Qiu Xiaolong - When Red is Black

From another perspective, however, the grant of Gu’s request would mean a loss of revenue to the traffic control office. A large modern garage would put a lot of cars out of sight, but it would also put a lot of patrol officers out of work and eliminate the fines they might otherwise collect. So it might not be that easy for him to back Gu’s request, he understood, and Gu understood this too.

“Well, when it is convenient, put in a word for the New World,” Gu said very smoothly.

Chen could always claim that he was still waiting for that convenient moment, but he would probably not do so. The bottom line was that he was obliged to help Gu with respect to the garage request. “I’ll make a couple of phone calls,” he said vaguely at the end of the phone conversation. “And I will call you back, Gu.”

Chen decided that first he had better go to the hospital. He had to pay the medical bill there. His mother would be released that evening. She had been worried about the expense. There was no point letting her know how much it cost; in any case, the money from the translation would surely cover it. This gave him an extra sense of self-justification, he reflected, as he arrived at the hospital accounting office. In the age of the market economy, the hospital made no exceptions, so neither need he, as long as he made money in a way that was acceptable to the system.

To his surprise, he learned that his mother’s factory had already paid the hospital bill. “It’s been taken care of, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen,” the hospital cashier said with a broad grin. “Comrade Zhou Dexing, the factory director, wants you to give him a call when you have time. This is his number.”

Chen dialed the number from a pay phone in the lobby.

It was no great surprise to him to hear a warm speech from Comrade Zhou Dexing: “Our factory is having a difficult time, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen. The national economy is in a transitional period, and a state-run factory meets with one problem after another. For an old worker like your mother, however, we will take responsibility for her medical expense. She has worked all her life with utter dedication to the factory. We know what a good comrade she is.”

“Thank you so much, Comrade Zhou.”

What a good comrade her son is; somebody must have tipped him off about that, thought Chen. Whatever his motivation, what Comrade Zhou had said and done was politically correct, even an appropriate subject for an editorial in the People’s Daily.

“For our work in the future, we will continue to enjoy her support, I hope, and yours too, Comrade Chief inspector. I have heard so much about your important work for the city.”

These official courtesies were a polite veneer. But Chen was not worried. There are things a man can do, and things a man cannot do. This Confucian dictum could also mean that no matter what others might ask him to do, he would make his decision in accordance with his principles.

A new sort of social relationship, cobweb-like, seemed to have developed, connecting people closely together along the threads of their interests. The existence of each thread depended on the others. Like it or not, Chief Inspector Chen was bound up in this network of connections.

“You really flatter me, Comrade Zhou,” Chen said. “We all work for socialist China. Of course we will help each other.”

That was not the Confucian ideal of a society, not the one envisioned by his father, a Neo-Confucian intellectual of the old generation. Ironically, Chen reflected, it was not totally irrelevant to Confucianism either. Yiqi, or the oughtness of the situation, a Confucian principle that emphasized moral obligation, had somehow evolved into oughtness of one’s own interest.

But Chen reminded himself that he had no time for such philosophical speculation.

He walked into his mother’s room. She was still asleep. Although the test results had excluded the particular possibility that had worried him, she had been growing visibly weaker in the last few years. He decided to stay with her for a while. Since the onset of the translation project, almost simultaneously with the murder of Yin Lige, this was the first day that he could spend some peaceful time with his mother without worrying about this clue or that lead, or about definitions and phrasing.

She stirred in her sleep, but she did not wake. It might be as well. Once awake, she would probably lead their talk to her number one question: Now that you are established in life, what about your family?

In traditional Chinese culture, both “establishment” and “family” were at the top of a man’s list of priorities, though the latter appeared more urgent to his mother. Whatever he might offer about his career and Party standing, his personal life was still a blank page to her.

Again, he thought of the line under the painting of the goose in Beijing, although in a different context: What will come, eventually comes. Perhaps it was not time yet.

He started peeling an apple for his mother. That was something White Cloud had done in his place, he remembered. Afterward, he put the peeled apple in a plastic bag on the nightstand. He looked into the drawer of the nightstand. He might as well start putting things together for her. Perhaps he would have to leave before she woke up.

To his surprise, he found a small photograph of White Cloud in a book of Buddhist scripture his mother had brought with her. In her uniform as a college student, White Cloud looked spirited and young as she stood in the impressive gateway of Fudan University. He understood why his mother had kept the picture. For his mother, as Overseas Chinese Lu had once put it, Anything that came into her bamboo basket must be counted a vegetable now.

White Cloud was a nice girl, to be sure. She had helped a lot: with the translation, with his mother in the hospital, and with the investigation. For all this, he could not but be grateful to her. He did not want to denigrate her because at their first meeting she had been a K girl with whom he had danced, his hand on her bare back, nor for being a “little secretary,” with all the possible connotations of that term. Chen considered himself above that sort of snobbishness.

What his mother had obviously thought about her in connection with him, however, had never entered his mind. This was not so much because of the difference in their ages, or in their backgrounds, it was just that it seemed to him that they lived in two different worlds. But for the business of the New World, their paths would never have crossed. The translation was now finished, and he was pleased that she could go back to her life, whatever it might be like. There was nothing for him to be sentimental about. She was paid for her work as a little secretary. “Paid handsomely,” as she had put it; the way he was paid, although at a different rate and for a different reason.

But then, was he really so sure about himself?

Was the filial son sitting with his mother the same man as the Mr. Big Bucks drinking with his little secretary in the Golden Time Rolling Backward?

“Are you Chief Inspector Chen?” A young nurse poked her head into the room. “Someone is waiting downstairs for you.”

Chen took the steps in long strides. To his surprise, he found Party Secretary Li waiting in the lobby, carrying a large bouquet of flowers, in sharp contrast to the familiar image of the serious senior Party cadre in his high-buttoned Mao jacket. A bureau Mercedes was parked in the driveway.

“They told me your mother is still sleeping,” Li said, “so I think I’ll just say a few words to you here. I have a city government meeting this morning.”

“Thank you, Party Secretary Li. You are so busy; you shouldn’t have taken the trouble to come here.”