The Mao Case Read online

  “A young girl named Jiao, Qian’s daughter. Possibly a kept girl — a little concubine.”

  “Who keeps her?”

  “No one knows. That’s what Old Hunter has been trying to find out, I think, but he has forbidden me to do anything concerning her.”

  “That’s strange. A Big Buck will show off his mistress like a five-karat diamond ring — a symbol of his success. Unless he belongs to a different circle…”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Instead of being a Big Buck, he might be a high-ranking Party official, so he is trying to keep their relationship a secret. But he can’t keep it secret for too long if cops are looking into it.”

  “Not just the cops, but Internal Security too.”

  “And Chief Inspector Chen as well. That’s not good,” she said broodingly. “Did you learn anything else from your father?”

  “He apparently had a long talk with Chen, mentioning a story about how the tomb builders of Cao Cao were killed because of what they knew, but that happened more than a thousand years ago.”

  “That sounds ominous! Some knowledge can be really deadly. Did you notice anything unusual about him?”

  “He had a book with him — with a strange title, like a weather book about Shanghai …”

  “Do you think the book has something to do with Chen’s investigation?” She added, “The old man is not a great reader.”

  “Yes, that’s what I think.”

  “Hold on, Yu — can you recall the name of the book?”

  “Cloud and Rain … something.”

  “Cloud and Rain — oh I see, now I see —”

  “What do you see?” he said, noting an anxious and eager look in her eyes, a sort of scared opacity, as if she were staring at something strange, monstrous.

  “Cloud and Rain —” She jumped up from the stool, wiping her hands on her apron while bending to pull a cardboard box out from under the bed. “I’ve got a copy of it. Cloud and Rain in Shanghai.”

  “That’s it. That’s the name of the book,” he said, his eyes following her. In the room, the makeshift bookshelf belonged to Qinqin. Peiqin had her own books, like her favorite novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, but he didn’t know where she kept them. The cardboard box was an old one, originally used for Meiling brand, canned lunch meat, possibly from her restaurant.

  She had found the book in question and started leafing through it in great excitement.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Yes, that’s it — Qian. And Tan too, sure enough,” she said, holding the book up in her hand. “Have you heard of a movie star named Shang?”

  “Shang? I’ve never seen her movies. She was popular in the fifties, I think, and she died during the Cultural Revolution.”

  “She committed suicide.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes,” she said, taking another look at the page, “Qian was Shang’s daughter.”

  “Is that book about Shang?”

  “No, it’s about her daughter, Qian, but it was popular because of Shang, or rather because of the man she slept with.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Mao!” she said in the shifting morning light that dappled her face like in a painting. “That’s why Chen doesn’t want to get you involved. That’s also why Party Secretary Li is keeping his mouth shut. It’s all because of Mao.”

  “I’m lost, Peiqin.”

  “You haven’t heard about Mao’s affair with Shang?”

  “No, not really.”

  “There’s a book titled Mao and His Women. Have you never heard of it?”

  “No, but you cannot take those stories seriously. Have you read it?”

  “No, but I read some excerpts in a Hong Kong magazine that a customer left in the restaurant. The book is banned here, of course, but they are true stories. Mao liked dancing with beautiful young women. It’s acknowledged in the official newspapers, which say that Mao was under a lot of stress, so the Party Central Committee wanted him to relax through dancing. Shang was a regular partner of his and they danced together many times.”

  “You never talked to me about this.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Mao. Not in our home. Hasn’t he brought enough disaster for all of us?”

  Yu was taken aback by her vehement response. Considering what her family had suffered during the Cultural Revolution, however, her reaction was understandable.

  “Mao lived in Beijing, and Shang, in Shanghai,” he said. “How was that possible?”

  “Well, Mao came to Shanghai from time to time. Whenever he was here, the local officials would arrange parties for him at a grand mansion that had belonged to a Jewish businessman before 1949. Shang was waiting for him there.”

  “He might have danced with her, but that did not necessarily mean he slept with her.”

  “Come on, Yu. Mao could have danced with anyone in Beijing. Why come all the way to Shanghai?”

  “But Mao traveled a lot. There’s a song about his traveling for the welfare of the country, I remember.”

  “You’ve never heard these stories about Mao? I can’t believe you, Yu. Shang wasn’t the only one. Mao had so many personal secretaries, nurses, orderlies. Remember Jade Phoenix, the pretty secretary who took care of him day and night at his imperial residence? Now mind you, she was a young woman with only elementary school education who actually worked as the confidential secretary for Mao. Again, it was written up in the Party newspapers that even Madam Mao had to suck up to Jade Phoenix. Why? Everybody knows the answer.”

  “Yes, Jade Phoenix was in a documentary movie in Yunnan, that I do remember. It was just a glimpse of a knockout helping Mao walk out of his room. You know what? In that moment, I, too, couldn’t help speculating about their relationship, and I felt so guilty about it afterward, as if I had committed a most unforgivable crime.”

  “You didn’t have to feel guilty at all. Jade Phoenix is now an honorable manager of a Mao restaurant in Beijing and she sits there occasionally. The business is booming and reservations have to be made days beforehand. All the customers go there for a chance to see Jade Phoenix.”

  “But it all happened so many years ago. Why this assignment for Chen, all of a sudden?”

  “That I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “Some power struggle at the top?”

  “No, I don’t think they are going to remove Mao’s portrait from the Gate of Tiananmen Square, not anytime soon.”

  “Chen’s not working on some cover-up for him, I hope.”

  “But what can I do to help?”

  “He’ll come to you when he’s in need. Don’t worry about it, but — I do understand Old Hunter’s concern,” she said, rising abruptly. “Oh, I have to put the chicken in the pot. I’ll be right back.”

  She hurried back in a minute, picking up the copy of Cloud and Rain in Shanghai again. “I’m going to reread it closely. Perhaps I can find some clue for your boss.”

  “You, too, have a soft spot for our irresistible chief inspector,” he said with mock jealousy. “He also has a personal problem at the moment.”

  “What problem?”

  “Ling, his HCC girlfriend in Beijing, has married somebody else — people have been gossiping about it at the bureau.”

  “Oh that,” she said. “He got a call from Beijing during the bureau political studies meeting a couple of days ago. Somebody overheard the conversation — a few words of it. Chen looked devastated afterward.”

  “It might not be that bad for him. He’s a successful cop — and not because of her. In fact, I wondered what he would become if they stayed together. You know what I mean.”

  “He’s become a chief inspector on his own merits, no question about it,” Yu readily agreed. “Which is easy for others to see, but not for him.”

  “Then now he can turn over a new page. With his HCC girlfriend constantly at the back of his mind, it was impossible for him to see other girls. White Cloud, for instance.”
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  It was another of her favorite topics. Peiqin appeared to think that the breakup had come as a shock to Chen, but Chen’s relationship with his HCC girlfriend had long been on the rocks. Last year, Chen had passed on an opportunity to go to Beijing, but Yu decided not to mention that to Peiqin at the moment.

  “No, not White Cloud,” he said instead. “I don’t think she’s a good one for him, either.”

  “You know what I found in a bookstore the other day?” she said, delving into the book box again to pick up a magazine. “A poem written by your chief inspector. For his HCC girlfriend, though it isn’t that explicit. Even then and there, they were already lost in their different interpretations. It’s entitled ‘Li Shangyin’s English Version.’ ” She took off her apron and started reading aloud.

  The fragrance of jasmine in your hair / and then in my teacup, that evening,/ when you thought me drunk, an orange /pinwheel turning at the rice-paper window./ The present is, when you think/ of it, already the past. I am / trying to quote a line / from Li Shangyin to say what / cannot be said, but the English version /at hand fails to do justice / to him (the translator, divorced / from his American wife, drunk, found English / beating him like a blind horse), any / more than the micaceous mist / issuing from a Lantian blue jade / to your reflection. // Last night’s star, / last night’s wind — the memory / of trimming a candle, the minute / of a spring silkworm wrapping itself / in a cocoon, when the rain / becomes the mountain, and the mountain / becomes the rain… // It is like a painting /of Li Shangyin going to open / the door, and of the door / opening him to the painting, / that Tang scroll you showed me / in the rare book section / of the Beijing Library, while you / read my ecstasy as empathy / with the silverfish escaping / the sleepy eyes of the full stops, / and I felt a violent wonder / at your bare feet beating / a bolero on the filmy dust / of the ancient floor. Even then / and there, lost in each / other’s interpretations, we agreed.

  “I can make neither heads nor tails of it,” Yu said with a puzzled smile. “How can you be so sure it’s a poem written for her?”

  “She worked at the Beijing Library. But more importantly, why Li Shangyin? A Tang-dynasty poet, Li was seen as a social climber because he married the daughter of the then prime minister. Unfortunately, the prime minister soon lost his position, which cast a shadow on Li’s official career. He wrote his best lyrical poems in frustration.”

  “So that turned out to be good for his poetry, right?”

  “You could say so. Chen’s too proud to be seen as a climber.”

  “If he had really cared for her, why should it have mattered so much?”

  “No one lives in a vacuum, not to mention all of the politics at your bureau.”

  She was passionate in Chen’s defense, waving the magazine dramatically, her face flushing like a flower.

  “Oh, the chicken soup,” she said, dropping the magazine. “It’s time to turn the fire down low.”

  He watched her hurrying out with a touch of amusement. After all, the chicken soup proved to be just as important as Chen to her. But then he started worrying about Chen again. It was an investigation fraught with danger, involving knowledge which could kill, as Old Hunter had warned.

  Detective Yu had to do something, whether Chief Inspector Chen included him or not.

  NINE

  CHEN WOKE UP, BLINKING in the glaring sunlight streaming in through the half-drawn curtain. Still lying in bed, he reviewed his unsuccessful “approach” to Jiao in the restaurant the previous night.

  In spite of the “romantic” dinner in the well-preserved attic room under the time-sobered beams allegedly from Madam Chiang’s days, with a couple of tiny red paper lanterns dangling overhead, he had learned little that was new. Sitting opposite, in a pink tank top and white pants, her shoulders dazzling against the candlelight, Jiao appeared preoccupied, “the autumn waves” in her eyes reflecting something far away. Tossing a wisp of hair back from her forehead, she brushed off his efforts to bring the talk around to her family background. “No, let’s not talk about it,” she said. A silver knife lay beside her plate, like a footnote, the waiters and waitress coming and going, all dressed in the fashion of the thirties.

  Perhaps she had met people like him — more interested in her grandmother than in her. He knew better than to pressure her further. Besides, their conversation was disturbed by a loud Manila band and other louder diners, bantering tales about Madam Chiang, popping off the corks on expensive champagne like in the old days.

  At the end of the meal, Jiao let him pay the bill like the ex-businessman he claimed to be. He didn’t really worry about the expense since the staggering bill might function, for once, as proof of his conscientious work. She told the waiter to box the leftovers — “For Mr. Xie, who doesn’t know how to cook.”

  It was yet another confirmation of her being considerate of Xie. Parting outside the restaurant, they shook hands, and he had a feeling that her hand lingered in his for a moment. He saw a wistful smile flick across her face, as if touching a string, a peg in a half-forgotten poem.

  But that wasn’t enough for Chief Inspector Chen, far from the breakthrough he needed, as he concluded as he got up from the bed.

  He checked the cell phone first. No message. The information from Old Hunter so far, including the little indirectly from Detective Yu, didn’t appear promising.

  So he decided to sally out onto his second front, a move first contemplated after his talk with Jiao in the garden, supported in his thoughts about Eliot’s poetry, and necessitated by his unsuccessful approach at the restaurant.

  For the first attempt along that new front, Chen had actually done his homework. Before and after the dinner the previous day, he’d come up with a list of scholars’ works on Mao’s poetry. Though it could be said he had done some of the homework long before: He had read a number of books on the subject as early as his middle school years, when Quotations of Chairman Mao and Poems of Chairman Mao were his textbooks. Upon graduation, he had copied several lines in his diary as self-encouragement: The mountain pass may be made of iron, / but we are crossing it all over again, / all over again, / the hills stretching in waves, / the sun sinking in blood. After the Cultural Revolution, Chen, like many others, chose not to think too much about Mao or his poems. It was a page finally turned. Besides, Mao wrote in the traditional verse form, different from Chen’s free verse. Now, those poems of Mao’s came crowding back, fragmented more or less in the mind of the worn-out cop.

  Most of Mao’s were “revolutionary,” at least in the official interpretations, including the poem composed for his second wife, Kaihui, and another poem written about a picture taken by his fourth wife, Madam Mao. The two poems were the only ones he could remember that had any relation to Mao’s personal life.

  Some critics thought otherwise, perhaps. In traditional Chinese literary criticism, there was a time-honored tradition of suoying, i.e., an effort to find the true meaning of a work in the author’s life. Such an approach to Mao’s work might not have been practicable, for there was only the official version of his life. Still, a scholar in the field might know something inaccessible to Chen.

  On the list of Mao poetry scholars Chen had made, some were so established that it was beyond Chen to attempt a quick contact, let alone a quick breakthrough; some of them were high in their Party positions, having worked with Mao, which also excluded the possibility of Chen’s learning anything from them; some had passed away; and some were too far away from Shanghai. So the only one approachable at the moment was Long Wenjiang, a “scholar” quite different from all others, but in Shanghai, and a member of the Writers’ Association too.

  As a Mao poetry critic, Long had come to the fore during the Cultural Revolution. Not because of his academic studies but because of his class status as a worker. Having spent years collecting various annotations and interpretations of Mao poetry, he put them together into a single volume. The publication of the annotated edition immediately established h
im as a Mao scholar in the years when workers and peasants were encouraged to be the masters of the socialist society. He became a member of the Writers’ Association, as well as a “professional writer.”

  But Long’s luck dipped after Mao’s death in 1976. For several years, few were interested in anything related to Mao. Mao scholars started working on different projects, like Tang or Song poetry, but Mao was the only subject Long knew anything about. Instead of giving up, he plodded on, betting on a revival of interest in Mao. The revival finally came with Mao’s becoming a brand name in the materialistic age, with Mao restaurants and Mao antiques and people collecting Mao badges and stamps for their potential value in the market. Plastic Mao images had even become potent charms for taxi drivers, dangling in front of windshields, supposedly effective against traffic accidents. Chen, too, had a lighter made in the shape of the Little Red Book — click it and a spark would shoot up, like Mao’s prediction about the red revolutionary flame sweeping over the world.

  But there was no market value for Mao poetry in the collective revival. No publishing house showed any interest in Long’s revised edition, despite his passionate speeches and protests, both in and out of the Writers’ Association.

  That was not the only trouble for Long. In the last few years, the Writers’ Association had suffered several cuts in their government funding. People began to talk about reforming the system of “professional writers.” In the past, those acknowledged as professional writers could get their monthly pay from the association until retirement, regardless of their publications. Now a contract period was suggested, with each member’s qualifications being examined and determined by a committee. Long was desperate, beginning to write something like short anecdotes — totally unrelated to Mao — in his effort to remain in the contract.

  Chen happened to remember Long because of such a short piece published in Shanghai Evening. It was a vivid anecdote about river crabs, but “politically incorrect” in the judgment of the committee of the Writers’ Association, of which Chen was a member. So he dug the newspaper out and began rereading it. For a change, he added half a lemon and a spoonful of sugar into his tea.