by Unknown
The Forbidden City, strictly speaking, referred to the palace compound, including the court, various imperial halls, offices, and living quarters, but just beyond the palace, there were royal gardens and other imperial complexes no less forbidden to the ordinary people. After the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, the palace proper was turned into a museum, with various exhibition halls displaying the splendors of the imperial dynasties.
The palace was apparently too huge for a museum. So booths appeared in the courtyards, along the trails, and at the corners. Absent-mindedly, he bought a stick of sugar-glazed hawthorn, a Beijing street food speciality. It tasted surprisingly sour.
He began to be aware of a subtle effect the imperial surroundings were having on him. A self-contained world of divine sublimity, where an emperor couldn’t have helped seeing himself as the son of the heaven, high above the people, a godly ruler endowed with the sacred mandate and mission for him alone. Consequently, no ethics or rules whatsoever could possibly apply to him.
So for Mao, the anti-Rightist movement, the Three Red Banners, and the Cultural Revolution — all those political movements that had cost millions and millions of Chinese people’s lives — might have been nothing more than what was necessary for an emperor to consolidate his power, at least in his imagination within the high walls of the Forbidden City…
Instead of stepping into any of the imperial exhibition rooms, Chen kept walking straight ahead. That morning, he was the only such determined passerby there.
Soon, he walked through the museum’s back gate, from which he then glimpsed the tip of the White Pagoda in the North Sea Park.
NINETEEN
FANGSHAN RESTAURANT, WHICH CHEN had chosen for the lunch meeting with Diao, was in the North Sea Park, originally an outside imperial garden attached to the Forbidden City, celebrated for its imperial history.
The restaurant choice was also made for a personal reason. During his college years, Chen had talked to Ling about having lunch there. They had never done so, as it had been far beyond his means.
There was still about half an hour before the appointment time. So he took a leisurely walk along the lake. In spite of the park’s name, there was no sea, only a man-made lake, which was exaggerated for the sake of the emperor. Still, it was a fantastic park in the center of the city, adjacent to the Beijing Library, where Ling had once worked, and with the silhouette of the White Pagoda shimmering behind.
He made his way toward a small bridge that he remembered from years before. Cutting across a corner, he saw an arts-and-crafts boutique store embosomed in the summer foliage. He stepped in, but things were too expensive inside. In the evening, he might have some time for a visit to Xidan Department Store to choose a present.
Then the bridge came into view. There, a young girl stood leaning against the railing, gazing out to the verdant mountains in the distance, a pigeon whistle buzzing in the air. He was overwhelmed with a sense of déjà vu. The heart-breaking spring ripple / still so green under the bridge, / the ripples that reflected her arrival / light-footed, in such beauty / as would shame a wild goose into fleeing.
One afternoon, in his last years of college, Ling had arranged to meet him here with some books he had requested. He was delayed at school, and she must have been waiting for a long time. Hurrying over, he saw her standing on the muddy planks of a little bridge, resting one foot lightly on the railing, scratching her ankle, her face framed by wind-tangled hair. The scene was inexplicably touching: it was as if she was merging into a backdrop of willow catkins, which symbolized ill-fated beauty in Tang-dynasty poetry.
Whether the scene of the willow catkins had foreshadowed their relationship, no one could tell. But it wasn’t time for nostalgia, he told himself, heading back in the direction of the restaurant.
Fangshan presented an ancient-looking front. In a quiet flagstone courtyard, a waitress dressed like a Qing palace lady came up and led him to a private room. What struck him first was the ubiquitous yellow color — the color exclusively for the royal family. Against the yellow-painted walls, the table was set up with an apricot-colored tablecloth and gilt chopsticks, and behind him, an old cabinet elaborately embossed with golden dragons. Sitting by the window, he opened the briefcase and took out the information he had about Diao.
Diao was a newcomer on the literary scene — a middle school teacher up until his retirement, with no publications whatsoever to his credit until he suddenly produced his bestseller, Cloud and Rain in Shanghai. That practically ruled out the possibility that Diao would recognize Chen. The former wasn’t a member of the Writers’ Association, and they couldn’t have met before. The chief inspector should be able to play a role similar to the one he had at Xie Mansion.
People attributed the success of Cloud and Rain in Shanghai to its subject matter, but nonetheless it bespoke of the author’s ingenuity. Chen had read the book, impressed by the subtle balance between the stated and the unstated in the text.
At two or three minutes before one, the waitress led in a gray-haired man of medium build, with a deeply furrowed forehead and beady eyes, wearing a black T-shirt, white pants, and shiny dress shoes.
“You must be Mr. Diao,” Chen said, rising from the table. “Yes, I’m Diao.”
“Oh, it’s a great honor to meet you. I’m Chen. Your book, Cloud and Rain in Shanghai, is such a big bestseller.”
“Thank you for your invitation to lunch. This is an imperial restaurant, really expensive, and I’ve only heard about it before.”
“I was a student in Beijing years ago, and I would dream of coming here. So it’s for the sake of nostalgia as well.”
“That’s not a bad reason,” Diao said with a grin, showing cigarette-stained teeth. “Don’t you remember a line by our great leader Chairman Mao? ‘Six hundred million people are all Sun and Yao, great emperors.’ Poetic hyperbole, to be sure, but Mao’s right about one thing. People are interested in being emperors, or being like emperors.”
“You are absolutely right.”
“It explains the popularity of the restaurant. People come not only for the food, but for the imperial association too. For a short moment, they can imagine themselves being an emperor.”
That might have also been true for Shang — she might have enjoyed imagining herself as an emperor’s woman. Chen raised his cup, making no comment.
The waitress approached and offered them a small platter of dainty, golden ououtou, steamed buns usually made of maize. The ones Chen remembered from his college years had been somber in color, hard to swallow. These looked very different.
“It’s made from a special green bean,” the waitress said, reading his surprise. “Super delicious. The Empress Dowager’s favorite.”
“Great, we’ll try that,” Chen said. “Recommend some other specials to us.”
“For the private room, there is a minimum charge of one thousand yuan. You have to spend at least that amount anyway. So let me recommend an exquisite meal of light delicacies. All small dishes, about twenty of them — the Empress Dowager’s way. That was the minimum for one meal for her too. To begin with, the live fish from the Central South Sea steamed with tender ginger and green onion.”
“That’s good,” Chen said. No one would miss the association between the Forbidden City and Central South Sea.
“What else?” Diao asked for the first time.
“The roast Beijing duck, of course.”
“Duck from the palace?”
“Genuine Beijing ducks. Specially fed, six to eight months old. Most restaurants now cook with an electric oven. We stick to the traditional wood-burning oven, and we use not just any firewood, but a special pine wood so the flavor penetrates deep into the texture of the meat. It was unique practice used only for the emperors,” she said with pride in her voice. “Oh, our chefs follow the tradition of blowing up the duck with their mouths and sewing up its ass before placing it into the oven.”
“Wow, so much to learn about a duck,” Diao exclaim
ed.
“We offer the celebrated five ways of eating a duck: crisp duck skin slices wrapped in pancake, duck meat slices fried with green garlic, duck feet immersed in wine, duck gizzard stir-fried with green vegetables, and duck soup, but the soup takes about two hours before it turns creamy white.”
“That’s fine. I mean the soup,” Chen said. “Take your time with the soup. Bring up whatever specials you think are the restaurant’s best. Today, it is for a great writer.”
“You overwhelm me with your generosity,” Diao said.
“As a businessman, I’ve made a bunch of money, but so what? In a hundred years, will the money still be mine? Indeed, as our grand master Old Du said, literature alone lasts for thousands of autumns. It’s proper and right for a novice like me to buy a meal for a master like you.”
Chen’s speech echoed one by Ouyang, a friend Chen had met in Guangzhou. An amateur poet yet a successful businessman, Ouyang had made a similar statement over a dim sum meal.
As far as nonfiction was concerned, however, Chen was legitimately a novice, so he could in fact learn something from Diao.
“Your book was a huge success,” Chen went on. “Please tell me how you came to write it?”
“I was a middle school teacher all my life. As a rule, I would start my class by quoting proverbs. Now, for a proverb to be passed on from generation to generation, there must be something in it — something in our culture. One day, I quoted a proverb — hongyan baoming — a beauty’s fate is so thin. When my students pressed me for an example, I thought about the tragic fate of Shang. Eventually, I started contemplating a book project, but I hesitated to focus on Shang, for the reasons you might guess. In the process of researching it, I learned about the equally tragic fate of her daughter, Qian. Something clicked in my mind. That’s how I came to write it.”
“That’s fantastic,” Chen said. “You must have done a lot of research on Shang.”
“Some, but not a lot.”
“It’s like a book behind a book. In the lines about the daughter, people may read the story of the mother.”
“Readers read from their own perspectives, but it’s a book about Qian.”
“So tell me more about the story behind the story. I’m fascinated by the real details.”
“What cannot be said must pass over in silence,” Diao responded guardedly. “What’s true and what’s not? You like the Dream of the Red Chamber, so you must remember the famous couplet on the arch gate of the Grand Illusion — ‘When the true is false, the false is true. / Where there is nothing, there is everything.’ ”
As Chen anticipated, Diao wasn’t willing to speak freely to a stranger, not even to just admit that it was a true story, despite the lunch at Fangshan.
“People of my generation have heard all sorts of stories from those years,” Diao went on, taking a sip at the tea. “As long as the official archive remains sealed to the public, we may never be able to tell whether a story is true or not.”
“But you must have gathered more information than you used in the book.”
“I put in only what I considered reliable.”
“Still, you must have interviewed a lot of people.”
Diao didn’t respond. A speaker outside started playing a song from the popular TV series Romance of Three Kingdoms. “How many times, the sinking sun red, / a white-haired man angles, alone, in the river / rippling with stories from time immemorial … ” The TV series was based on the historic novel about the vicissitudes of the emperors and would-be-emperors in the third century, and the author ended the novel with a poem from the perspective of an old fisherman.
“Remember the poem titled ‘Snow’ by Mao?” Diao asked instead.
“Yes, particularly the second stanza. ‘The rivers and mountains so enchanting / made countless heroes bow in homage. / Alas, the First Emperor of the Qin and the Emperor Wu of the Han / were lacking in literary grace; / Emperor Tai of the Tang, and the Emperor Tai of the Song / had not enough poetry at heart; / Genghis Khan, / the proud son of Heaven for his generation, / knew only shooting eagle, bow outstretched. / All are past and gone! / To look for the really heroic, / you have to count on today.’ ”
The return of the waitress interrupted their talk. She placed a large platter on the table. “The live fish from the Central South Sea.”
“I had to distinguish between what would be publishable, and what wouldn’t,” Diao resumed after helping himself to a large fish filet.
“Tell me about your background research then.”
“What’s the point? It’s nothing but knocking upon one door after another. Let’s enjoy our meal. To be honest with you, I’m a budget gourmet.”
“Come on. The meal is nothing for a bestselling author like you. That’s why I decided to quit my business.”
“You keep talking about my book as a bestseller. A lot were sold, that’s true, but I got very little for myself.”
“That’s unbelievable, Mr. Diao.”
“Don’t dream of making money by writing books. For that, you’d better stick to your business. If it would help, I might as well tell you how much I’ve made. Less than five thousand yuan. According to the editor, he took a great risk with an initial printing of five thousand copies.”
“But what about the second and third printing? There must have been more than ten printings for your book.”
“There is never even a second printing. As soon as there is buzz on a book, pirated copies come into the market, and you don’t get a single penny.”
“What a shame! Only five thousand yuan,” Chen said. Some of his more lucrative translation projects had paid him as much, for only ten pages or so, though he knew he had gotten the project because he was chief inspector. He glanced at his leather briefcase. It contained a sum of at least five thousand yuan — which he brought to buy a wedding present for Ling. But he had been having second thoughts about it after watching her leave in that luxurious limousine last night. It might be a large sum for him, but it was nothing to her.
He picked up the briefcase, snapped it open, and took out an envelope. “A small ‘red envelope’ of about five thousand yuan, Mr. Diao. Far from enough to show my respect, it is only a token of my admiration.”
It was a bulging envelope, unsealed, with a hundred-yuan bill peeping, which bore a portrait of Mao, declaring as the supreme Party leader to China, “The poorer, the more revolutionary.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Chen?”
“To tell the truth, I’m interested in writing something about Shang, publishable or not. So the envelope is in compensation for your invaluable information. For a businessman like me, it’s an investment, but it also shows my respect for you.”
“An old man like me, Mr. Chen, doesn’t have anything to brag about, but I think I can size up a man well. whatever you are up to, you aren’t after money.”
“whatever you tell me is not black or white. Nor will anyone be able to prove it’s from you, Mr. Diao. Outside of this room, you may say you have never met me.”
“Not that I was so unwilling to tell you the story about Shang, Mr. Chen,” Diao said, draining the cup, “but what I gathered could be just hearsay. You can’t take it literally.”
“I understand. I’m not a cop, so I don’t have to base every sentence on hard facts.”
“I didn’t write the book about Shang, but that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be written. In ten or fifteen years, aspects of the Cultural Revolution may be totally forgotten. Oh, you’re not recording our talk, are you?”
“No, I’m not.” Chen opened the briefcase again, showing the contents.
“I trust you. So where shall I begin?” Diao went on, barely waiting for an answer. “Well, I won’t beat about the bush. About Shang: believe it or not, I happened to know a peddler, whose fish booth was crushed by her body falling out of a fifth-story window —”
The roast Beijing duck arrived with the waitress as well as a white-clad and -capped duck chef, who peeled th
e crisp duck skin in front of their table with a flourish.
“The slices of crispy duck skin, wrapped in the paper-thin pancake with the special sauce and green onion was the Empress Dowager’s favorite,” the waitress said. “As for this one special dish of fried duck tongues mantled with red peppers like maple-covered hills, can you guess how many ducks?”
“Can I ask you a favor?” Chen said to her. “All of these are fantastic, but can you serve the rest of them together? We are just beginning an important talk.”
“I’ll let our chef know,” she said, bowing low like a Manchurian girl before she headed to the door. “You go ahead.”
TWENTY
“NOW, BACK TO THE story,” Chen said. “You were just talking about the end of Shang’s life, about the fishmonger.”
“Oh yes, he was indeed a talkative monger, giving a vivid description of her death scene, though I wonder how he could remember those details after so many years.”
“Did Shang die instantly?”
“No, she didn’t. She said a few words before she lost consciousness.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she lived on the fifth floor.”
“What could that mean?”
“He had no clue,” Diao said reflectively, picking a tiny fishbone out from between his teeth. “Did she want to draw attention to her room on the fifth floor? She could have been tortured or pushed out of the window. Did she want people to call for an ambulance, using the phone in the room? In those days, there was only one public phone station in the neighborhood. What went through her mind in her last moments, no one can say.”
“What then?”
“Well, she was so ‘black,’ people avoided her like the plague while she lay there. No one did anything except for watching and finger-pointing. A couple of red-armbanded men then rushed out of the building, speaking in a Beijing accent —”
