A Loyal Character Dancer

by Qiu Xiaolong

  He wondered why Wen had not returned to Shanghai like so many others. Many educated youths who had married got divorced so they could return home. In those years of absurdities, one had to do even more absurd things to survive. It would be difficult for people to comprehend nowadays, even for Chief Inspector Chen who, though only a few years younger, had not been to the countryside.

  “Attention, it is the time for the night meal. Passengers who want to have a night snack please go to compartment six.” A husky-voiced woman started reading an announcement over the train loudspeaker. “For tonight, there are fried rice cakes with pork, dumplings with Qicai stuffing, and noodles with mushrooms. We also serve beer and wine.”

  He took out a package of instant noodles, poured water from the train thermos bottle into an enamel cup, and soaked the noodles in it. The water was not hot enough. It took several minutes for the noodles to soften. He also had a smoked carp head in a plastic bag. which Peiqin had prepared for him. But Detective Yu’s mood did not improve. This assignment was practically a joke. It was as if the Shanghai police were going to try to cook in the kitchen of the Fujian police bureau. How could a Shanghai cop, single-handed, make a difference when the Fujian police had failed? Their having been given command of the Wen investigation did not make sense unless it was simply a show for the Americans. He poked the staring eye out of the smoked carp head.

  Around three in the morning, Yu dozed off, sitting up stiff and tight like a bamboo stick, his head bumping against the hard seat back.

  When the sun glaring in his face woke him, the aisle was full of people waiting for their turn to wash up in the restroom. According to the announcement from the train loudspeaker, Fujian was close.

  As a result of sitting up all night, his neck felt sore, his shoulders strained, and his legs numb. He shook his head at his reflection in the train window. A middle-aged man, his chin unshaven, his face etched with travel fatigue. No longer a tireless educated youth, sitting with Peiqin in the train to Yunnan.

  Another result of traveling “hard seat” was that it took him five minutes at the Fujian railway station to locate a man holding a cardboard sign with his name on it. Sergeant Zhao Youli, of the Fujian Police, must have been looking for his Shanghai counterpart among the travelers stepping out of the soft sleeper compartments. Zhao had a chubby face, beady eyes, well-moussed hair, and wore an expensive white suit, a red silk tie, and well-shined dress shoes. His eyes narrowed into smiling slits at the sight of Yu.

  “Welcome, Detective Yu. I’m assigned to work with you on the case.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant Zhao.”

  “I was looking for you over there,” Zhao said.

  “The sleeper tickets were sold out,” Yu fibbed, growing self-conscious about his appearance. In his old Renli jacket, his pants all wrinkled after a night’s travel, he looked like a bodyguard rather than the partner of the well-groomed Zhao. “Are there any new developments, Sergeant Zhao?”

  “No. We’ve been looking everywhere for Wen. No success. The case is a top priority for us. I’m so glad you’ve come all the way from Shanghai to help.”

  Yu caught the suggestion of sarcasm in Zhao’s voice. “Come on, Sergeant Zhao. You don’t have to say that. I don’t know anything about the case. In fact, I don’t know why I am here. It is by order of the Ministry.”

  The truth was that Yu did not expect to accomplish anything. Either his mission was simply political window-dressing or Wen had been kidnapped by Jia’s Fujian accomplices. If the latter was the case, the search for Wen would be like fishing in the woods unless the local cops were determined to crack down on the gangsters.

  “Well, ‘The monk from a far-away temple can recite scripture more loudly’,” Zhao said, smoothing his shining hair with his hand.

  “If it is in Fujian dialect, I don’t speak a single word of it. I cannot even ask for directions here,” Yu said. “So you will have to take me to Changle Village.”

  “Why in such a hurry, Detective Yu? Let me take you to the hotel first-the Abundance Hotel. You’ve had a long night in the train. Take a break, have lunch with me, and then come to our county police bureau. There we will have a good discussion, and a reception dinner-”

  “Well…” Yu was astonished at his local partner’s lack of urgency. “I slept quite well on the train. Chief Inspector Chen will be waiting for my interview tapes.”

  They set out for Changle Village. Driving along a bumpy road, Zhao managed to make a brief report about the gang known as the Flying Axes.

  This society had been founded in the late Qing dynasty in the Fujian area as a secret brotherhood, with a wide range of “business practices,” including illegal salt distribution, drug trafficking, loan collection, protection, gambling and prostitution. These activities expanded in spite of the various governments’ containment efforts, though the triad remained a local one. The gang was suppressed after 1949 under the communist government and some of the leading members were executed because of their connections to the Nationalists. In the last few years, however, the gang had staged a comeback. The human smuggling business was headed by Taiwan snake heads such as Jia Xinzhi, but the Fujian triad’s role was essential. An illegal immigrant promised to pay the smugglers in installments. At first, the Flying Axes’ role was to make sure that the payments were made on time. Then they became involved in the other aspects of the operation, such as recruiting people to go overseas.

  Yu said, “Can you tell me more about Wen’s disappearance?”

  So Zhao went on to tell Yu about the work the Fujian police had done so far.

  On the morning of April sixth, Zhao went to visit Wen for verification of her passport application. The Fujian police had been informed that an American officer was coming for Wen, so they were trying to speed things up. Wen was not at home. Nor was she at the commune factory. Zhao went there again in the afternoon, but still he had no luck. The next morning, he came to Changle with another policeman. The door to her house was locked. According to her neighbors, Wen had never before gone away for a whole day. She had to work in the commune factory, to take care of the family plot, and to feed the chickens and piglets. They looked into the pigsty, where the starving animals could hardly stand on their legs. So they decided to enter the house after checking for signs of forced entry. There were none, nor any sign of a struggle inside. They started canvassing the village, knocking at one door after another. Wen had last been seen there around 10:45 p.m. on April fifth, as she fetched water from the village well. By the afternoon of April seventh, they were sure that something had happened to her.

  The local police had searched the neighboring villages, as well as hotels within the radius of a hundred miles. They also made inquiries at the bus depot. Only one bus had passed the village that night. So far, all their efforts had yielded nothing.

  “It’s beyond us,” Zhao concluded. “Her disappearance is a mystery.”

  “What about the possibility of the Flying Axes kidnapping her?”

  “That’s not likely. Nothing unusual was noted in the village that night. She would have shouted or struggled, and someone would have heard. You will see for yourself in a minute.”

  It took them another fifteen minutes, however, before the village came in view. There was a striking discrepancy between the kinds of houses clustered there. Some were new, modern, substantial, like mansions in the best area of Shanghai, but others were old, shabby, and small.

  “It’s like two different worlds here,” Yu observed.

  “Exactly,” Zhao said. “There’s a huge gap between households with people abroad and those without. All these new houses have been built with money sent from overseas.”

  “It’s amazing. These new houses would be worth millions in Shanghai.”

  “Let me give you some numbers, Detective Yu. A peasant’s yearly income here is around three thousand Yuan, and that depends on the weather. Someone in New York can earn that sum in a week-living, eating, sleeping in a restaurant,
and getting paid all in cash. One year’s savings there is enough to pay for a two-story house here, full of new furniture and appliances, too. How can families without people abroad compete? They have to remain huddled in those ancient huts, in the shadow of the upstarts.”

  “Yes, you cannot do everything with money,” Yu said, echoing the line from a new movie, “but you cannot do anything without it.”

  “The only way for the poor to turn the tables is to go abroad, too. Otherwise, they will be viewed as foolish, lazy, or incompetent. It’s a vicious cycle. So more and more people leave.”

  “Did Feng leave for the same reason?”

  “That must have been one of his reasons.”

  They came to Wen’s house. An old one, probably built as early as the turn of century, though not small, with a front yard, a backyard, and a pigsty. It looked extremely shabby compared to the improved standard of the village housing. The door was locked from the outside with a brass padlock. Zhao opened it by inserting a small knife into the lock. In the deserted front yard, Yu saw two baskets of empty wine bottles in a corner.

  “Feng drank a lot,” Zhao said. “Wen collected the bottles to sell.”

  They examined the yard walls, the tops of which were covered in dust, but found no traces of anyone having climbed over.

  “Have you found anything suspicious among the things she left behind?” Yu asked as they moved inside.

  “Well, there’s not much left behind.”

  Not much in the way of furniture anyway, Yu observed, taking out his notebook. The living room appeared inconsolably bare. A ramshackle table with two wooden benches were all he could see. There was, however, a basket of cans and plastic packages under the table. One of the packages bore a danger-inflammable notice. Whatever it was, it did not appear to be something people would normally keep in the living room.

  “What’s that?”

  “The material Wen used for her work,” Zhao explained.

  “What sort of work did she do at home?”

  “What she did at the commune factory was simple. She worked with a sort of chemical abrasive. She dipped her fingers in it and rubbed the precision parts until they were smooth, like a human grinder. Folks here earn according to the number of products completed, piecework. To earn a few more Yuan in the evenings, she brought the chemicals and parts home.”

  They went into the bedroom. The bed was huge and old with a carved design on the headboard. There was also a chest displaying the same craftsmanship. Most of the drawers contained rags, old clothes, and other useless stuff. One drawer was packed with a child’s clothes and shoes, probably her dead son’s. In another, Yu found a photo album with some pictures of Wen taken in high school.

  One showed Wen at the Shanghai railway station, leaning out of the train window, waving her hand at the people on the platform who were undoubtedly singing and shouting revolutionary slogans. This was a familiar scene to Yu, who had seen Peiqin reaching out, waving to her family on the same platform. He put several pictures in his notebook. “Did Wen have any recent photos?”

  “The only recent one is her passport picture.”

  “Not even a wedding picture?”

  “No.”

  That was strange, Yu thought. In Yunnan, though they had not applied for their marriage certificate for fear of jeopardizing their chances of being allowed to return to Shanghai, Peiqin had made a point of having their picture taken in a standard bride-and-bridegroom pose. Now, years later, Peiqin would still refer to it as their wedding picture.

  The bottom drawer of the chest contained a few children’s books, a dictionary, a piece of old newspaper dated several months earlier, a copy of The Dream of the Red Chamber reprinted before the Cultural Revolution, an anthology of the best poems of 1988-

  “A 1988 poetry collection,” Yu said, turning toward Zhao. “Isn’t this out of place here?”

  “Oh, I thought so too,” Zhao took it. “But do you see the paper embroidery designs kept between the pages? Village folks use books for that purpose.”

  “Yes, my mother used to do that too. So the designs would not get crumpled.” Yu leafed through the volume. No signature. Nor was Wen’s name mentioned in the table of contents.

  “Do you want to send it to your poetic chief inspector?”

  “No, I don’t think he has time for poetry right now.” Nevertheless, Yu made a note of it. “Oh, you mentioned her work in a commune factory. The commune system was abolished several years ago.”

  “That’s true. People are just used to calling it the commune factory.”

  “Can we go there today?”

  “The manager is away in Guangzhou. I will arrange a meeting for you as soon as he comes back.”

  After they finished examining Wen’s house, they went to the village committee office. The village head was not in. An old woman in her eighties recognized Zhao and made tea for them. Yu telephoned the Shanghai Police Bureau but Chief Inspector Chen was not in either.

  It was about lunchtime. Zhao did not refer to his reception plan again. They walked over to a noodles booth-a coal stove and several pots in front of a shabby house. While waiting for their fish ball noodles, Yu turned around to look at the rice paddy behind them.

  Most of the farmers in the rice paddy were young or middle-aged women, working with their hair bundled up in white towels and their trouser bottoms rolled up high.

  “This is another sign,” Zhao said, as if reading Yu’s thoughts. “This village is typical of the area. About two-thirds of the families have their men abroad. If not, it is like a stigma for that family. So there are practically no young or middle-aged men, and only their wives are left to work in the fields.”

  “But how long will those wives be left behind?”

  “At least seven or eight years, until their husbands get legal status abroad.”

  After lunch, Zhao suggested a few families to start interviewing. Three hours later, however, Yu realized they would probably not get anything new or useful. Whenever they touched on the topics of human smuggling or gang activities, inevitably their questions were met with silence.

  As for Wen, her neighbors shared an unexplained antipathy. According to them, Wen had kept to herself all those years. They still referred to her as the city woman or the educated youth, though she worked harder than most of the local wives. Normally Wen went to the commune factory in the morning, took care of the family plot in the late afternoon, and then finger-polished those parts she’d brought home at night. Always on the run, her head lowered, Wen had little time or desire to talk to others. As interpreted by Lou, her next-door neighbor, Wen must have been ashamed of Feng, the evil embodiment of the Cultural Revolution. Due to her lack of contacts with others, no one seemed to have noticed anything unusual about her on April fifth.

  “That’s my impression, too,” Zhao said. “She seems to have remained an outsider here all these years.”

  Wen might have shut herself up right after her marriage, Yu thought, but twenty years was a long time. The fourth interviewee on their list was a woman surnamed Dong in the house opposite Wen’s.

  “Her only son left with Feng on the same ship, The Golden Hope, but he has not contacted home since,” Zhao said before knocking at the door.

  The person who opened the door for them was a small, white-haired woman with a weatherbeaten, deeply lined face. She stood in the doorway without inviting them in.

  “Comrade Dong, we are conducting an investigation into Wen’s disappearance,” Yu said. “Do you have any information about her, specifically with respect to the night of April fifth?”

  “Information about that woman? Let me tell you something. He’s a white-eyed wolf, and she’s a jade-faced bitch. Now they’re both in trouble, aren’t they? It serves them right.” Dong drew her lips into a thin, angry line and shut the door in their faces.

  Yu turned to Zhao in puzzlement.

  “Let’s move on,” Zhao said. “Dong believes Feng influenced her son to leave ho
me. He’s only eighteen. That’s why she calls him a white-eyed wolf-the most cruel one.”

  “Why should Dong call Wen a jade-faced bitch?”

  “Feng divorced his first wife to marry Wen. She was a knockout when she first arrived. Locals tell all kinds of stories about the marriage.”

  “Another question. How could Dong have learned that Feng’s in trouble?”

  “I don’t know.” Zhao’s eyes did not meet Yu’s. “People here have relatives or friends in New York. Or they must have heard something after Wen’s disappearance.”

  “I see.” Yu did not really see, but he did not think it appropriate to push the matter further at the moment.

  Yu tried to shake off the feeling that there might be something else behind Sergeant Zhao’s vagueness. Sending a cop from Shanghai could be taken as a rebuke to the police in Fujian. That he found himself working with an unenthusiastic partner and unfriendly people was not much of a surprise to him, though. Most of his assignments with Chief Inspector Chen had been anything but pleasant.

  He doubted whether Chen’s work was going to be easier in Shanghai. It might appear so to others-the Peace Hotel, an unlimited budget, and an attractive American partner, but Yu knew better. Lighting another cigarette, he thought he would have said a definite no to Party Secretary Li. Because this job was not one for a cop. And that, perhaps, was why he would never become a chief inspector.

  When they finished their interviews for the day, the village committee office had closed. There was no public phone service in the village. At Zhao’s suggestion, they were about to set off for the hotel, a twenty-minute walk. As they reached the outskirts of the village, Yu approached an old man repairing a bicycle tire under a weatherbeaten sign. “Do you know anybody with a home phone here?”