards came round and searched all the ‘‘free’’ workers’ huts. We managed to hide her, but we knew they’d be back. We cooked up a plan for her to run away. We even offered her some of our savings. But she said no, we should keep our money or spend it on her daughter. She was going to leave on her own and come back for the baby when she could. We said she’d never get anywhere without help; she insisted. She kissed the child, turned away and walked out into the snow.

  ‘I followed her. She knew the way south towards Harbin, but she headed in the other direction, straight for the Black Dragon River, which ran past the top end of our encampment. When she reached the bank, she kept going. It was spring: there was ice, but it was beginning to thaw. The water beneath it was still unspeakably cold, of course. I tried to call out to her, but couldn’t attract her attention. So I just stood there, watching and listening. Listening was the worst. I can still remember the sound of the ice creaking, then a noise like a gunshot as it shattered, then a kind of muffled splash as Yifeng vanished under it. She never uttered a sound, just sank from view, as if someone had put a statue there.’

  The Shanghai-Jinan sleeper blew its whistle. The noise was inexpressibly mournful, as lonely as a young woman a thousand kilometres from home, in a hell that Yama himself could not have devised. Bao got up and hurried to the carriage toilet, where he stood and bashed the walls to let off some of his shame and fury.

  *

  ‘I can’t remember when I’ve felt this good,’ said Bao Ming.

  ‘That’s great,’ Rosina replied.

  ‘You know what they say, “We must make western things serve China”. And it’s all so simple. Just admitting the truth!’

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ Rosina replied. ‘This is just the start of a long process.’

  ‘Ah, but what a start!’ He grinned. ‘I’ve made some more jiaozi. Did you like the last lot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re not just being nice?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought I could go into business making them. When I get that money for my fields, I can buy some equipment, maybe even take on an assistant. I’ve even thought of a name. The Hundred Flavours Dumpling Company. We could have a slogan: “Let a hundred flavours bloom, let a hundred types of dumpling contend”!’

  Rosina took one of Ming’s hundred flavours, dipped it in vinegar and ate it. It was good, no doubt about it.

  ‘So you’re abandoning your opposition to the fish-farm, then?’ she asked.

  ‘My new project needs money. And I don’t like the sort of people muscling in on the protest group.’

  ‘Fei Huiqing stood up for you.’

  Ming blushed. ‘I don’t know her that well.’

  ‘Get to know her. Unless you’re afraid of the old class labels, of course.’

  Ming blushed. ‘Have another dumpling. This
one’s my own special recipe. Dragon’s Tail, I call it.’

  *

  A bus took Bao from the station at Jinan to Wentai, then he hitched lifts back to Nanping. The driver of the last vehicle, which took him most of the way, was a morose fellow who said three words in their forty shared kilometres. This suited the inspector fine, as his thoughts were on other things.

  After hearing Mrs Ping’s story, Bao had been shown Li’s room, which was full of traditional scroll paintings. Copies, of course, but a sign of excellent taste. Mrs Ping had explained how Li’s natural mother had been very fond of art. The daughter had learnt that from a set of journals her mother had kept and left for her in the hut the day she killed herself. Mrs Ping still had them.

  Bao had asked where the journals were, and Mrs Ping had replied that Li had taken them with her. She wasn’t sure why. He had asked her if she had read them, and she had replied: ‘Only extracts. They’re very detailed – and very depressing. Whose house got raided by the Red Guards, what got stolen or destroyed, who got beaten up or put in the cowshed. I’m not sure it’s healthy for her to have them, but I can hardly deny her the right.’ Mrs Ping had shaken her head sadly. ‘I assume you are a Party member, Inspector. Why did they do that?’

  *

  The lorry pulled up, as requested, at the police station, where Bao got off and went to check if there was any message about the samples that he’d sent off for analysis. There wasn’t. He also asked for a copy of the charges against Ma Kai, which Constable Kong typed out for him with his usual slowness. Then he made his way back to the guesthouse.

  Rosina was out, probably talking to Ming again. Bao was glad; he needed to be alone. He spent a long time staring out into space, imagining lines of men and women trudging through snow. Men and women who had done nothing wrong, just served to make up a meaningless figure that had sprung from the mind of one man. One man that his father had taught him to revere as the saviour of the nation, but who had ended up wreaking unspeakable suffering on millions of people.