When Red is Black

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “I was in Anhui, collecting debts for my company. A number of people, including those at the hotel, can testify to that.”

  “Thanks, Comrade Qiao. I don’t think I have any more questions for you today. ‘Look to the future,’ as the People’s Daily always says.”

  The telephone interview had been unhelpful, although not a total waste. For one thing, Yu learned that in his last few years, Yang had kept on working, which could have resulted in the translation of classical Chinese love poems they had found in Yin’s safety deposit box. Also, it reconfirmed Old Hunter’s maxim, that the past is always present. Almost twenty years later, people still looked at the Cultural Revolution from their own perspective forged at the time.

  He removed the cassette on which he had taped the phone call. Chief Inspector Chen might be interested in it, Yu thought. He dialed the home number of his boss.

  “You may suspect everyone in the building,” Chen said after having listened to Yu’s short briefing, “but when everyone is a suspect, nobody is a suspect.”

  “Exactly,“ Yu said. “Old Liang sees only what he wants to see.”

  “Old Liang has been a residence cop for too many years. The job of a residence cop, however important in the years of class struggle, is hardly relevant nowadays. But he still cannot help seeing the world from his outdated angle,” Chen said. “Su Dongpu has put it so well: You cannot see the true face of the Lu mountains, / When you are still inside the mountains.”

  That was just like his boss, quoting some long-dead poet in the middle of an investigation. This penchant of Chen’s could occasionally be annoying.

  Then Detective Yu went over to the shikumen building.

  Cai was not at home. Lindi, a fine-featured woman in her late forties, was in the courtyard, cutting open a pile of river scallop spiral shells with a pair of rusted scissors. Wan was also there, seated on a bamboo stool, drinking from a purple stone teapot. At this time of the year, people normally did not sit outside doing nothing. At the sight of Detective Yu, Wan mumbled a few words and left.

  After Yu introduced himself to her, Lindi led him upstairs to a small room. It would be difficult for a medium-sized family to squeeze into such an all-purpose room, let alone three families. But she lived in it with her son and his “wife,” her daughter, a crying baby and, most of the time, her son-in-law, Cai. Fortunately, it was a room with a relatively high ceiling, which made possible the construction of two added make-shift lofts, with a common ladder leading to both of them. In comparison, Detective Yu reflected with deep sarcasm, his living conditions could be considered great.

  According to Lindi, Cai was not at home this morning. Nor had he been here on the morning of February 7. “No one can tell what he’s really up to,” Lindi said with a sigh. “I warned Xiuzhen about her choice, but she would not listen.”

  “I have heard about it. How about your son Zhenming?”

  “Home for him is like a free hotel, and a free restaurant too. He comes whenever he wants. Now he brings another person with him as well.”

  “Please tell me what you know about Yin, Comrade Lindi.”

  “She was different.”

  “How?”

  “She had a room all for herself, whereas in our one single room there are three families. She suffered during the Cultural Revolution? Who didn’t? My husband died in the ‘armed struggle’ among worker organizations, believing he was fighting for Chairman Mao to the last drop of his blood. After his death, there was not even a memorial service for him.” She went on after a pause. “One of the reasons Xiuzhen married Cai was not because of his money-he did not have such a lot to begin with-but because she had lost her father when she was only four years old.”

  “I see,” Yu said. He was surprised by her thoughtful analysis of her daughter’s reason for marrying the much older Cai.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you much about Yin. The Cultural Revolution has left so many tragedies in its wake. Yin was a writer, and had published a book about it, but she was not willing to talk about it to us.”

  Detective Yu thanked her at the end of the conversation. As he moved downstairs, he felt totally depressed. People here still seemed to be covered with the dust of the past, just like the shikumen building itself. To be more exact, they were still living in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution. The government called on the people to look forward, never turning their head heads back, but this was extremely hard for some, including Yin, Lindi, Wan, almost everyone he had interviewed here except Mr. Ren. Now Yu wondered whether Mr. Ren really could forget, drowning his memories in a bowl of steaming noodles.

  As he walked out of the shikumen building, he caught sight of Lei’s booth at the front lane entrance. Detective Yu was not in a great hurry to interview Lei. Looking at his watch, he decided to buy a lunch box for himself. There was a line of customers stretching toward the booth, and he stood in it patiently. He watched. In spite of the help he had recently hired, Lei himself was busy, constantly stirring the contents of a heavy wok. Several rough, unpainted wooden tables and benches stood clustered around the lane entrance. Some customers walked away with lunchboxes in their hands, but some chose to eat there. Yu also took a seat.

  The meal was quite good. A large portion of rice paddy eel slice fried with green onion and sesame oil on top of steamed white rice, plus a soup of pickled vegetable and shredded pork, for only five Yuan.

  Afterwards, he phoned Peiqin with a question. “Do you think we can rely on Yu’s tax form?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Peiqin replied. “Private restaurants make lots of money by not paying tax. It’s an open secret. All business is done for cash. No one asks for a receipt for four or five Yuan. His tax form is not something you can trust. Nor does he put all his money in the bank either. This is a common practice among restaurant owners.”

  “That’s true,” Yu said. “I did not ask for a receipt this afternoon.”

  “I have done some spreadsheets for Geng. I know what I am talking about.”

  Yu believed Peiqin.

  Chapter 11

  Sitting in her cubicle at the Four Seas restaurant, Peiqin finished the accounting work for the month. It was hardly the middle of February. Still, she would come to her so-called office every day to sit with the books and papers spread out on the long desk, even though there was no work left to do. Originally a tingzijian, it was not much of a room, but it served as an office separated from the business downstairs. She shared the office with Hua Shan, the restaurant manager, who had an all-day-long meeting somewhere else. Slipping off her shoes, she placed her feet on a chair, then put them down again. There were two small holes in her socks.

  “Peiqin, it’s time for lunch,” Luo, the new chef shouted from the kitchen located below the office. His voice boomed up through the cracks of the old worn floor, the air was filled with swirling dust making weird patterns in the light. “We’ll have fish-head soup with red pepper today.”

  “Great. I’ll come as soon as I finish here.”

  In the first year she had worked there, Peiqin had occasionally come downstairs to help. Soon she stopped doing so. In a state-run company, employees were paid the same amount regardless of how long or how hard they worked. As an accountant, she needed only to finish her bookkeeping, which normally took her a week, instead of a month. If she sat there afterward, doing nothing for the rest of the time, no one would care. So for the last few years, she had read Qinqin’s textbooks under the cover of her accounting books. Qinqin would not let his school years slip away, unlike hers. To help him with his homework, she started learning English too, so as to be able to practice with him at home. Qinqin had to get a good education, at a top university. A college education could make a world of difference in China ’s fast-changing society. In fact, Chief Inspector Chen had obtained his position-in part at least-because of his superior educational background, although she acknowledged Chen was one of the few Party cadres who deserved his position on his own merit.
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br />   Sometimes she read novels in the office. Like many people of her generation, Peiqin had more or less educated herself by reading novels. The manager must have been aware of her reading, but he had not said anything. He, too, was busy doing something for himself. Peiqin did not have a clue what it was.

  Sometimes, when she put down her book, she could not help being momentarily bewildered. How had she ended up here, she wondered, in this tiny office, reading novels simply because she had nothing better to do? Was she going to spend the rest of her life just like this? In her elementary school, Peiqin had been a straight-A student, even though not a popular one, because of her “black” family background. Her father had owned a small import/export company, hence he was declared a “capitalist” in his class status after 1949, which cast his whole family under a dark cloud. The dark cloud turned into a violent storm during the Cultural Revolution.

  As an educated youth-a beginning high school student-in the late sixties, she had had to leave Shanghai for Yunnan. Her path had crossed Yu’s then. Their relatives had introduced them, hoping that they could take care of each other in that distant place. Far away in the countryside, with her girlish dreams shattered, she learned to appreciate the man in Yu. Then after they were allowed to return to Shanghai in the late seventies, she considered herself lucky to have a family like hers. Yu was a good husband, and Qinqin a wonderful son, in spite of the fact that they all had to huddle together in that one single all-purpose room. Monotonous as her restaurant job was, she managed to see herself, literally, as one level above those working in the kitchen. She had long since accepted the truism that happiness comes only in contentment.

  The lackluster, unchallenging work actually suited her well if she chose to look at it from another angle. For she could devote herself more to her family. The best years of her youth had been wasted during the Cultural Revolution, but she saw no point blaming fate, or crying, like so many others. She had been content to play the traditional role of good wife and mother.

  Of late, however, she had become less at peace with the status quo. The world around her was changing. Some of the values, or meanings, which she used to think she had found in her life seemed to be slipping away. I don’t know in which direction the wind is blowing, was a line she recalled reading; it seemed appropriate now. She believed that she should try to do something, in addition to her restaurant work. She had to face the fact that the iron-bowl positions Yu and she had would, at most, satisfy their most basic material needs. The apartment fiasco had been the last straw. Qinqin must have a different life; she was resolved. Almost everybody else in Qinqin’s class had Nike shoes, and Peiqin wanted to buy a pair for him, too. In her school years, brand names did not exist, and army-green imitation rubber shoes were the norm. In Yunnan, sometimes she went barefoot, because she had mailed one pair of those she had been issued back home to her niece. Even today, she still went without cosmetics, in spite of the ever-increasing appeals of commercials on TV. At a recent class reunion, one of her former classmates arrived in a Mercedes, to the envy of most in the room. In school, he had been a nobody, copying Peiqin’s homework from time to time. It was really a changed world.

  And then the investigation of Yin Lige’s case, unexpectedly, began to take on meaning for her. Not exactly a new meaning, nor meaningful only to her, but it was traceable as far back as her high school years. Her reading was secret at the time-secret because Chairman Mao’s works alone were officially available-libraries were closed, novels and poems out of reach, and a young girl of her family background had to be careful, carrying novels in a most stealthy way, hidden under her armpit within her cotton-padded coat. Like others, Peiqin had to turn to books that had been published earlier, that were still in clandestine circulation. “Wealthy” with half a dozen books she had hidden from the Red Guards’ clutches, she and several others had formed an underground network to exchange books. There was something like an “exchange rate”: Balzac’s Old Goriot would be worth Dickens’s Hard Times plus a Chinese novel such as The Song of Youth or The Story of the Red Flag. In their network, if a member was able to get a new book through an outside contact, then the book would travel from one member to another, available to each for only one day.

  She had developed a preference for certain writers. Yang, the great contemporary translator, was one of her favorites. In her opinion, hardly any modern Chinese writer was comparable to Yang for stylistic innovation, perhaps because he had a unique sensitivity to language, introducing Western expressions, and sometimes syntax too, into Chinese. In the history of modern Chinese literature, she had observed, most intellectuals who had a higher education had become translators rather than writers, for political reasons which were not difficult to understand.

  When she had left high school for Yunnan, she carried some of those “poisonous” books with her. She did not talk to Yu about them. It was not that she had intended to keep something from him; rather, she was worried that her bookish passion might have made her less approachable. Besides, Yu had been too busy, doing not only his share of the labor in the field, but a lot of times hers as well.

  In Yunnan she learned that Yang had written poems as well as translated novels. She found a short poem in an old anthology, which she copied into a notebook and memorized. It was not until after she came back to Shanghai that Yang’s poetry collection edited by Yin appeared in bookstores. By then, Peiqin was no longer a young, sentimental girl; still, she admired those poems. It broke her heart to learn that his poetry career had been cut short even before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. In the collection, she also read a few poems written shortly before his death.

  Now she picked up the poetry collection that Yin had edited and turned to a poem entitled “Snowman”:

  You have to be a snowman

  To stand in the snow

  Listening to the same message

  Of the howling wind

  With imperturbable patience,

  Gazing at the scene

  Without losing yourself in it

  While a hungry, homeless crow

  Starts to peck at your red nose,

  Apparently, a carrot.

  She did not think she truly understood the poem, yet she felt a sudden, almost Zen-like enlightenment, overcome by empathy for the poet. He must have been so lonely, so desolate, so chilled, standing outside alone like the snowman. Peiqin did not have to guess what “the same message of the howling wind” might have been. Or the “hungry, homeless crow.” But the snowman did not lose itself in the scene: it kept its human shape, paradoxically, in snow.

  She looked at the date underneath the poem. It had probably been written before he met Yin. Peiqin could understand how Yin’s appearance might have made a great difference in Yang’s life.

  But Peiqin was drawn into the investigation of Yin Lige’s case not just because of Yang, nor even because it might help her husband in his work. It was also because of a vague yearning she thought she had long since put behind her, a yearning to find something, some meaning, in her own life-like the meaning one could find in the “snowman.”

  Geng had suggested she become his partner when he expanded his business. She had not discussed this with Yu. It might be too early for her to let go of the iron bowl. No one could predict the future of China ’s economic reform. Nor was a restaurant business something in which she was genuinely interested. She had helped her husband and Chief Inspector Chen once before when they were investigating the death of a National Model Worker, but she had never thought that she would come to be so engaged in an investigation. The combined temptation of doing something for a writer she had admired, of doing something for Yu, and of doing something for herself, too, was irresistible.

  Could she discover a clue Yu might have overlooked? There was no way she could investigate as he did. She still had to come to her office during the week, and the weekend was reserved for Qinqin’s homework. There was only one thing she could do, Peiqin realized. Read. Yu had joked abo
ut her having lost herself God-knows-how-many times in The Dream of the Red Chamber. She thought she would now do a close re-reading of Death of a Chinese Professor.

  “Peiqin, the soup will turn cold if you do not come down,” someone shouted from the kitchen.

  She put away the books and went downstairs.

  The restaurant was full of customers. One of its new specials was rice cake with soy-sauce-braised pork steak, a popular choice. While a lot of state-run restaurants had suffered from tough competition with privately run restaurants, Four Seas had done fairly well. This was probably because of its convenient location.

  Taking her seat on a bench near the kitchen entrance, she had a portion of the rice cake with pork steak in addition to a bowl of the fish-head soup. The rice cake was pleasantly soft and sticky, the steak tender, and the soup delicious, shining with the red pepper strewn over the surface. It was a pity that she could not take it back home. Once cold, the fish soup would start smelling.

  Xiangxiang, a dish washer, also an ex-educated youth, came over to Peiqin. Xiangxiang had to wear rubber boots that creaked as she moved, for the sink area was always wet. As she sat beside Peiqin, she pulled one water-soaked foot out of her boot. Xiangxiang had a slight stoop from bending over the dirty dishes all year round, and her fingers were red, chapped, swollen like carrots. She worked seven days a week under a special arrangement. Her husband had been laid off. She had to support the whole family.

  “We have worked our butts off, for what?” Xiangxiang complained, wiping her hands on her gray apron. “All the meat goes to the government. Nothing but the soup is left for us.”

  In order to compete, the restaurant had started a dinner business, instead of opening only in the mornings and afternoons as before. Business had improved, but little of the profit went to the employees, except as inexpensive perks like the fish-head soup.

  “We are not doing that badly, with our location, and with our name too.”