Qiu Xiaolong - Death of a Red Heroine

Indeed, the garden was a draw to fans of the novel. Peiqin had talked about visiting it five or six times. There had been no putting off this visit.

A moss-covered winding path led into a spacious hall with oblong windows of stained glass, through which the “inner garden” appeared cool and inviting, but Yu was in no mood for any further expedition. He felt stupid and out-of-place, as he stood by Peiqin in the crowd, though he pretended to be interested like everybody else. Some people were taking pictures. By a strange-shaped grotto stood a makeshift photography booth where tourists could rent so-called Ming dynasty costumes and jewelry. A young girl was posing in a heavy antique golden headdress, and her boyfriend was changing into a dragon-embroidered silk gown. And Peiqin, too, was being transformed by the splendor of the garden, as she busily compared the chambers, stone pavilions, and moon-shaped gates with the pictures in her mind. Looking at her, he almost believed that she belonged there, expecting Baoyu-the young, handsome hero of the novel-to walk out of the bamboo grove any minute.

She also seized the opportunity to share her knowledge of classical Chinese culture with Qinqin. “When Baoyu was your age, he had already memorized the four Confucian classics.”

“The four Confucian classics?” Qinqin said. “Never heard of them in school.”

Having failed to elicit the expected response from her son, she turned to her husband. “Look, this must be the stream where Daiyu buries the fallen flower,” she exclaimed.

“Daiyu buries her flower?” he said, at a total loss.

“Remember the poem by Daiyu-‘ I’m burying the flower today, but who’s going to bury me tomorrow?’”

“Oh, that sentimental poem.”

“Guangming,” she said, “your thoughts are not in the garden.”

“No, I am enjoying every minute of it,” he assured her. “But I read the novel such a long time ago. We were still in Yunnan, you remember.”

“Where are we going now?”

“To be honest, I’m a bit tired,” he said. “What about you and Qinqin going ahead to the inner garden? I’ll sit here for a few minutes, finish my cigarette, and then I’ll join you there.”

“That’s fine, but don’t smoke too much.”

He watched Peiqin leading Qinqin into the quaint inner garden through the gourd-shaped gate, effortlessly, as if she were moving back into her own home.

He was no Baoyu, and never meant to be. He was a cop’s son. And a cop himself. Yu ground out his cigarette under his foot. He was trying to be a good cop, but he was finding it more and more difficult.

Peiqin was different. It was not that she complained. In fact, she was contented. As a restaurant accountant, she earned decent money, about five hundred Yuan a month with perks. Enjoying a nice little niche, she did not have to work with the customers. And at home, small as it was, things were smooth and satisfactory, too, she had often said.

But her life could have been different, he knew. A Daiyu or a Baochai, just like one of those beautiful, talented girls in the romantic novel.

In the beginning of The Dream of the Red Chamber, there were twelve lovely girls who lived out their romantic karma as preordained in Fate’s heavenly register. According to the author, a love affair is predestined for lovers sauntering under the moon in the Grand View Garden. Of course that’s fiction. In real life, however, things might be stranger even than in fiction.

He tried to extract another cigarette, but the pack was empty. A crumpled Peony box. The monthly ration coupons allowed him only five quality-brand packs, such as Peony and Great Wall, which he had already finished. He reached into his jacket pocket for a metal cigarette case, in which he kept some cigarettes he had rolled himself, a secret from Peiqin, who was worried about his heavy smoking.

They had known each other since their early childhood. “Playmates on stilted bamboo horses, / Chasing each other, plucking green plum blossoms.” Doctor Xia had copied the couplet from Li Bai’s “Zhanggan Song” on two red silk streamers for Yu and Peiqin’s wedding.

But that innocently romantic childhood had not been exactly true for them. It was just that her family had happened to move into the same neighborhood in the early sixties. So they became schoolmates in grade school, and then in high-school, too. Instead of seeking each other’s company, however, they’d kept their distance. The sixties was a revolutionary puritan period in China. It was out of the question for boys and girls to mix together at school.

Another factor was her bourgeois family background. Peiqin’s father, a perfume company owner before 1949, had been sent to a labor-reform camp in the late sixties, sentenced to a number of years for something unexplained, and died there. Her family, driven out of their Jingan District mansion, had to move to an attic room in Yu’s neighborhood. A thin, sallow girl with a tiny ponytail secured with a rubber band, she was anything but a proud princess. Though a top student in their class, she was often bullied by other kids of working-class family background. One morning, several Little Red Guards were trying to cut off her ponytail. It went too far, and Yu stepped forward to stop them. He exerted a sort of authority over the neighborhood kids as the son of a police officer.

It was only in the last year of their junior high-school that something occurred to bring them together. The early seventies witnessed a dramatic turn of the Cultural Revolution as Chairman Mao came to see the Red Guards, once his ardent young supporters, standing in the way of his consolidation of power. So Mao said it was necessary for the Red Guards-then called “educated youths”-to go to the countryside to “be reeducated by the lower and middle-poor peasants,” so that the young people would be gone from the cities, unable to make trouble. A nationwide campaign was carried on with drums and gongs sounding everywhere. In their naive response to Mao’s call, millions of young people went to the far-away countryside. To Anhui Province, to Jiangxi Province, to Helongjiang Province, to Inner Mongolia, to the northern border, to the southern border…

Yu Guangming and Jing Peiqin, though too young to be Red Guards, found themselves labeled as educated youths, despite the fact that they had received little education, with copies of the shining red Quotations of Chairman Mao as their textbook. As educated youths, they, too, had to leave Shanghai to “receive education in the countryside.” They were to go to an army farm in Yunnan province, on the southern China / Burma border.

On the eve of their leaving home, Peiqin’s mother came to see Yu’s parents. The two families had a long talk that night. The next morning Peiqin came to his place, and her brother, a truck driver at Shanghai Number 1 Steel Mill, took both of them to the North Railway Station. They sat in the truck, facing each other, staring at the cheering crowds, holding on to two trunks-all their belongings- and singing a Chairman Mao quotation song: Go to the countryside, go to the frontier, go to where our motherland needs us the most…

It was a sort of arranged engagement, Yu guessed, but he accepted it without too much thought. The parents of the two families wanted them, two sixteen-year-olds sent thousands of miles away, to take care of each other. And she had grown into a pretty girl, slender, almost as tall as he. They sat shyly beside each other in the train. They did take care of each other there. There was no alternative for them.

The army farm was tucked into a faraway region called Jinghong, Xishuangbanna, in the depths of southern Yunnan Province. Most of the poor and lower-middle peasants there were of the Dai minority; they spoke their own language and held to their own cultural traditions. To keep themselves above the dank and humid earth, the result of frequent tropical rains, the Dais lived in bamboo shelters raised off the ground on solid stilts, with pigs and chickens moving around below. In contrast, the educated youth stayed in the damp and stuffy army barracks. It was out of the question for the young people to receive reeducation from the Dais. A few things they did learn, but not what Chairman Mao might have wanted. The Dai convention of romantic love, for instance. On the fifteenth of the fourth month in the Chinese lunar calendar year came the Water Splashing Festival, which was supposed to wash away the dirt, death, and demons of the previous year, but it was also an occasion when a Dai girl would declare her affection by pouring water on her beau. The beau then came to sing and dance beneath her windows at night. If she opened the door, he would be her bed partner for the night.