Qiu Xiaolong - When Red is Black

Chen started pacing around in the tingzijian, though there was not much room for him to do so. He wanted to concentrate.

It could not have been easy for Yin to write here; it could not have been easy to do anything, for that matter, with people going up and down the stairs, with noise coming from various directions, and with all the various smells wafting about. An unpleasant tang like that of salted beltfish sizzling in a wok was surging up from the kitchen area. He sniffed in spite of himself.

He went over to the window and rested his elbows, gingerly, on the windowsill, from which most of the paint had already peeled off.

There might be one advantage, nonetheless, for a writer in a tingzijian room, with its window lower than on the second floor but higher than on the first. There was an almost eye-level view of the hustle and bustle of the lane, so close yet at the same time somehow distanced.

In spite of the cold weather, several residents were out in the lane, holding bowls, talking, or exchanging a slice of fried pork for a nugget of steamed fish. Late breakfast or early lunch, Chen could not tell which. Peddlers came in and out, hawking the various goods on their shoulder poles. An old man went by, carrying a green-headed duck in his hand, stopping to feed the duck at a tiny pool in the corner, then resuming his walk, light-footed as if he were on a cloud, his mind doubtless filled by the image of sesame oil-braised duck wings. He clutched the neck of the helpless duck tightly with a look of utter satisfaction on his face. Could this be Mr. Ren, the frugal gourmet? Chief Inspector Chen then remembered having been told that Mr. Ren did not cook at home often.

Once more, Chen’s glance followed the curve of the lane back to the corner where the shrimp woman was now stationed, sitting on the same bamboo stool, on the same spot with a large bowl full of glistening fish scales at her feet. Perhaps she had another contract with the food market to make a later delivery.

As he went downstairs to the back door, something else caught his attention. It was the space-or rather something covering the space-under the staircase.

In a shikumen house, any usable space was precious. Since no single family could claim the space under the staircase, it became an additional common storage area for all sorts of hardly usable stuff which, in its owner’s imagination, still had some potential value-like a broken bike of the Lis, a three-legged rattan chair of the Zhangs, a trunk of coal of the Huangs. But there was one difference here, Chen noticed: the space was covered by something like a curtain. It was a heavy material, possibly a once-expensive tapestry, which had been discolored by years of smoke from all the coal stoves.

The curtain seemed to be moving mysteriously. As Chen took a step toward it, out jumped two small boys. They must have been playing hide-and-seek behind the curtain. At the sight of Chief Inspector Chen, they ran away, laughing and shrieking. He lifted up the curtain; the space inside was full of the grimy discarded junk.

A middle-aged man squeezed past him to reach into a bag of coal balls that was leaning against the side of the staircase. “Sorry, lunch time,” he mumbled, as he filled a ladle with coal balls.

Looking at his watch, Chen realized that he had spent nearly three hours without finding out anything of value for the investigation. He might have gained some first-hand experience for his translation, but he had no idea whether it would really help him to visualize the New World.

He left the shikumen building, cutting through one sub-lane into another, and then returned to the main lane, which was throbbing with life just as Old Liang had described it. A middle-aged woman was drying a redwood chamber pot, another trotted back from the food market with a full bamboo basket, and still another was preparing a large carp in the lane sink, splashing scales and gossip around at the same time.

Turning another corner, he saw a white-haired old man playing go on a board resting on a stool, the black pieces in one of his hands and the white in the other, studying the board as if he were taking part in a national tournament. Chen liked go, too, but he had never tried to play the game solo.

“Hi,” he said, coming to a stop by the stool. “How come you are playing by yourself?”

“Have you read The Art of War?” the old man asked without looking up. “Know your enemy as you know yourself, and you will win every time.”

“Yes, I have read the book. You have to figure out why your opponent has made a certain move. So you must try hard to understand your opponent.”

“From my point of view, the positioning of the black piece does not make any sense, and the best I can do is to guess, to try to understand, as you put it. But that’s not enough. Knowing your enemy actually means that you not only have to think as if you were reading his mind, you have to be him.”

“I see. Thank you so much, Uncle. That is profound,” Chen said sincerely. To him, it seemed as if the talk were not just about the game of go. “I will put your teaching into practice, not just on a go board.”

“Young man, you don’t have to take me so seriously. When you play a game, you want to win,” the old man explained. “When you are absorbed in it, every piece counts, every move matters. Happy to win a corner, sad to lose a position, you are carried away with the illusion of gains or losses. Not until after the game will you come to realize it’s nothing but a game. According to Buddhist scripture, everything in this mundane world is a matter of illusion.”

“Exactly. You have put it very well.”

Chen decided to walk back to his apartment. He could not afford to spend a whole day in the lane. The conversation about go had cost him another ten minutes. The translation lay unfinished on his desk at home. Still, he wanted to think a little about the case, at least on his way back, after this talk with the elderly go player who had been as mysteriously enlightening as the old man of the Han dynasty who had helped Zhang Liang two thousand years ago.

At the exit of the lane, he looked back toward the building where Yin had spent the last years of her life after Yang’s death. Some more lines from Yang’s poetry translation manuscript occurred to him.

Where is the beauty?

Swallows alone are locked inside, for no purpose.

It is nothing but a dream,

in the past, or at present.

Who ever wakes from the dream?

There is only a never-ending cycle

of old joy and new grief.

Some day, and someone else,

in view of the yellow tower at night,

may sigh deeply for me.

These lines were from a poem by Su Dongpo, about a courtesan who shut herself up in the tower after her lover’s death. A tingzijian was not at all comparable to a romantic tower, but Yin, too, had shut herself up.

Chen was determined to do his level best for the investigation. He started by putting himself in the position of the government. He still couldn’t figure out what it could have possibly gained from murdering Yin. While Internal Security seemed to have some concern, Chen did not consider it really surprising or suspicious for them to show interest in a dissident writer’s sudden death; it could simply be their way of asserting authority. In recent years, the Party had changed its way of dealing with dissidents. Foreign investment, a vital part of China ’s economic reform, depended heavily on the new, improved government image. It did not make sense to assassinate someone like Yin. After all, she was not someone fighting for democracy and freedom under a red banner in Tiananmen Square.