Qiu Xiaolong - When Red is Black

“Peiqin, it’s time for lunch,” Luo, the new chef shouted from the kitchen located below the office. His voice boomed up through the cracks of the old worn floor, the air was filled with swirling dust making weird patterns in the light. “We’ll have fish-head soup with red pepper today.”

“Great. I’ll come as soon as I finish here.”

In the first year she had worked there, Peiqin had occasionally come downstairs to help. Soon she stopped doing so. In a state-run company, employees were paid the same amount regardless of how long or how hard they worked. As an accountant, she needed only to finish her bookkeeping, which normally took her a week, instead of a month. If she sat there afterward, doing nothing for the rest of the time, no one would care. So for the last few years, she had read Qinqin’s textbooks under the cover of her accounting books. Qinqin would not let his school years slip away, unlike hers. To help him with his homework, she started learning English too, so as to be able to practice with him at home. Qinqin had to get a good education, at a top university. A college education could make a world of difference in China ’s fast-changing society. In fact, Chief Inspector Chen had obtained his position-in part at least-because of his superior educational background, although she acknowledged Chen was one of the few Party cadres who deserved his position on his own merit.

Sometimes she read novels in the office. Like many people of her generation, Peiqin had more or less educated herself by reading novels. The manager must have been aware of her reading, but he had not said anything. He, too, was busy doing something for himself. Peiqin did not have a clue what it was.

Sometimes, when she put down her book, she could not help being momentarily bewildered. How had she ended up here, she wondered, in this tiny office, reading novels simply because she had nothing better to do? Was she going to spend the rest of her life just like this? In her elementary school, Peiqin had been a straight-A student, even though not a popular one, because of her “black” family background. Her father had owned a small import/export company, hence he was declared a “capitalist” in his class status after 1949, which cast his whole family under a dark cloud. The dark cloud turned into a violent storm during the Cultural Revolution.

As an educated youth-a beginning high school student-in the late sixties, she had had to leave Shanghai for Yunnan. Her path had crossed Yu’s then. Their relatives had introduced them, hoping that they could take care of each other in that distant place. Far away in the countryside, with her girlish dreams shattered, she learned to appreciate the man in Yu. Then after they were allowed to return to Shanghai in the late seventies, she considered herself lucky to have a family like hers. Yu was a good husband, and Qinqin a wonderful son, in spite of the fact that they all had to huddle together in that one single all-purpose room. Monotonous as her restaurant job was, she managed to see herself, literally, as one level above those working in the kitchen. She had long since accepted the truism that happiness comes only in contentment.

The lackluster, unchallenging work actually suited her well if she chose to look at it from another angle. For she could devote herself more to her family. The best years of her youth had been wasted during the Cultural Revolution, but she saw no point blaming fate, or crying, like so many others. She had been content to play the traditional role of good wife and mother.

Of late, however, she had become less at peace with the status quo. The world around her was changing. Some of the values, or meanings, which she used to think she had found in her life seemed to be slipping away. I don’t know in which direction the wind is blowing, was a line she recalled reading; it seemed appropriate now. She believed that she should try to do something, in addition to her restaurant work. She had to face the fact that the iron-bowl positions Yu and she had would, at most, satisfy their most basic material needs. The apartment fiasco had been the last straw. Qinqin must have a different life; she was resolved. Almost everybody else in Qinqin’s class had Nike shoes, and Peiqin wanted to buy a pair for him, too. In her school years, brand names did not exist, and army-green imitation rubber shoes were the norm. In Yunnan, sometimes she went barefoot, because she had mailed one pair of those she had been issued back home to her niece. Even today, she still went without cosmetics, in spite of the ever-increasing appeals of commercials on TV. At a recent class reunion, one of her former classmates arrived in a Mercedes, to the envy of most in the room. In school, he had been a nobody, copying Peiqin’s homework from time to time. It was really a changed world.

And then the investigation of Yin Lige’s case, unexpectedly, began to take on meaning for her. Not exactly a new meaning, nor meaningful only to her, but it was traceable as far back as her high school years. Her reading was secret at the time-secret because Chairman Mao’s works alone were officially available-libraries were closed, novels and poems out of reach, and a young girl of her family background had to be careful, carrying novels in a most stealthy way, hidden under her armpit within her cotton-padded coat. Like others, Peiqin had to turn to books that had been published earlier, that were still in clandestine circulation. “Wealthy” with half a dozen books she had hidden from the Red Guards’ clutches, she and several others had formed an underground network to exchange books. There was something like an “exchange rate”: Balzac’s Old Goriot would be worth Dickens’s Hard Times plus a Chinese novel such as The Song of Youth or The Story of the Red Flag. In their network, if a member was able to get a new book through an outside contact, then the book would travel from one member to another, available to each for only one day.

She had developed a preference for certain writers. Yang, the great contemporary translator, was one of her favorites. In her opinion, hardly any modern Chinese writer was comparable to Yang for stylistic innovation, perhaps because he had a unique sensitivity to language, introducing Western expressions, and sometimes syntax too, into Chinese. In the history of modern Chinese literature, she had observed, most intellectuals who had a higher education had become translators rather than writers, for political reasons which were not difficult to understand.

When she had left high school for Yunnan, she carried some of those “poisonous” books with her. She did not talk to Yu about them. It was not that she had intended to keep something from him; rather, she was worried that her bookish passion might have made her less approachable. Besides, Yu had been too busy, doing not only his share of the labor in the field, but a lot of times hers as well.

In Yunnan she learned that Yang had written poems as well as translated novels. She found a short poem in an old anthology, which she copied into a notebook and memorized. It was not until after she came back to Shanghai that Yang’s poetry collection edited by Yin appeared in bookstores. By then, Peiqin was no longer a young, sentimental girl; still, she admired those poems. It broke her heart to learn that his poetry career had been cut short even before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. In the collection, she also read a few poems written shortly before his death.

Now she picked up the poetry collection that Yin had edited and turned to a poem entitled “Snowman”:

You have to be a snowman

To stand in the snow

Listening to the same message

Of the howling wind