Red Mandarin Dress Read online

  Shen had been a poet in the forties, writing in a then-fashionable Imagist style. After 1949, he was assigned a job at the Shanghai Museum, where he denounced his earlier poetry as decadent and threw himself into the study of ancient Chinese clothing. Probably a neck-saving choice in the deteriorating political climate of the mid-fifties. As in Tao De Jing, misfortune leads to fortune. Because of his abrupt disappearance from the literary scene, the young Red Guards in the mid-sixties failed to recognize him as a “bourgeois poet,” and he was spared the humiliations and persecutions. In the eighties, he reemerged with a multivolume work on the history of ancient Chinese clothing, which was translated into several foreign languages, and he became an “internationally known authority.” The literary scene was busy with new voices and faces and few remembered him as a poet anymore.

  Chen would not have remembered him either but for a meeting with a British sinologist who raved about Shen’s earlier literary work. Chen was impressed by a short poem about Shen’s early days:

  Pregnant, happy / for the coming baby / who’ll be able to be / a Shanghainese, his wife’s touching / the blue veins streaking / her breasts, like—//the mountain ranges / against the pale clouds the day / he left, his grandmother / stumbling after him / in her bound feet, putting / a chunk of the soil /in his hand, saying, / “It—(a mutilated earthworm / wriggled out of the lump)—will / bring you back.”

  As an executive member of the Writers’ Association, Chen took it upon himself to arrange for a reprint of Shen’s collection. It was not an easy job. The old man was nervous about poetry, like a man once bitten by a snake, and the publisher, hesitant about possible financial loss, was like a man in fear of a snake. Still, the collection came out and was caught up in the city’s collective nostalgia. People were pleased to rediscover a poetic witness of those golden years before the revolution. A young critic pointed out that the American Imagist poets were indebted to classical Chinese poetry and that Shen, labeled an Imagist, was actually restoring the ancient tradition. The article appealed to a group of “new nationalists,” and the collection sold fairly well.

  Chen took out his address book and dialed Shen’s number.

  “A gentleman’s request I cannot refuse,” Shen agreed, quoting from Confucius. “But I have to take a look at the mandarin dress.”

  “No problem. I’m not in the bureau today, but you can talk to Detective Yu, or to Inspector Liao. Either of them will show you the dress.”

  He then informed Yu of Shen’s visit. As Chen expected, Yu was pleased with the unexpected help, promising to show the dress to the historian. At the end of their call, Chen added, “Oh, it’s so thoughtful of Peiqin—she had the copy of Random Harvest specially delivered to me. I’ve been looking for that movie for a long time.”

  “Yes, she’s been watching a lot of DVDs, trying to find clues there.”

  “Anything new?”

  “No, nothing so far, but the DVDs might give her a break from her job.”

  “You’re right about that,” Chen said, though he didn’t really think so. It was like his reading for the last two weeks. Once he took it seriously—as something he had to do, something with a purpose—it gave him no break.

  Before he could leave for the library to continue his work, there was another special delivery to his home. It was a package of new information about Jia Ming from Director Zhong.

  Mostly it was speculation about Jia’s motive for making trouble for the government. Jia and his entire family had suffered during the Cultural Revolution; Jia ultimately lost his parents. He had become a lawyer in the early eighties, when such a career choice was uncommon. During the sixties and seventies, attorneys were hardly existent or relevant in China. Lawyers, like stocks, were considered part and parcel of capitalist society: hypocritical and for the rich. Major cases were determined or predetermined by the Party authorities, all in the name of the proletarian dictatorships. Liu Shaoqi, chairman of the People’s Republic of China, had been thrown in jail without a trial, and there he died alone, without a notice sent to his family for years. Jia had deliberately chosen to become an attorney at a time when it was far from a popular profession: he had planned to make trouble for the government from the beginning.

  Because of his early entry into the field, he was quickly successful. As a legal system was advocated and recognized as part of China’s reform, he became well known for his defense of a dissident writer. He made such a brilliant defense that the judge appeared tongue-tied several times, which people caught on TV and applauded. The “new” legal practice gathered steam, and law offices sprung up like bamboo shoots after a sudden spring rain.

  But Jia was different from the others. He didn’t take on only profitable cases. Partially because of his inheritance from his family after the Cultural Revolution, he didn’t have to work for the sake of money. From time to time, he would take on controversial cases, which put him on a blacklist composed by the city government, even before he took over the West-Nine-Block housing development case.

  Chen decided not to read any more. During his college years, he, too, had been put on a blacklist, by groundless political interpretations of his modernist poetry.

  It was past ten when Chen arrived at the library. Susu, the librarian with enchanting dimples, brought him a cup of fresh coffee, strong and refreshing.

  Still, his mind started wandering. Perhaps he was more drawn to the murder case than to the love stories, a realization that did not exactly surprise him.

  Only after the second cup of coffee did he manage to settle down to another tale selected for his paper, “The Story of Yingying.”

  The Tang dynasty cuanqi story was composed by Yuan Zhen, a well-known poet and statesman. According to subsequent studies, the narrative was largely autobiographical. In the year 800, Yuan traveled to Puzhou, where he met a girl named Yingying. They fell in love. Yuan then went to the capital, where he married a girl of the Wei family instead. Eventually, Yuan wrote a story based on the Puzhou episode.

  Chen turned to the story with interest. In it, a scholar named Zhang traveled to the Temple of Universal Salvation, where Mrs. Cui was staying with her daughter Yingying on their way to Zhang’an. As the troops nearby rose up in mutiny, Zhang obtained help from his friend to provide much-needed security for the people in the temple. Out of gratitude, Mrs. Cui invited Zhang to a banquet, during which he met Yingying and fell in love with her, though she rebuked his advances with Confucian moralist lectures. One night, however, in a dramatic turn, she came to his western-wing room, offering herself to him. Soon afterward, he left for the civil service examination in the capital, where he received a letter from her. Part of the letter read:

  When I offered myself to you in your bed, you took me with the kindest passion. I was so ignorant as to believe that I could depend on you ever after. How could I have realized that having succumbed to the attraction of a gentleman like you without following the proper marriage rites, there was no chance of serving you openly as a wife in the future? To the end of my days that will be an everlasting regret—I could do nothing but to stifle my sighs and be silent. If you, out of the greatest kindness, would condescend to grant the fulfillment of my secret wish, though in death I would be happy as in life. But if, as a man of the world, you curtail your feeling, sacrifice the lesser for the sake of the more important, and regard the affair as shameful, so that our solemn vow can be dispensed with, still my true love will not vanish, and in the breeze and dew it will follow the ground you walk on, even as my body decays, dissolves. . . .

  Yuan’s scholar-protagonist then showed the letter to his friends before he deserted Yingying with a surprising moralistic argument, which came at the end of the story:

  It is a general rule that those Heaven-endowed beauties invariably either ruin themselves or ruin others. If this Cui girl were to meet someone with great wealth and position, she would use the favor she gains to come in cloud and rain, or dragon and monster—I cannot imagine what she might tu
rn into. Of old, King Yin of the Shang and King You of the Zhou were brought low by such women; in spite of the size of their kingdoms and the extent of their power, their armies were destroyed, their people butchered, and to the present day their names are objects of ridicule. I have no inner virtue to withstand this evil influence. That is why I have resolutely suppressed my love.

  At that point in the narrative, the author—posing as Zhang’s close friend in the text—stepped in to endorse Zhang’s behavior in his own words.

  Zhang’s contemporaries for the most part commended him as one who had done well to rectify his mistake. I have often mentioned this among friends so that, forewarned, they might avoid making such a mistake, or if they already did, that they might not get totally lost.

  Zhang’s decision, Chen observed, came as a volte-face, severing at one stroke the romantic theme. The character’s argument amounted to an assertion that a woman, if irresistibly charming, should be disposed of as an “evil influence,” for she will “ruin” the man close to her like a “monster.”

  Chen thought that a better self-defense could have been made. The self-justifying rhetoric about Yingying’s being a monster seemed to Chen nothing but brazen hypocrisy—a poor excuse for Zhang’s having seduced her and then deserted her, making the story fascinating and confounding. It invited speculation about its inconsistencies: romantic passion, for example, was commended in the first part of the story and condemned in the second.

  But for the purpose of his paper, the story’s similarities to the other tales he’d read was beginning to suggest a topic for his project. “The Story of Yingying,” like “The Story of Xiangru and Wenjun,” effected a deconstructive turn in the narration of the romance. The Han-dynasty story attributed the hero’s death of thirsty illness to the heroine, who, implicitly evil in her sexual insatiability, depleted and eventually destroyed him. In the Tang-dynasty story, the hero averted his destruction by accusing the heroine of being a monster who ruins people close to her. In both stories, the romantic theme was eventually denounced.

  Chen was reminded, unexpectedly, of something in the red mandarin dress case: the killer’s ambivalence or contradiction. The murderer stripped and killed the victims, but he put their bodies in expensive, elegant dresses.

  It was an elusive parallel, fading from his thoughts before he could fully articulate it. So he tried to refocus himself on the books, exploring the background of Yuan further. In literary criticism, the biographical approach sometimes contributed to one’s understanding of a difficult text.

  But what about the criminal investigation? With the perpetrator’s identity unknown, biographical analysis seemed out of the question, and the meaning of the contradictory clues seemed indecipherable.

  Again he found his mind stuck, torn between the two projects, which further confused and confounded him.

  Around one o’clock, Shen called him at the library.

  “Any discovery, Shen?”

  “It’s a long story, Chief Inspector Chen,” Shen said. “I’d better tell you in person, I think. I can show you some pictures.”

  “Great. Let me buy you lunch. How about Five Fragrance Resort? It’s a restaurant across the street from the library.”

  EIGHT

  AS CHEN STEPPED INTO the restaurant, a waiter who had known him for years greeted him warmly.

  “You haven’t come here in a long time, Chen. What would you like to have today?”

  “Whatever you recommend, but not too much. Only for two people.”

  “How about the Chef’s Special Combination for two?”

  “Great. And a pot of strong green tea, please.”

  While waiting, Chen tried to think about his paper again. Perhaps it was not enough to analyze only one or two stories. If he succeeded in proving the thematic contradiction as something common in classical love stories, it might be an original, worthy project. So he had to choose one or two more stories. He wrote that down in his notebook.

  Closing the notebook, he looked up to see Shen shuffle into the restaurant, leaning on a bamboo stick topped with a dragon head. A white-haired and browed man in his early eighties, Shen looked spirited, wearing a cotton-padded traditional Tang costume and black cloth shoes. Chen rose and helped the old man to the table.

  As it turned out, Shen hadn’t had a pleasant experience at the bureau. Detective Yu had hurried out for something urgent; Inspector Liao received Shen instead. Liao, declaring that he had already consulted several old tailors, showed little interest in Shen.

  There might be another reason, Chen suspected, for Liao’s manner. Shen’s coming to the bureau at Chen’s request could have rubbed Liao the wrong way. It wasn’t necessary, however, to explain the bureau politics to the elderly scholar.

  “Don’t worry about Liao. He can occasionally be as stubborn as a mule, and as stupid too,” Chen said, pouring a cup of tea for Shen as the waiter started serving cold dishes. “Please give me an introduction into the history of the mandarin dress. I am all ears.”

  Shen, helping himself to a spoon of white jade tofu flavored with green onion and sesame oil and nodding in approval, started. “Now, why is it called mandarin dress? There are a number of theories about it. For one, the Manchurians, both male and female, wore gowns of bright colors. It is also said that in the early period of the Qing dynasty, the Manchurians divided their people into eight groups, or qi, each sporting a flag of a special color and design. Qi is the same as in Qipao—mandarin dress, you know. It was not until the twenties and thirties, however, that the dress suddenly turned into a nationwide hit, shedding its ethnic suggestion. It then enjoyed great popularity until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In the mid-eighties, it was reembraced, and now it’s internationally popular. Hollywood stars wear mandarin dresses to the Oscar ceremonies. People believe that it hugs a woman’s body subtly, bringing out her curves like no other dress. . . .”

  It was a long introduction but Chen listened with great interest. The mandarin dress being an unmistakable signature of the murderer, a cop couldn’t be too knowledgeable about it.

  “About the mandarin dress Liao showed me: it was made years earlier, probably more than ten years ago,” Shen said, producing several pictures, “based on the color of the thread—already yellow with time. When you consider the material, the special damask with its exquisite print pattern, it possibly goes back even earlier. The sixties, I would say. The same with the tiny steel press buttons. Tailors only used them during that time period or earlier. Since the early eighties, they’ve used plastic zippers instead, which are more comfortable and tighter fitting. The style of the dress also belongs to that period. Look at the whole-piece sleeves. Fashionable people now prefer separate-piece sleeves, which bring out the curves more eloquently. They are also much easier to make—”

  Shen’s lecture was interrupted by the arrival of their main dishes. Among them, there was a glass bowl containing live shrimp immersed in white liquor. The drunken shrimp were still jumping, though less and less energetically.

  “A fashionable dish,” Shen said, “sort of rediscovered too.”

  For a man his age, Shen showed quite a good appetite. He chopsticked a twitching shrimp into his mouth and Chen followed suit. The shrimp tasted slightly sweet, but he didn’t like the slippery sensation on his tongue.

  “Now I have to say a word about its tailoring,” Shen went on, puckering his lips. “A hundred percent handmade. Only an old, experienced Ningbo tailor could have produced such a dress. It took at least a week to finish. Today you may see a mandarin dress displayed in a high-end store, shiny and splendid with a staggering price tag, but the quality is just a joke. All machine made and not at all comparable to the one Liao showed me.”

  “So it was made at least ten years ago, and the material and the style date back even earlier—the sixties or fifties,” Chen said, writing it down in his notebook. “In other words, the criminal had to special order material from an earlier period, and then custom-tai
lor it in a special way.”

  “That’s beyond me,” Shen said. “But there’s something else in the way the victim wore the dress. The essence of mandarin dress aesthetics is subtle suggestiveness. The dress slits, for instance, reveal a woman’s legs, but not too much. A partial glimpse of her thighs could stir up the imagination most effectively.”

  “So it’s like classical Chinese poetry,” Chen cut in. “Imagination rises out of what the poet does not say, or not directly.”

  “Exactly. You know the difference. For example, a tall, buxom American star may wear a so-called modified mandarin dress, backless and extremely short in the skirt part. I, for one, would have lost all my sense of imagination at the sight of her bare back covered with speckles, and her legs and thighs shaven like mammoth tusks.”

  “You are still so good with your Imagist touch, Master Shen.”

  “To put it in another way, it is a dress that allows the wearer’s inner grace to shine through. Sensual, subtle, svelte. It’s not a costume that becomes everyone.”

  “Yes, there is quite a lot of knowledge in that,” Chen echoed.

  “The length of the side slits is another point of subtlety. For a woman of a good family, the slits are usually modest, suggesting her refined sense of decorum. Strictly speaking, when wearing a mandarin dress, a woman walks with small steps, without showing any dramatic body movement. A fashionable girl, however, may have to have higher slits for dancing or strutting around. As for a girl in the entertainment business, she would choose one with the highest slits possible, showing her legs and thighs seductively, and sometimes her buttocks too. It’s sort of the mandarin dress semiotics. In the thirties, a potential customer on Fourth Street would have approached her.”

  “Yes, the dress etiquette speaks,” Chen said, swallowing another live shrimp without chewing it—a throat-scratching mistake with a terrible aftertaste. Fourth Street was an area where prostitutes had congregated before 1949.