Qiu Xiaolong - When Red is Black

“That sounds very nice,” Chen said. “Here, people may have experiences unavailable in modern apartment complexes.”

“People do a lot of things in the lane,” Old Liang went on with unabated enthusiasm. “Men practice tai chi, brew the first pot of tea of the day, sing snatches of Beijing opera, and talk about the real weather or the political weather. As for women, washing and cooking and talking take place simultaneously. People here don’t have a living room like in those fancy new apartments. So in the evening, most of them move outside, men playing chess or cards, telling stories, women chatting or knitting or mending.”

Chen was familiar with similar scenes from his childhood, even though he’d lived in a different lane. Whatever differences there might be, or whatever other new information he might learn, it was the time for him to call a halt to Old Liang’s speech.

“Oh, do you hear that?” Liang went on. “A cotton-candy peddler is hawking his wares. A variety of peddlers come down the lane. They offer a huge selection of goods, and services too, repairing shoes, mending coir rope bedframes or restuffing or sewing cotton quilts for the winter. It is so convenient-”

“Thank you so much, Comrade Old Liang. As the proverb says, A talk of yours benefits me more than ten years of study,” Chen said with sincerity. “I would really like to spend some more time talking with you when I have finished my project.”

Old Liang finally understood that Chen wanted to be left alone, excused himself, saluted Chen respectfully one more time, and went back to his own office.

Chen watched him walking down the lane, taking abrupt detours to avoid the laundry hanging on bamboo poles overhead. The clothing festooned on the network of poles seemed to present a scene from an Impressionist painting. Apparently, Old Liang still believed the old superstition that walking under women’s underwear would bring bad luck.

Turning back, Chen tried the solid black wooden front door of the shikumen house. There were two brass knockers on the outside, and a solid wooden latch on the inside. After so many years of wear and tear, the door creaked when he pushed it open.

There were several people in the courtyard. They must have seen him talking with Old Liang, and they went on with their own activities, making no effort to speak to the chief inspector. As he crossed the courtyard, he saw a row of tall hall screen doors with exquisite designs of the eight immortals sailing over the ocean embossed on the panels. In an elaborate sequence, each door narrated a particular scene. The doors might be a valuable addition to the folk art museum in the New World, Chen thought.

As far as he could remember, he had never seen the hallway of a shikumen used for its original purpose, not even in his childhood. Without exception, a hall became common space in one way or another, since all the rooms along the wings opened into it. He smelled something like fermented tofu being fried in a wok, a favorite dish for some families in spite of its smell. It appealed to a lot of Shanghainese because of its exceptional flavor and texture. Most restaurants did not serve this dish because it was so cheap. That was a pity. There was also a faint smell, rich with a nostalgic aroma, of old hen soup with plenty of ginger and green onion.

Chen could not help wondering about the possibility of turning a shikumen into a restaurant. It would be unique. In a book of Chinese culinary studies he had read, it was argued that the best cooking might be done at home by a highly cultivated hostess who could spend days preparing a feast full of inspiration, to be served in an elegant ambience. Such a shikumen restaurant would have a pleasant family atmosphere too. The wings would be used as the dining areas, the small rooms here and there as private rooms; the intimacy of being at home, not to mention the contrast between the present and the past, would greatly enhance the proposed theme of the New World.

The courtyard, too, could be quite romantic in the evening, over a cup of wine or tea.

Some fragmented lines of an ancient poem unexpectedly came to him.

These lines were from a poem Yang had included in his translation manuscript. Some night, when all the other families in the shikumen were asleep, Yin, a lonely, heart-broken woman, could have stepped into this very courtyard and read it to herself.

Chen stubbed out his cigarette and walked across the hall and out the back door. He stopped to open and close the door a couple of times. Someone could have hidden behind the door, which was angled toward the staircase when it was open, but he would have been seen easily by people descending the stairs.

Outside, the shrimp woman was nowhere in sight, but a bamboo stool indicated her post in the lane, just three or four steps away. It was cold out there. It could not be easy for a woman to sit there working, morning after morning, her fingers numbed by the frozen shrimp, for the unprincely wage of two or three Yuan per hour. Her monthly income would be far less than an hour’s translation earned him, he calculated.

He suddenly thought of two celebrated lines by Baijuyi, a Tang dynasty poet. Now what merit do I have - / with my annual salary at three thousand kilos of rice? At that time, when a lot of people could not fill their bellies, this salary was considered princely.

A recurring theme among Chinese intellectuals was a concern for the unfair distribution of wealth in society- huibujun. But Comrade Deng Xiaoping must also have been right when he declared that some Chinese people should be allowed to get rich first in their socialist society, that the wealth they accumulated would “trickle down” to the masses.

As for the money those upstarts like Gu were making, God alone knew where it would lead. Though China in the nineties was still socialist in name, with a time-honored emphasis on egalitarianism for the entire society, the gap between the rich and the poor was quickly-alarmingly-widening.

Chen started climbing the stairs. It was dark; finding each step was difficult. It would not be easy for a stranger to climb these stairs without stumbling. There should have been a light, even in the middle of the day. In such a building, however, with so many families, each one’s share of the electricity bill would be a headache to calculate.

Some of the rooms on each floor were obviously makeshift subdivisions of space, Chen thought. There were sixteen families in the two-story building, about one hundred residents in all. Yu had his job cut out for him if each resident was a potential suspect.

Chen could not help stepping inside Yin’s room, though he had not intended to examine it. Yu would have done a thorough job already.

He felt melancholy as he stood there, alone, thinking about a solitary woman whose death he should have more actively investigated. The furniture was already covered in a thin layer of dust, which somehow made the scene familiar. There was a pile of old magazines in which bookmarks had been placed. He thumbed through them; in each case, the marked page contained a poem of Yang’s which had later appeared in the collection edited by Yin. A traditional Chinese painting of two canaries still hung high on the time-yellowed wall. There was nothing else left that was really personal to Yin.

Chen’s interest in the room was also piqued by the term tingzijian writer. There were poverty-stricken writers, unable to rent better rooms, in the thirties, and then in the nineties, too. The marginal status of a tingzijian room, something barely inhabitable between two floors, appeared symbolic. He wondered how such a room-or the attempt to write in such a room-could have been romanticized in fiction. Not everything could have been glamorous in times past, but nostalgia made it seem so. Things are miraculously mellowed in memories. That was a line from a Russian poem he had read, but failed to understand, in his high-school years. A subtle transformation in comprehension had occurred with the lapse of years.