Qiu Xiaolong - Enigma of China

“I’ve got it, Master Chen,” Young Bao said breathlessly. “And something more-hopefully, something that will surprise you.”

Lianping was waiting for Chen in an elegant private room at a high-end restaurant he had suggested. It seemed to her to be quite new. It was near the front entrance of Bund Park, and the window of the second-floor room overlooked a panorama of ships coming and going along the distant Wusongkou, the East China Sea.

Her mind was in a turmoil. So much had happened the last few days, and it was as if it had happened to somebody else. She thought back on all of it in disbelief.

But one thing proved that it really had happened-the dazzling diamond ring on her finger. Xiang had proposed, and she had accepted. He’d put the ring on her finger without waiting for a response. She hadn’t taken it off.

She didn’t know what to say to Chen, but she had to tell him about her decision. She owed it to him, and for that matter, she owed it to Xiang too.

On a fitful May breeze, a melody came wafting over from the big clock atop the Shanghai Custom Building. Her left eyelid twitched again. She must be stressed out, or perhaps it was just another omen. She remembered a superstition from back home in Anhui about twitching eyes.

Agreeing to marry Xiang wasn’t an easy decision for her. It was more like an opportunity she couldn’t afford to miss than something she really wanted. After all, she lived in materialistic times, having read and heard all the tabloid stories about pretty young girls hooking up with Big Bucks and living “happily ever after.”

Tapping her fingers on the table, she wished she could have lived in the world of the poems recited by Chen back in Shaoxing, but she had to face reality. Just the day before, her father had written to her about the problems his factory was facing with both a shrinking market and the rocketing price of commodities. She could no longer bring herself to ask him for help with her mortgage payments. The subdivision committee had just increased parking fees, but it was still difficult to find an open spot, so they suggested, as an alternative, that she buy a permanent spot for thirty thousand yuan. And gas prices kept going up too. The list went on and on.

Still, she had to achieve the Shanghai dream-not just for herself but for her family too. Xiang represented an opportunity she couldn’t let slip by, as her colleague Yaqing had repeatedly pointed out. Even though he was always busy and business-oriented, this could also bode well for his future. He was just like Chen in that he was overwhelmed by his work.

Looking back on it, she realized that the flirtation with Chen was perhaps the result of a vain, vulnerable moment. A connection to a high-profile Party cadre like Chen would be helpful to her as a journalist, and publishing his work in her section would also be to her credit. Add to this the fact that Xiang had vanished without telling her first or contacting her for days.

Then it developed further than she anticipated.

But now Xiang was back with an explanation for his behavior-a reasonable one-and with the surprise proposal, accompanied by a passionate speech as he slipped the ring onto her finger: “In Hong Kong, after finally signing the business deal, I realized that all the success in the world meant nothing without you.”

To be honest, she’d been waiting for Xiang to make a move. Xiang hadn’t done so earlier because his father had wanted him to make a different choice, one that made more business sense. Specifically, he wanted an alliance with another rich family in the city. Xiang finally made his own move, though, when she least expected it. She couldn’t afford not to accept.

So what explanation could she offer Chen?

It occurred to her that maybe neither of them had taken it too seriously, from the day they first met at the Writers’ Association. If there was a moment when something came close to developing between the two of them, it would have to be that afternoon in Shaoxing, with memories of the romantic poems and stories echoing around them in Shen Garden. It was also that afternoon, however, that she realized that nothing would ever develop between them. It wasn’t that he was first and foremost a policeman or that he was too much of an enigma for her; it was that he had disappointed her in the same way Xiang had, and he had done so even more dramatically than Xiang.

She reached into her bag and touched the book of translated poetry he’d given her. Somehow she’d brought it here with her. Looking out the window, she recalled some lines from the volume.

She leans against the window / looking out alone to the river, / to thousands of sails passing along- / none is the one she waits for. / The sun setting slant, / the water running silent into the distance, / her heart breaks at the sight / of the islet enclosed in white duckweed.

Except for the absence of white duckweed, it was the same scene, more than a thousand years later.

She couldn’t shake off the feeling that Chen might have approached her with an ulterior motive, though in her high-strung state of mind, she could be imagining things.

A waiter approached her with a pot of tea and interrupted the train of her thought. The service here was excellent. She had researched the restaurant online. It was obscenely expensive, yet perhaps that fact appealed to upstarts eager for a taste of elite status. Sipping at the tea, she looked out the window at the park.

It wasn’t much of a park, and it looked even more crowded with the recent additions, such as the concrete monument that looked like the logo of Three-Lance underwear, the fashionable new cafés and bars, and the array of other architectural add-ons along the bank. She had never understood why the Shanghainese made such a big deal of the park, but she’d heard it was a place special to Chen.

Beyond the park, petrels glided over the waves, their wings flashing in the gray light, as if flying out of a fast-fading dream. The dividing line between Huangpu River and Suzhou River became less visible.

It was then that Chen stepped into the room, smiling. To her surprise, he was wearing a light gray Mao jacket. He had never dressed so formally in her presence.

“Sorry I’m late. The meeting with the city government took longer than expected. I had no time to change.”

“No wonder you’re wearing a Mao jacket. That’s very politically correct, but there’s no need to change, Chen. Mao jackets are also fashionable now: even Hollywood stars vie to wear one at the Oscars. It fits well with this upscale, high-priced restaurant.”

“The food is not bad here,” he said, “and it’s on the Bund. You’re paying for the view.”

“To be exact, you pay to have your elite status confirmed, and for the satisfaction of knowing you can afford it.”

“Well said, Lianping. For me, it’s really more for the view of the Bund in the background. My favorite place in the city.”

“It’s your feng shui corner,” she said, still hesitant about broaching the subject of her decision, though it wasn’t fair, she knew, to put it off any longer. “Tell me more about it.”

“In the early seventies, I used to practice tai chi with some friends in the park. Then I switched my major to English studies. Because of that, I was able to enter the college after the end of the Cultural Revolution with a high score in English. But as the proverb states, in eight or nine times out of ten, things in this world don’t work out as one plans. Upon graduation, I was assigned to the police bureau, as you know,” he said, taking a sip of tea. “But I still come back here from time to time, to recharge myself with the memories of those years. You may laugh at me for being sentimental, but here, on the very site where this restaurant now stands, for no less than three years I used to sit on a green bench almost every morning.”