by Qiu Xiaolong
“After the First Opium War, with the Treaty of Nanking, the city was forced to open itself to the West as a treaty port, and some areas were designated as foreign concessions. The small number of Western residents was not sufficient for the exploitation of Shanghai ’s potential. So a number of Chinese, who were worried about the civil wars raging outside the concessions, were permitted to move in. The British authorities took the lead in having collective dwellings built for the Chinese on designated lots. For the convenience of management, those houses were all built in the same architectural style, arranged in lines like barracks, row after row, accessible from sub-lanes leading to the main lane. French authorities soon followed suit-”
“What about the shikumen?” Chen, much impressed by Old Liang’s narrative flow, interrupted him as Liang paused to take a long pull at his cigarette. This general introduction might go on and on, for much longer than Chen was prepared to listen. And he had already learned some of these details elsewhere.
“I am coming around to it, Chief Inspector Chen,” Old Liang said, lighting another cigarette from the butt of the first one. “This is a really good brand; it’s reserved for high Party cadres only, I know.
“In the early days, not too many Chinese could have afforded to move into a concession. A shikumen house-the typical Shanghai two-storied house with a stone door frame and a small courtyard-was originally designed for one family, usually a large, extended, and well-to-do family, with various rooms for different purposes: dwelling wings, hall, front room, dining room, corner room, back room, attic, dark room, and tingzijian too. As a result of the housing shortage, some of the rooms came to be leased, then subleased, with rooms undergoing further partitioning or subdivision.
“This has been an on-going progress to the present day. You may have heard of a Shanghai comedy called Seventy-two Families in a House. It is about such an overcrowded condition.
“Our Treasure Garden is not exactly like that. Generally, there are no more than fifteen families in a shikumen house.”
“Yes, I have seen the comedy. So hilarious, with a mixture of so many diverse types. Life in a shikumen house must be quite interesting.”
“Oh, you bet. Life here is colorful. There is so much interaction between residents. You practically become part of the neighborhood and the neighborhood, of you. Take this hall, for example. It was turned into a common kitchen area long ago and contains the coal stoves of more than a dozen families. It’s a bit of a squeeze, but that’s not necessarily too bad. When you cook here, you can learn how to prepare the dishes of various provincial cuisines from your neighbors.”
“I would like that,” Chen said, smiling in spite of himself.
“Take the courtyard, for another example. You may do practically anything in it, even to sleeping outside in the summer, on a rattan recliner or bamboo mat. It is so cool that you don’t have to worry about an electric fan. Nor will you find it monotonous to scrub your clothes on a washboard here, where Granny Liu or Aunt Chen or Little Hou will keep you informed of the latest news of the lane. Indeed, you learn to share a lot of things with your neighbors.”
“That sounds very nice,” Chen said. “Here, people may have experiences unavailable in modern apartment complexes.”
“People do a lot of things in the lane,” Old Liang went on with unabated enthusiasm. “Men practice tai chi, brew the first pot of tea of the day, sing snatches of Beijing opera, and talk about the real weather or the political weather. As for women, washing and cooking and talking take place simultaneously. People here don’t have a living room like in those fancy new apartments. So in the evening, most of them move outside, men playing chess or cards, telling stories, women chatting or knitting or mending.”
Chen was familiar with similar scenes from his childhood, even though he’d lived in a different lane. Whatever differences there might be, or whatever other new information he might learn, it was the time for him to call a halt to Old Liang’s speech.
“Oh, do you hear that?” Liang went on. “A cotton-candy peddler is hawking his wares. A variety of peddlers come down the lane. They offer a huge selection of goods, and services too, repairing shoes, mending coir rope bedframes or restuffing or sewing cotton quilts for the winter. It is so convenient-”
“Thank you so much, Comrade Old Liang. As the proverb says, A talk of yours benefits me more than ten years of study,” Chen said with sincerity. “I would really like to spend some more time talking with you when I have finished my project.”
Old Liang finally understood that Chen wanted to be left alone, excused himself, saluted Chen respectfully one more time, and went back to his own office.
Chen watched him walking down the lane, taking abrupt detours to avoid the laundry hanging on bamboo poles overhead. The clothing festooned on the network of poles seemed to present a scene from an Impressionist painting. Apparently, Old Liang still believed the old superstition that walking under women’s underwear would bring bad luck.
Turning back, Chen tried the solid black wooden front door of the shikumen house. There were two brass knockers on the outside, and a solid wooden latch on the inside. After so many years of wear and tear, the door creaked when he pushed it open.
There were several people in the courtyard. They must have seen him talking with Old Liang, and they went on with their own activities, making no effort to speak to the chief inspector. As he crossed the courtyard, he saw a row of tall hall screen doors with exquisite designs of the eight immortals sailing over the ocean embossed on the panels. In an elaborate sequence, each door narrated a particular scene. The doors might be a valuable addition to the folk art museum in the New World, Chen thought.
As far as he could remember, he had never seen the hallway of a shikumen used for its original purpose, not even in his childhood. Without exception, a hall became common space in one way or another, since all the rooms along the wings opened into it. He smelled something like fermented tofu being fried in a wok, a favorite dish for some families in spite of its smell. It appealed to a lot of Shanghainese because of its exceptional flavor and texture. Most restaurants did not serve this dish because it was so cheap. That was a pity. There was also a faint smell, rich with a nostalgic aroma, of old hen soup with plenty of ginger and green onion.
Chen could not help wondering about the possibility of turning a shikumen into a restaurant. It would be unique. In a book of Chinese culinary studies he had read, it was argued that the best cooking might be done at home by a highly cultivated hostess who could spend days preparing a feast full of inspiration, to be served in an elegant ambience. Such a shikumen restaurant would have a pleasant family atmosphere too. The wings would be used as the dining areas, the small rooms here and there as private rooms; the intimacy of being at home, not to mention the contrast between the present and the past, would greatly enhance the proposed theme of the New World.
The courtyard, too, could be quite romantic in the evening, over a cup of wine or tea.
Some fragmented lines of an ancient poem unexpectedly came to him.
The moon appears like a hook.
The lone parasol tree locks the clear autumn
in the deep courtyard.
What cannot be cut,
nor raveled,
is the sorrow of separation:
Nothing tastes like that to the heart…
These lines were from a poem Yang had included in his translation manuscript. Some night, when all the other families in the shikumen were asleep, Yin, a lonely, heart-broken woman, could have stepped into this very courtyard and read it to herself.
Chen stubbed out his cigarette and walked across the hall and out the back door. He stopped to open and close the door a couple of times. Someone could have hidden behind the door, which was angled toward the staircase when it was open, but he would have been seen easily by people descending the stairs.
Outside, the shrimp woman was nowhere in sight, but a bamboo stool indicated her post in the lane, just t
hree or four steps away. It was cold out there. It could not be easy for a woman to sit there working, morning after morning, her fingers numbed by the frozen shrimp, for the unprincely wage of two or three Yuan per hour. Her monthly income would be far less than an hour’s translation earned him, he calculated.
He suddenly thought of two celebrated lines by Baijuyi, a Tang dynasty poet. Now what merit do I have- / with my annual salary at three thousand kilos of rice? At that time, when a lot of people could not fill their bellies, this salary was considered princely.
A recurring theme among Chinese intellectuals was a concern for the unfair distribution of wealth in society-huibujun. But Comrade Deng Xiaoping must also have been right when he declared that some Chinese people should be allowed to get rich first in their socialist society, that the wealth they accumulated would “trickle down” to the masses.
As for the money those upstarts like Gu were making, God alone knew where it would lead. Though China in the nineties was still socialist in name, with a time-honored emphasis on egalitarianism for the entire society, the gap between the rich and the poor was quickly-alarmingly-widening.
Chen started climbing the stairs. It was dark; finding each step was difficult. It would not be easy for a stranger to climb these stairs without stumbling. There should have been a light, even in the middle of the day. In such a building, however, with so many families, each one’s share of the electricity bill would be a headache to calculate.
Some of the rooms on each floor were obviously makeshift subdivisions of space, Chen thought. There were sixteen families in the two-story building, about one hundred residents in all. Yu had his job cut out for him if each resident was a potential suspect.
Chen could not help stepping inside Yin’s room, though he had not intended to examine it. Yu would have done a thorough job already.
He felt melancholy as he stood there, alone, thinking about a solitary woman whose death he should have more actively investigated. The furniture was already covered in a thin layer of dust, which somehow made the scene familiar. There was a pile of old magazines in which bookmarks had been placed. He thumbed through them; in each case, the marked page contained a poem of Yang’s which had later appeared in the collection edited by Yin. A traditional Chinese painting of two canaries still hung high on the time-yellowed wall. There was nothing else left that was really personal to Yin.
Chen’s interest in the room was also piqued by the term tingzijian writer. There were poverty-stricken writers, unable to rent better rooms, in the thirties, and then in the nineties, too. The marginal status of a tingzijian room, something barely inhabitable between two floors, appeared symbolic. He wondered how such a room-or the attempt to write in such a room-could have been romanticized in fiction. Not everything could have been glamorous in times past, but nostalgia made it seem so. Things are miraculously mellowed in memories. That was a line from a Russian poem he had read, but failed to understand, in his high-school years. A subtle transformation in comprehension had occurred with the lapse of years.
Chen started pacing around in the tingzijian, though there was not much room for him to do so. He wanted to concentrate.
It could not have been easy for Yin to write here; it could not have been easy to do anything, for that matter, with people going up and down the stairs, with noise coming from various directions, and with all the various smells wafting about. An unpleasant tang like that of salted beltfish sizzling in a wok was surging up from the kitchen area. He sniffed in spite of himself.
He went over to the window and rested his elbows, gingerly, on the windowsill, from which most of the paint had already peeled off.
There might be one advantage, nonetheless, for a writer in a tingzijian room, with its window lower than on the second floor but higher than on the first. There was an almost eye-level view of the hustle and bustle of the lane, so close yet at the same time somehow distanced.
In spite of the cold weather, several residents were out in the lane, holding bowls, talking, or exchanging a slice of fried pork for a nugget of steamed fish. Late breakfast or early lunch, Chen could not tell which. Peddlers came in and out, hawking the various goods on their shoulder poles. An old man went by, carrying a green-headed duck in his hand, stopping to feed the duck at a tiny pool in the corner, then resuming his walk, light-footed as if he were on a cloud, his mind doubtless filled by the image of sesame oil-braised duck wings. He clutched the neck of the helpless duck tightly with a look of utter satisfaction on his face. Could this be Mr. Ren, the frugal gourmet? Chief Inspector Chen then remembered having been told that Mr. Ren did not cook at home often.
Once more, Chen’s glance followed the curve of the lane back to the corner where the shrimp woman was now stationed, sitting on the same bamboo stool, on the same spot with a large bowl full of glistening fish scales at her feet. Perhaps she had another contract with the food market to make a later delivery.
As he went downstairs to the back door, something else caught his attention. It was the space-or rather something covering the space-under the staircase.
In a shikumen house, any usable space was precious. Since no single family could claim the space under the staircase, it became an additional common storage area for all sorts of hardly usable stuff which, in its owner’s imagination, still had some potential value-like a broken bike of the Lis, a three-legged rattan chair of the Zhangs, a trunk of coal of the Huangs. But there was one difference here, Chen noticed: the space was covered by something like a curtain. It was a heavy material, possibly a once-expensive tapestry, which had been discolored by years of smoke from all the coal stoves.
The curtain seemed to be moving mysteriously. As Chen took a step toward it, out jumped two small boys. They must have been playing hide-and-seek behind the curtain. At the sight of Chief Inspector Chen, they ran away, laughing and shrieking. He lifted up the curtain; the space inside was full of the grimy discarded junk.
A middle-aged man squeezed past him to reach into a bag of coal balls that was leaning against the side of the staircase. “Sorry, lunch time,” he mumbled, as he filled a ladle with coal balls.
Looking at his watch, Chen realized that he had spent nearly three hours without finding out anything of value for the investigation. He might have gained some first-hand experience for his translation, but he had no idea whether it would really help him to visualize the New World.
He left the shikumen building, cutting through one sub-lane into another, and then returned to the main lane, which was throbbing with life just as Old Liang had described it. A middle-aged woman was drying a redwood chamber pot, another trotted back from the food market with a full bamboo basket, and still another was preparing a large carp in the lane sink, splashing scales and gossip around at the same time.
Turning another corner, he saw a white-haired old man playing go on a board resting on a stool, the black pieces in one of his hands and the white in the other, studying the board as if he were taking part in a national tournament. Chen liked go, too, but he had never tried to play the game solo.
“Hi,” he said, coming to a stop by the stool. “How come you are playing by yourself?”
“Have you read The Art of War?” the old man asked without looking up. “Know your enemy as you know yourself, and you will win every time.”
“Yes, I have read the book. You have to figure out why your opponent has made a certain move. So you must try hard to understand your opponent.”
“From my point of view, the positioning of the black piece does not make any sense, and the best I can do is to guess, to try to understand, as you put it. But that’s not enough. Knowing your enemy actually means that you not only have to think as if you were reading his mind, you have to be him.”
“I see. Thank you so much, Uncle. That is profound,” Chen said sincerely. To him, it seemed as if the talk were not just about the game of go. “I will put your teaching into practice, not just on a go board.”
“Young man, you don�
��t have to take me so seriously. When you play a game, you want to win,” the old man explained. “When you are absorbed in it, every piece counts, every move matters. Happy to win a corner, sad to lose a position, you are carried away with the illusion of gains or losses. Not until after the game will you come to realize it’s nothing but a game. According to Buddhist scripture, everything in this mundane world is a matter of illusion.”
“Exactly. You have put it very well.”
Chen decided to walk back to his apartment. He could not afford to spend a whole day in the lane. The conversation about go had cost him another ten minutes. The translation lay unfinished on his desk at home. Still, he wanted to think a little about the case, at least on his way back, after this talk with the elderly go player who had been as mysteriously enlightening as the old man of the Han dynasty who had helped Zhang Liang two thousand years ago.
At the exit of the lane, he looked back toward the building where Yin had spent the last years of her life after Yang’s death. Some more lines from Yang’s poetry translation manuscript occurred to him.
Where is the beauty?
Swallows alone are locked inside, for no purpose.
It is nothing but a dream,
in the past, or at present.
Who ever wakes from the dream?
There is only a never-ending cycle
of old joy and new grief.
Some day, and someone else,
in view of the yellow tower at night,
may sigh deeply for me.
These lines were from a poem by Su Dongpo, about a courtesan who shut herself up in the tower after her lover’s death. A tingzijian was not at all comparable to a romantic tower, but Yin, too, had shut herself up.
Chen was determined to do his level best for the investigation. He started by putting himself in the position of the government. He still couldn’t figure out what it could have possibly gained from murdering Yin. While Internal Security seemed to have some concern, Chen did not consider it really surprising or suspicious for them to show interest in a dissident writer’s sudden death; it could simply be their way of asserting authority. In recent years, the Party had changed its way of dealing with dissidents. Foreign investment, a vital part of China ’s economic reform, depended heavily on the new, improved government image. It did not make sense to assassinate someone like Yin. After all, she was not someone fighting for democracy and freedom under a red banner in Tiananmen Square.