Becoming Inspector Chen Read online

  Juqing, a traditional, virtuous woman in the eyes of her neighbors, felt rather uneasy about the two of them staying up there alone. But Dong came up with an excuse, declaring that they were simply developing pictures in the attic. It was true sometimes, but there was also something else he chose to hold back from Juqing.

  Lanlan, like some girls of her age, wanted to have her youthful moments captured in pictures, so she posed in the attic – in scanty dresses, in swimming suits, and in a white bath towel too, her slim body stretching out, like supple clouds gently rolling, dissolving into soft rain.

  ‘Evidence of youth,’ she whispered, her hair brushing his cheek.

  And precious evidence they appeared to be, as a state-run photography studio could have turned those pictures in to the authorities as ‘evidence of decadence’. That made the attic darkroom even more attractive to Lanlan.

  As for Dong, shooting and developing pictures there, with her humming tunes beside him, ‘Youth is like a bird, / it perches, and flies,’ he found the attic a paradise.

  One Saturday afternoon in May, Lanlan called into the Red Dust Public Phone Service, leaving a message through a mobile service woman named Caixiang, who trotted over to a spot underneath Dong’s window and shouted loudly with a battery horn, ‘I’m coming over this evening. The red curtain as usual. Lanlan.’

  Upon getting the message, Dong set out to make the necessary preparations for the evening. He bought used liquid concentrate at a discount from Guanlong Camera on Nanjing Road, having tried the cheap concentrate with acceptable results. On the way, he also purchased a bag of black coffee dregs from Deda Cafe. He had never tried them, but they were said to be still stimulating at a price affordable to him. They might stay up quite late. Coffee could add a romantic touch to the night, breathing aromatics in association with the so-called Western lifestyle.

  Lanlan arrived after dinner. They lost no time climbing up into the tiny attic. With the small window covered, the opening boarded, the two of them felt so secure, yet soon, so hot and stuffy up there.

  Sweating profusely, Dong ended up donning just a beater and boxers. Lanlan still wore the skirt, but shed the blouse, leaving only a tank top on.

  Time really flies on a spring-intoxicated night. Much more so in a secure darkroom, the water rippling in the plastic basin, her bare shoulders gleaming against the shadows on the wall, their hands touching lightly, the red-draped window blushing back at them.

  In spite of the promise made to Juqing that they would never cross the boundary, Dong found it hard to contain himself, being constantly aware of her soft hand meeting his under the aura of the red bulb, caressing the images which began appearing gradually in the papers in the water, like the miracle of their passion. But the spell was shattered all of a sudden by a commotion breaking out downstairs.

  ‘Open up!’

  ‘The police!’

  ‘The neighborhood security!’

  The retractable ladder landed down in haste, and the raiders rushed up helter-skelter. It did not take long for them to turn the whole attic upside down, searching around with the two lovers stunned, huddled up in a corner, he having snatched back on only his pants, and she having mislaid her blouse.

  A highly suspicious scene presented itself there, what with the two in scanty clothing, with the mattress in disarray on the floor, and with the plastic basin occupying the only chair in the semi-darkness.

  A neighborhood security activist put his finger into the water in the basin, questioning its possible purpose. Another activist nicknamed ‘Hunchback Fang’ examined the coffee, sniffing at it like a dog. Finally, an elderly neighborhood cop surnamed Peng noticed the pictures floating in the basin.

  ‘Damn,’ Peng said, glancing at the red bulb, picking up from the basin a picture of the two kissing each other on the Bund, and shaking his head with the picture still dripping. ‘It’s not at all what you thought.’

  Whatever the cop’s comment could have meant, any move taken in the name of the proletarian dictatorship had to appear correct and justified. The fact that the two half-clad young people were caught alone in the attic appeared to be incriminating enough. In spite of the equipment that supported Dong’s statement about their having picture development tools in the attic darkroom, Hunchback Fang exploded.

  ‘What were the two of you really doing up here, with the window covered up, the red light blinking, you in your beater and she in her top? You two are not married yet, are you?’

  The two shuddered at the accusation for which they could have been put into custody in the neighborhood police station. To their surprise, Peng signaled Hunchback Fang and others to leave without any further ado, except that he turned round to put several still-wet pictures into a plastic bag. As evidence, presumably.

  A bunch of damaged pictures left behind stared back at the two lovers left alone in the attic. Because of their exposure to light, most of them were now totally black – like their imaginable future.

  Juqing was heard sobbing inconsolably in the room below.

  In the age of Chairman Mao’s class struggle, a ‘black stain’ like that would never be washed away.

  For days, weeks and months afterward, what had happened in the attic that May night hung over their heads like a sword capable of falling down at any moment. They suspected that their respective companies, having been notified about it, must be working closely with the police bureau to measure out the punishment.

  At the tavern, Dong could barely keep the ladle steady while selling customers the wine. Back at the lane, he felt like a naked rat trying to scurry through the speculations that began enclosing around with barbed wire. Lanlan too fell prey to the continuous trepidation, so nervous that she chose not to step into Red Dust Lane again.

  No matter what the people in the lane might be imagining or gossiping, no one could say for sure what the two were really up to in the attic that night. But irreparable damage had been done, particularly to Lanlan as a young girl. In her neighborhood, not too far away, wild stories surfaced like uncontrollable weeds, spreading over from Red Dust Lane, making any prospective young man hesitate about approaching her in Treasure Garden Lane.

  About three months later, the two young people gave in to the unbearable pressure of uncertainty. They turned in their marriage application to the district civil bureau. It was not so much a move to make themselves a virtuous couple, but a desperate attempt to bring an end to the suspense. If the application was rejected, it meant serious trouble was still in store for them, but at least they would no longer feel suspended like forsaken balloons in the air.

  To their pleasant astonishment, they got the license without any questions at the civil bureau. So the wedding came to be the order of the day for the two of them, a surprise for a lane full of surprises.

  The young couple saw no point in having a grand wedding party in the lane. The neighbors would take it as a belated cover-up anyway. Lanlan simply moved in without as much as a five-minute fanfare of firecrackers under the attic window. It happened to be politically correct, ironically, as the government were re-emphasizing the proletarian lifestyle in the newspapers.

  Juqing delivered a tiny bag of wedding candy in person to Comrade Jun, the head of the neighborhood committee, who readily accepted it with a broad grin. Another reassuring signal to her. Back home that night, she heaved a long sigh of relief while lying in bed listening to the creaking from the attic overhead, where the newlyweds tossed and turned with a tremulous cadence. Like the roar of pebbles, the sleepless, darksome waves kept flinging out and drawing back anew at return, beginning, ceasing, and then again beginning.

  She murmured her late husband’s name in the dark. Perhaps their child could carry his surname again in the not too distant future, she prayed.

  So grateful for Buddha’s blessing, Juqing reverentially lit a bunch of tall incense in front of the clay image, placed a platter of fresh fruit, and kowtowed for more than fifteen minutes before she dug out the picture of he
r late husband, the same black-framed portrait she had held in front of her bosom when walking back into the lane, taking the hand of her son, still a toddler, about twenty years earlier …

  Lanlan turned out to be an exceptionally filial daughter-in-law. She was not only willing to stay in the retrofitted attic with Dong on the same old mattress with no bedframe – though with a new sheet – but to also carry down the chamber pot for cleaning early in the morning, to start the fire on a coal briquette stove out in the lane, and to make breakfast for the family like other good young wives there.

  Despite the lingering stories about the dubious circumstance of the two coming to tie the knot, it did not take long for them to settle down just like other young couples in Red Dust Lane.

  If anything still struck their neighbors as slightly different about the two, it was that their attic window could appear covered with a red curtain once in a while, reminiscent of that eventful night. Thanks to their changed status, however, the neighbors now seemed to consider it quite understandable for the young couple to fancy a bright colored curtain for their shabby attic window.

  Time dripped away, drop by drop, barely noticed by the residents of the lane, just like water from the worn-out public faucet under that occasionally red-curtained window, as if in an unwavering effort to wash away any traces of what had so inexplicably happened that May night.

  Still, the mystery of the red curtain remained.

  ‘Neighborhood cop Peng has retired,’ Old Root concluded in the evening talk of the lane. ‘So no one could explain what really happened that night. But why should we worry about it? Indeed, all’s well that ends well. Juqing is going to be a grandma soon. And Dong has recently had some pictures of his on display in an exhibition.’

  FOUR

  Waking up again in the increasingly surreal night, Chen blinked his eyes in the dark, with the remnants of the dream still blurring in a swirl …

  He is receiving a grand poetry prize on the brightly lit stage of a prestigious library, reading a poem from his newly released collection:

  Master Zhuang awakes

  wondering if it is he who dreamed

  of being a butterfly, or if it is

  butterfly that dreams of being

  Master Zhuang—

  The reading is abruptly disrupted, however, by droves of red-armbanded Rebels and Red Guards, who burst in like crazy, tearing and burning books, beating and kicking at the audience, singing and chanting the thunderous Cultural Revolution songs …

  The next moment, he finds himself still standing on the stage, but turning into his father, a target of the revolutionary mass criticism during the Cultural Revolution, drowning in the angry waves of the slogans the Red Guards are shouting, his head bent low with a large blackboard hung around his neck declaring: ‘Down with the counter-revolutionary poet in the frenzied attacks against the Party government …’

  For several seconds, he failed to shake off the feeling of the nagging nightmare. It was an uncanny night of repeatedly broken sleep, invaded with one foreboding dream scene after another. Was this the third or fourth time that he had woken up in a startle in the attic?

  For some unknown reason, he wanted to grapple with the question implied in the dream.

  The poem had probably been inspired by a fable from Master Zhuang, a celebrated Taoist philosopher in ancient China. The metaphysical reflection about the interchangeable identities of the man waking under the ash tree and the butterfly soaring in the sunlight, as it seemed to Chen, posed a modernist or postmodernist question.

  To put it simply, what was one meant to be?

  For so many years, that had not even been considered as a question in China. Each and every person is nothing but ‘a screw fixed on the socialist state machine’, as declared by the Communist role model Comrade Lei Feng.

  This was the pervading view, with the possible exception of one short period, perhaps, when some young people questioned the political correctness of being a selfless screw at the disposal of the Party. After the ending of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the official newspapers started talking about the ‘liberation of the mind’, though only in a very limited way. It coincided with Chen’s enrolment at Beijing Foreign Language University in 1977, through the first college entrance examination restored after the Cultural Revolution. Like other young people at the time, he was so infused with the idealistic enthusiasm for China’s reform that he too started dreaming of self-realization, a term newly introduced into the Chinese language. A professor at the Beijing university discussed his future plans after graduation, and encouraged him to pursue a literary career, which he would be able to wholeheartedly embrace, he believed, in the post-Cultural Revolution China.

  So Chen started writing and translating poems, and before long he became known for his modernist style in a small circle. But just as in a Song dynasty poem written by Xin Qiji – ‘Again, the spring leaves / so soon, unable to sustain / the wind and rain any longer’ – the real splendor of the spring lasts only for a short period of time.

  In existentialism, self-realization comes through making one’s choices and taking the consequences. In China, however, it was not up to him to make the choices. On the contrary, the choices were pushed onto him.

  And what was worse, one’s identity or being could always be changed with the changes in China’s political discourse. ‘Being is an empty fiction,’ as Nietzsche put it – like the poet, like the chief inspector …

  But he hastened to channel his thoughts away from abstract ruminations. Sitting up, he resisted the temptation for another cigarette.

  Still, how had he come to the dream of reading the poem on the stage prior to turning into a target for the proletarian denunciation? The first part of the dream was not difficult to interpret. But could the second part have reflected his anxiety about his fall from favor in the Party system? Not a poet, nor a chief inspector, but a target of the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ like his father in an earlier dream of the night. It was not unimaginable. The slogans of the Cultural Revolution kept echoing in the present-day China. In fact, more and more people were talking about the possibility of a second Cultural Revolution.

  And what could he hope to accomplish by going to the lane the next morning? With the persecution and punishment of dissidents – even on the Internet – taken for granted as a part and parcel of the socialism of China’s characteristics, there was hardly anything he could do, whether as a cop or as a poet.

  After all, he knew so little about the case. About the netizen in Red Dust Lane either. Nothing for him to work on. Like in an old Chinese saying, no matter how capable a chef proves to be, he cannot make a meal without rice.

  There came another burst of the dog’s barking in the night, hollowly, as if from a dungeon.

  Struck by an idea flashing out of nowhere, he stood up under the attic ceiling, which seemed oppressing, crashing down on him like an unanswerable question, and moved over to the pants draped over the back of the chair.

  When he had left Peiqin’s restaurant earlier that night, she had handed him a new menu, smiling like the gracious proprietor she was, asking him to read it in leisure back home. He’d stuffed the menu in his pocket, thinking he knew all the specials at her place.

  Now on the back of the restaurant menu he could see something like a web link written in pencil.

  ‘Thoughtful Peiqin,’ he murmured in a rush of gratitude.

  Compared to her husband Detective Yu, Peiqin knew much more about how to gather information online. The link must have a bearing to the poem in question or the netizen in Red Dust Lane.

  He typed the link into his cellphone, but the screen showed a post already blocked out with a red warning sign: It violates the governmental regulations. Forbidden access.

  It did not explain which governmental regulations the post violated. For a case that had prompted both Webcops and Internal Security into action, the post must have been instantly blocked, whether it was a poem or not.

/>   Still nothing for him to work on regarding the case, then, without it being assigned to him, and without any clues, either. So was he not meant to be a cop or a poet after all?

  ‘But you are meant to be a poet.’ What a dear friend had once said to him came to mind – probably because of the ironic coincidence that, for tonight, he could not even have access to a poem posted online. Still, he remembered so vividly the way she had said those words to him, smiling a shy smile like the water lily in a breeze, with the White Pagoda of the North Sea Park shimmering against the approaching dusk.

  The pagoda was still standing there, but those idealistic days in her company had been so short. Before he could even choose to do anything for ‘self-realization’, he was state-assigned as a college graduate to the Shanghai Police Bureau. Period.

  So, with the memories shored against the doom drawing nearer, how could there be any choice except to do what he was expected to do?

  In the Imperial Shadow of Beijing Library

  It was an early summer morning at the beginning of the 1980s when Chen parked his bike in the parking lot of the Beijing Library.

  He felt exhilarated at the idea of another day in the midst of books. With the Cultural Revolution ending in a whimper, he had passed the restored college entrance examination with the highest score in English – thanks to his studies at Bund Park – and entered the Beijing Foreign Language University. Like other young idealistic people passionate about China’s unprecedented reform, he believed he saw his own future in the dramatically changing country.

  At the reception hall of the library, he put down the information on his book request slip as always, added the time and date, and slid it across the counter to a young vivacious librarian named Ling, who reached out for it with a smile, her fingers lightly brushing his as if by accident.