Qiu Xiaolong - When Red is Black

“Wonderful food,” Chen said, “and wonderful service, too.”

“We hope you will come back, Boss,” the hostess said with a bright smile, bowing slightly before she moved on to another table.

That was another new term of address. Not that new, perhaps. Before 1949, people had used this term, and it was staging a comeback.

“It’s their own business,” Yu said, “a private business. Of course they want to please their customers, who are their bosses.”

“That’s true.”

“By the way,” Yu asked, the noodles hanging like a waterfall from his chopsticks, “is Old Half Place also a good restaurant?”

“A very good one, especially known for the noodles they serve early in the morning. Why?”

“Mr. Ren, a resident who is on the suspect list, told me that he goes there two or three times a week, and he calls himself a ‘frugal gourmet.’”

“Frugal gourmet. Great, I like it,” Chen said. “Yes, Old Half Place has a lot of regular customers early in the morning, every morning. It’s almost like their ritual.”

“Why?”

“You have asked the right man. I happen to have read about this restaurant. The chef there plunges noodles into boiling water in an extremely large pot, so the noodles acquire a special crisp texture. But the water soon turns thick with starch and then the noodles lose this texture. It’s not easy to change the water in such a large pot. Instead, the chef just adds more cold water, but that’s not really good. Gourmets believe that the noodles boiled in the early morning taste much better.”

“Heavens, can there be so much to learn about a bowl of noodles?”

Chen was amused at the shocked expression on his partner’s face. “And the xiao pork is a must too. The pork sort of melts in the noodle soup, and then on your tongue. It comes in a separate side dish. Very special, and inexpensive too. You ought to go there this weekend.”

“You should have interviewed Mr. Ren, Chief. There would have been a lot for you to say to each other.”

“A frugal gourmet,” Chen repeated, putting the last shrimp into his mouth. “I don’t know what sort of man Mr. Ren is, but, according to your description, he no longer lives in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution.”

When Chen reached his home, he found a short note from White Cloud on the table. “Sorry, I have to leave for school. Lunch is in the refrigerator. If you need me this afternoon, please call me.”

The meal she had prepared was simple but good. The pork marinated in wine might have come from some deli, but the hot and sour cucumber slices mixed with transparent green bean noodles looked fresh and tasty. There was also an electric pot of rice, still quite warm. That would make a good dinner, Chen decided. Closing the refrigerator door, he tried not to think about the Yin case. At this stage, it was a matter of routine to go on interviewing her neighbors, which was what Yu had been doing, and which, if he had been working on the case, he would be doing too.

What else could he possibly do?

He stared at the New World business proposal, and the business proposal stared back at him.

Qinqin had called home, saying that he would sleep over at the apartment of a schoolmate. It was not that often that Yu and Peiqin had a night by themselves. In spite of his frustration with the day’s investigation, Yu decided to turn in early with Peiqin.

It was a cold night. They sat under the quilt, leaning against the pillows propped up against the hard headboard. It took quite a while for the warmth of their bodies beneath the old cotton-padded quilt to make the cold of the room endurable. His feet brushed hers; her toes were soft, still slightly chilled. He put his arm around her shoulders.

In the soft light, she looked like the same girl she had been the first time with him in Yunnan, on that cool creaking bamboo bed, in the shadow of the flickering candlelight-except for those tiny fishtail-like lines around her eyes.

But Peiqin had something else in mind this evening. She wanted to tell him the story of Death of a Chinese Professor. She put the novel on top of the quilt; a bamboo butterfly bookmark stuck out of it.

Yu did not read much. He had tried several times to get into The Dream of the Red Chamber, Peiqin’s favorite, but he gave up, invariably, after three or four pages. There was no way for him to relate to those characters who had lived in a grand mansion hundreds of years ago. In fact, the only reason that he had made the attempt was because of Peiqin’s passion for the book. As for the books about the Cultural Revolution, he had read only two or three short stories, all of which struck him as totally untrue. If there had been such foresighted heroes to question or challenge Chairman Mao in the early sixties, Yu reflected, the national disaster would not have started in the first place.

With Yin’s case on his hands, he had thought he had no choice but to read Death of a Chinese Professor from beginning to the end. Fortunately, Peiqin had already undertaken the assignment. She had told him a little about the book and this evening wished to give him a detailed account.

“What I’m going to recount,” Peiqin said, folding her legs, “is perhaps influenced by my own point of view. I will focus on the role of Yang, since you are familiar with Yin’s history, and then I will dwell on the love affair between the two.”

“Wherever you want to start, Peiqin,” Yu said, taking her hand in his.

“Yang was born into a wealthy family in Shanghai. He went to study in the United States in the forties, where he got a Ph.D. in literature, and started publishing his poems in English. In 1949, he hurried home, full of passionate dreams for a new China. He taught English at Eastern China University, translated English novels, and wrote poems in Chinese before he suffered a major setback during the Anti-Rightist Movement in the mid-fifties. Suddenly condemned as a reactionary Rightist, and deserted by his friends and relatives because of his Rightist status, he stopped writing poems, although he continued translating such books as were approved by government, like the works of Charles Dickens and Thackeray, about whom Karl Marx had made favorable comments, or those of Mark Twain and Jack London, some of whose works showed an anti-capitalist tendency. He was then transferred to the Chinese department, in an effort to prevent him from disseminating ‘decadent Western ideas’ in English at a time when most of the Party officials did not understand a single word of English.

“At the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, Yang turned overnight into a target of revolutionary mass criticism. He was forced to denounce himself. His college years in the States were described as years of espionage training, and his translations of English and American literature as attacks on proletarian literature and art in socialist China. In the early seventies, with more and more new class enemies being discovered in the course of the unprecedented revolution, Yang became a ‘dead tiger’-it was no longer so much fun for revolutionary people to beat him up. Like other ‘bourgeois intellectuals,’ he was then sent to a cadre school in the countryside. It was there that he met Yin.

“They were both cadre students, but there was a marked difference in their political status. Yang, a Rightist with serious problems in his past, was at the bottom. Yin, a Red Guard who was charged with ‘minor mistakes’ in the Great Revolution, was made a group leader, responsible for supervising members of the group to which Yang belonged.

“At this time, some still believed in everything Chairman Mao said, even there at the cadre school. A well-known poet wrote in ecstasy about the cure of his insomnia through physical labor in the fields, as a result of following Chairman Mao’s instruction. Some were disillusioned, however, in spite of Mao’s ‘newest and highest directions’ set forth in those endless Party documents. After a day’s hard labor, a few of them started thinking. Theoretically, after having successfully reformed themselves through hard physical labor and political studies, the cadre students should have been able to ‘graduate’ and have new jobs assigned to them. After a couple of years, however, they knew they had been pretty much forgotten. It seemed they were never going to be allowed to go back to the city, even though they were no longer at the center of the revolution.