Red Mandarin Dress

by Unknown

  “That’s true.”

  “You are not a cop, are you, Peiqin?”

  “No, I am not,” Peiqin said. “I have worked at the Four Seas since my return from Yunnan. Our state-run restaurant has suffered losses and our chef suggests that we should run it like a high-end restaurant with fashionable services. You may be able to give us advice.”

  That was a true statement. Rong might help too. Not necessarily in the aspect of three-accompanying girls—an aspect Peiqin didn’t want to envision yet.

  “Now that we are talking about it, Peiqin,” Rong said, “there might have been one thing—about Qiao, I mean. Three or four days before that fatal night, a customer came to Ming River, alone. He didn’t look like one who would require a girl, so I didn’t pay any attention to him. He contacted a waiter, requesting a girl’s company. Qiao went over to him. Nothing happened that evening.”

  “Can you give a description of that man?”

  “If I remember him at all, it’s because he didn’t look like those upstarts. A gentleman, I would say. Medium height. Oh, one more thing, perhaps. He wore a pair of amber-colored glasses. Not exactly sunglasses. Still, it’s rare for people to wear that kind of glasses in the winter.”

  “Did Qiao tell you anything afterward?”

  “No. She worked late. She had another old customer that night.”

  “Did she have a cell phone?”

  “No, not that I know of. Nor is there a phone at home. If I had to contact her for something, I called her neighbor on the third floor. Not too many people knew that number,” Rong said, rising with a smile. “I think it’s time for me to start preparing for the evening. I may put on a mandarin dress too. It’s hot.”

  TWELVE

  EARLY IN THE MORNING, a pile of newspapers was special-delivered from the police bureau to Chen’s home, along with the latest case reports and tapes of Yu’s interviews.

  Instead of opening the collection of Song and Ming stories, as he had planned the night before, Chen started looking through the material prepared by Yu, wrapping himself in a robe and reclining against the headboard.

  There was a cup of tea on the table, left over from last night, cold, almost black. People are not supposed to drink last night’s tea. But he did.

  Shortly afterward, a second package was delivered to him. A package of books from the Shanghai Library, most of them on psychology.

  In his college years, Chen had dabbled in the subject—particularly in Freud and Jung—for literary criticism. To his relief, he found himself still responding to those psychological terms. Collective unconscious, for one, jumped out at him. There could have been something like a collective unconscious, he realized, behind the deconstructive turn in those love stories.

  Or behind the deconstructive message—if he could so term it—in the red mandarin dress case too?

  For many years after 1949, psychological problems had not been acknowledged in socialist China. People were supposed to have no problems, psychological or otherwise, as long as they followed the teachings of Chairman Mao. If they admitted to having trouble, they had to reform their minds through hard labor. Psychology was practically declared a bogus science. Psychoanalysis didn’t exist as a practice. Nor was it sensible for people to go to an analyst—if one was available at all—since talking about their problems could become evidence of serious “political crime.” In recent years, psychology had been gradually reintroduced and somewhat rehabilitated, but most people remained wary of it. Psychological problems still could easily turn into political problems.

  As a result, a psychological approach was considered unorthodox in the police bureau. Detective Yu, too, was full of reservations about it, believing that a psychological explanation might be helpful at the conclusion of a case, but not in the middle of the investigation.

  Chen started reading Yu’s reports in earnest.

  Yu had a hard time with Liao. Apart from the long rivalry between the two squads, Liao didn’t approve of Yu’s focus on Jasmine. Liao declared that the homicide squad had done everything possible in that direction. The killer was a nut, killing at random, and it would be a waste of time to look for a rational explanation.

  But in a go chess game, an experienced player is capable of instinctively grasping an opportunity on the chessboard. One small white or black piece, in a marginal position, hardly of any significance in itself, can contain the possibility of turning the table. Yu was good with his hunches on a go chessboard. And in his investigations too.

  After the first interview with Weng in the hotel, Yu had continued exploring along that direction. He checked Weng’s records elsewhere, including at the airport. There was nothing wrong with the entry date, but Yu had an unexpected discovery in Weng’s custom declaration. On the slip, Weng had checked the “married” box on his marriage status. That necessitated a second interview.

  Chen put the second interview tape into the cassette player, skipping the preliminary part, going to where Yu questioned Weng about his relation with Jasmine in the context of his marital status.

  WENG: When I first met her, I was still married, but already separated from my wife. I was just waiting for the divorce to be final. Jasmine knew that too, though perhaps not at first.

  YU: Was she upset with the discovery?

  WENG: I think so, but she was also relieved.

  YU: Why?

  WENG: I tried to start up an antique business of my own. With my anthropology background, I thought I could do much better than those quack dealers, especially with a huge market in China nowadays. So I wanted her to move to the States, where she might help run a store. I looked into the possibility of putting her father up at a nursing home here. But she was not too anxious to leave, worrying about him. In fact, everything could have been taken care of in a couple of weeks. It’s just her luck. She was really cursed!

  YU: You’ve mentioned her bad luck. Can you give me some examples?

  WENG: A lot of ill-fated things happened to her. So inexplicable. Not to mention what happened to her father—

  YU: Well, let’s start with her father. So we’ll have a complete story, starting with her childhood.

  WENG: Tian was a Worker Rebel during the Cultural Revolution. Not a nice gentleman, to be sure. He was punished—sentenced to two to three years. He deserved that, but after his release, horrible luck dogged him like his shadow.

  YU: Karma, as his neighbors have put it.

  WENG: Karma, perhaps, but there were so many Red Guards and Worker Rebels in those years. Who was really punished? Tian alone, as far as I know. His divorce, his loss of his job, his years in prison, his failure in the restaurant business, and finally his paralys. . . .

  YU: Slow down, Weng. Details.

  WENG: After the Cultural Revolution, his wife received anonymous phone calls about his affairs with other women. That was the last straw for their marriage. She divorced him. Surely not a model husband, but his affairs were never proven, and no one knew who made the phone calls. Then his factory came under pressure from above and he was fired and sentenced too. What happened to his ex-wife then was even more unbelievable. Divorced, only in her early thirties, she started dating another man. Soon, pictures of her sleeping with him appeared. In the early eighties, it was a huge scandal and she committed suicide. Jasmine moved back in with Tian. He borrowed money to start a small restaurant, but in less than a month, several customers suffered food poisoning there. They sued him with the help of an attorney, and Tian went bankrupt.

  YU: That’s strange. At that time, few would have sued for something like that.

  WENG: Do you know how he was paralyzed?

  YU: A stroke, right?

  WENG: He was so desperate that he tried to reverse his luck on a mahjong table. And he was caught by the neighborhood cop the second time he sat down at the table. A heavy fine and a lecture. He suffered a stroke right there and then.

  LIAO: Karma indeed. Now, what about Jasmine’s bad luck?

  WENG: It was h
ard for a little girl, but she turned out to be a good student. On the day of the college entrance examination, however, she was knocked down by a bike. Not badly hurt, she told the biker not to worry, but he insisted on having her checked at a hospital. When everything was finished, she had missed the examination.

  YU: It was an accident. A responsible biker could have done that.

  WENG: Perhaps. But what about her first job?

  YU: What about it?

  WENG: She couldn’t afford to wait for the examination the next year. So she started working as a salesgirl for an insurance company. Not a bad job, with a sizable bonus for her. Insurance was then new in the city. During her third or fourth month on the job, however, someone sent a letter to her boss, complaining about her “promiscuous lifestyle and shameless tricks” in selling policies. Her boss didn’t want the company’s image affected by a scandal and fired her.

  YU: Well, that’s the version from her perspective.

  WENG: There’s no point in making up things like that. I never raised a question about her past.

  YU: Did she herself make any comment about her bad luck?

  WENG: She seemed to have always lived in the shadow of it. So she came to believe that she was born under an unlucky star. She applied for other jobs, but she had no success until she came to this shabby hotel, taking a dead-end job.

  YU: How did she come to tell you all this?

  WENG: She suffered from a sort of inferiority complex. When we first started going out, and I talked about our future, she could hardly believe the change in her life. But for the incident in the elevator, she would never have agreed to go out with me. She was a little superstitious, taking the incident as a sign. With so much bad luck in her young life, you understand.

  YU: One more question: when did you plan to marry her?

  WENG: We did not have an exact date, but we agreed that it should be as soon as possible—after the divorce. . . .

  Chen fast-forwarded the tape toward the end, but Yu didn’t make any comments, as he had sometimes did. There were no comments on the written report, either.

  Chen rose to make a cup of coffee. A cold morning. Outside the window, a yellow leaf finally tore itself from the twig, trembling, as in a story he had read a long time ago.

  He moved back to bed, putting the coffee mug on the nightstand, tapping his finger on the cassette player.

  Chen could see Yu tapping his finger on a go chessboard, grappling with a possible opening, not exactly identified—not yet.

  It was Weng’s statement about Jasmine’s curse.

  While Tian deserved the punishment, most of the people like Tian remained unpunished after the Cultural Revolution, with Chairman Mao’s portrait still hanging on the Tiananmen Gate. As a Chinese proverb goes, to kill a monkey is to scare the chickens, and Tian happened to be the monkey, that was perhaps just his luck.

  But what about Jasmine? The bike incident might have been an accident. The anonymous letters, however, went too far. She was only seventeen or eighteen. How could anyone have hated her that much?

  The cell phone rang, breaking into the gloomy thoughtful morning.

  “Let’s have brunch at the Old City God’s Temple Market,” White Cloud said, her voice sounding close by. “You like the mini soup bun there, I know.”

  Probably a good idea to take a break. Talk with her might help—about the paper, and about the case too.

  “There are several boutiques selling mandarin dresses there,” she went on before he responded. “Quite a variety of them—not good quality, but fashionable, and some of them nostalgically fashionable.”

  That clinched it for him.

  “Let’s meet at Nanxiang Soup Bun Restaurant.”

  It was for the sake of the investigation, he told himself. She might serve as a fashion consultant in a field study, though he was slightly uneasy about it.

  Was it because of something he had been studying for the paper—a femme fatale? There seemed to be a weird echo from the story he had just read. According to one critic, Yingying, in “The Story of Yingying,” was actually someone of dubious background, like a K girl in today’s society.

  Chen started dressing for brunch.

  About twenty minutes later, he found himself walking in under the familiar entrance arch of the Old City God’s Temple Market.

  For most Shanghainese, the temple represented not so much of an attraction in itself, but simply a name for the surrounding market of local snacks and products—originally booths and stalls for the temple festivals. For Chen, the attraction came from those eateries, whose offerings were inexpensive yet unique in their flavors, such as chicken and duck blood soup, soup buns in small steamers, radish-shred cakes, shrimp and meat dumplings, beef soup noodles, fried tofu and vermicelli. . . . All these he had liked so much, in the days when society was still an egalitarian one, in which everyone made little money and enjoyed simple meals.

  Things were also changing here. There was a new tall building rising behind the Yu Garden, which had originally been the back garden of the Shanghai mayor in the late Qing dynasty and was built in the traditional southern architecture style of ancient pavilions and grottos. In Chen’s childhood, his parents, unable to afford the trip to Suzhou and Hangzhou, had taken their son to the garden instead.

  Moving past the garden, he stepped up onto the Nine Turn Bridge—allegedly with nine turns so that the evil spirits wouldn’t be able to find their way around. An old couple stood on the bridge, throwing breadcrumbs to the invisible golden carps in the pond and nodding at him. It was too cold for the fish to come to the surface, but the old couple remained standing there, waiting. The last turn of the bridge brought him to the Nanxiang Soup Bun Restaurant.

  The first floor of the restaurant appeared little changed: a long line of customers waited outside for their turn to get in, watching through the large kitchen window, the never-boring scene of the kitchen assistants picking out the crab meat deftly on a long wooden table and mixing it with minced pork meat. He took the winding stairs up to the second floor, which was quite crowded in spite of the double price charged there. So he climbed up another flight of steps to the third floor, which charged three times as much for the same soup buns. The table and chairs were of imitation mahogany, not too comfortable, but there weren’t too many people there. He took a seat overlooking the lake.

  As a waiter came to pour him a cup of tea, White Cloud walked up the staircase, tall and slender in a white imitation-fur overcoat and high heels. Helping her take off the overcoat, he saw her wearing a modified backless pink mandarin dress. The dress fit her well, accentuating her curves. Once more he was reminded of that famous Confucian statement, A woman makes herself beautiful for the man who appreciates her.

  “You are floating over like a morning cloud,” he commented before ordering four steamers of soup buns stuffed with minced crab and pork meat. The waiter took the order from him, stealing a look at her.

  “Your appetite is good today,” she said, placing on the table a pink silk purse that matched the color of her dress.

  “A beauty is so delicious that people want to devour,” he said, quoting Confucius.

  “You are being romantic.” She tore open a small packet with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball that she carried in her purse, wiped his chopsticks first, and then hers. Nanxiang was one of the few old Shanghai restaurants that still resisted using disposable chopsticks.

  “Nostalgic, perhaps,” he said, immersing the ginger slices into saucers of vinegar. One of the saucers was cracked, just like in the old days, as on that afternoon with his cousin Peishan.

  In the early seventies, Peishan had been one of the first educated youths to “go to the countryside for reeducation by the poor and lower-middle-class peasants.” Before leaving Shanghai, Peishan took Chen to this restaurant, which, like other restaurants at the time, was supposed to serve only working-class people “in the Party’s glorious tradition of hard working and simple living.” Culinary enjoymen
t was denounced as a decadent bourgeois extravagancy. People were supposed to eat simply for the sake of making revolution. A number of high-end restaurants were closed. Nanxiang Soup Bun survived as a lucky exception owing to its incredibly cheap price: a bamboo steamer for only twenty-four cents, affordable by any working-class standard. That afternoon, Peishan and Chen patiently waited no less than three hours for their turn. Consequently they gave a huge order: four bamboo steamers for each of them, after the long wait and Peisan’s sentimental comment, “When, when can I come back to Shanghai—to the delicious soup buns?”

  Cousin Peishan did not come back. In the far, far away countryside, he suffered a nervous breakdown and jumped into a dry well. He might have starved to death there.

  Twenty years has passed like a dream.

  What a surprise I am still here, today!

  Chen chose not to tell White Cloud of this episode from the Cultural Revolution, which was not fashionably nostalgic. A young girl of another generation, she probably wouldn’t understand.

  But the soup buns appeared and tasted the same, fresh, steaming hot in the golden bamboo steamers, rich in the combined flavor of the land and river, with the scarlet crab oval so tantalizing in the afternoon light. The soup inside the bun came bursting out at the touch of his lips, the taste so familiarly delicious.

  “According to a gourmet book, the soup in the bun comes from the pork skin jelly mixing with the stuffing. In a steamer over the stove, the jelly turns into hot liquid. You have to bite carefully, or the soup will splash out, scalding your tongue.”

  “You have told me about it,” she said, smiling, nipping gingerly before she sucked the soup.

  “Oh, you brought a bag of them to me during the New World project.”

  “It was a pleasure to serve as your little secretary.”

  “I have to ask you another favor today,” he said. “You are a computer pro, I know. Can you do an Internet search for me?”