Qiu Xiaolong - Shanghai Redemption

“Let me say it again, Director Chen, a filial son like you will be blessed. But you don’t have to worry about the restoration work on your father’s tomb.”

“For the work to be completed in time, however, the farmers might have to work overtime. I understand that this might cost extra, and I want to reassure you that that’ll be fine. Just make sure to give me an itemized list of expenses.”

“To be honest, Director Chen, some of the local farmers might not be pulling their own weight. But I will visit your father’s grave site frequently and keep an eye on the workers for you. I give you my word on it. If you want to stay in Suzhou for a short vacation, there is a lot to see in the ancient city.”

A lot to see in the ancient city -that’s what his father had said when they were in Suzhou many years earlier.

“Thank you, Manager Hong,” Chen said, his tongue suddenly dry. “Time alone will be able to show my gratitude. The blue mountains always stand, the green water flows along the unchanging course.”

Chen’s response sounded like something from a martial arts novel, but his mind had suddenly gone blank, and that was all he could come up with.

He gave Hong his regular cell phone number, which Hong entered into his own cell. Hong then called a taxi for him.

“Where are you staying, Director Chen?”

“It’s a hotel called-” He had not booked a hotel yet, thinking that he could find a cheap one close to the cemetery. But that wouldn’t fit the persona of a high-ranking director. “Southern Garden, I think that’s the name.”

“That’s a nice hotel, the Southern Garden. It’s just about twenty minutes from here. That should be very workable for you.”

Chen said his farewells and walked out of the office to see a taxi driver waiting, arms crossed, a cigarette dangling between his lips.

“Southern Garden Hotel,” Chen said, after settling into the backseat.

“Oh, the Southern Garden, I know it well,” the driver said, nodding. “Years ago, Mao and other top Party leaders used to stay there. It’s a really nice hotel, in the old city section. Most tourists don’t know anything about Suzhou, and they swarm to newly built five-star hotels in the new city section.”

As a result of China’s economic reform, Suzhou had grown into a much larger city. There was now an outer ring called the new city and an inner section called the old city. The hotels in the old city were generally less desirable, with their old buildings and gardens little changed from the old days. Most visitors preferred the recently built high-rise hotels in the new city.

Fifteen minutes later, the taxi pulled up in front of a hotel located on Ten Perfections Street. What “Ten Perfections” referred to, Chen had no idea. Chinese people often believed in the power of certain numbers, and ten happened to be a lucky number.

Chen walked into the hotel, taking stock of the antique-style lobby and the southern-style garden in a sweeping glance. Things seemed to be little changed. The hotel was said to have been built on the site of a Qing dynasty garden, and the original grotto had been kept intact. The room rate was somewhat higher than what Chen had been planning on, but for a couple of days, he could handle it.

In the Ming and Qing dynasties, it was fashionable for the southern literati, when successful, to be Confucianists and to be intent on worldly achievements. When not successful, however, they tended to be Taoists focused on self-cultivation. For the Taoists, the southern-style garden represented a metaphysical landscape as well as a physical one, with the grotto, stream, and bamboo grove all clustered together in imitation of nature.

At the front desk, Chen registered, got his room key, and, just before he turned to go, decided to pick up a train schedule as well. Flipping through it, he saw that there was a Shanghai-bound train leaving Suzhou roughly every twenty minutes. If need be, he could leave Suzhou in the morning and return in the evening.

His room was on the second floor of the main building. It was a cozy, comfortable one, furnished partially in the Qing style. On one wall, there was an impressive row of pictures showing visits of high-ranking Party leaders in the fifties and sixties, eloquently documenting the hotel’s glorious past. The wall opposite displayed a long rice-colored silk scroll of a seventh-century Tang poem copied by a modern calligrapher.

Chen decided to take a short rest and slumped across the bed. The mattress came as a pleasant surprise-it had a foam cushion covering the old-style mattress. Of late, he’d slept badly, and he could use a nap. However, he lay on the bed and tossed restlessly.

There was a strange sound-not loud, but persistent-a tapping against the window. Chen got up and saw that it was a lone twig trembling in the wind, creaking until it finally snapped. It reminded him of a story he’d read long ago.

The work at the cemetery seemed to be off to a decent start. What worried the ex-cop was his inability to do anything in Suzhou that could make a difference in Shanghai.

He pulled out his laptop. The hotel provided free Internet service, so he connected and started surfing the Web. He came across an anecdote marked as the daily top pick. It was written by Jian Hao, a Web-based writer popular in Shanghai, about a lunch of meatball rice on the train.

I was traveling on the high speed train to Beijing. An attendant came by selling meatball rice lunches. “Come on,” he said. “The meat is a joke, I don’t need to tell you that. The balls are made of nothing but flour with a generous pinch of MSG.” Such an unbelievable tone of irony. The attendant was trying to pitch his wares by insisting they were fake. With the story of the dead pigs still so fresh in everybody’s mind, nobody had any appetite for meatballs. Could the attendant be telling the truth? The heart of the matter is that the list of “truths” in China can be too long. It’s not just dead pigs, toxic milk powder, contaminated fish, DDT-sprayed ham, and formalin-whitened shrimp…

I recently heard a joke about the people of Shanghai being blessed… they enjoy pork rib soup every day for free. There are so many things that are beyond imagination in this miraculous country. At the end of a TV soap opera I was watching, a Ming dynasty imperial concubine said to her secret lover, “Why are your brows knitted so deeply? I would love to smooth the lines with an electric iron.” Can you believe that? Still, let us pray that there will be such a miraculous iron to smooth out all of our frowns and worries over a portion of meatball rice.

It was no wonder, Chen thought, that Jian Hao had so many followers online. He really knew how to effectively poke at social realities. Chen stood up and began pacing about the room, liked a cricket jumping in a corked bamboo container. His cell phone rang: it was White Cloud.

She spoke very fast, as if anxious to finish the call. There was some traffic noise in the background.

“Following your instructions, I’m calling from a public phone,” she said. “About what happened at the club, nobody seems to have noticed anything unusual that night. A little disturbance at the Heavenly World is not surprising. But it might be because the people I’ve talked to-who are just girls like me, not the top management-know only a limited amount. I’m still working on it, though, and you can count on me. As for any particular topics that the clubgoers are talking about, you might as well simply check out the hottest topics on the Internet. Some of them that don’t appear at first to be related to the club actually do have a connection. For instance, the notorious Watch Boss Yao. He was said to have spent a night at the club right after the scandal broke, spending time with two top girls in a private room before he committed suicide the next day. Then there is Shang’s wife, who was also seen coming to a party at the club. She was coming to sing, though not necessarily like one of those singing girls, you know-”