The Ghost Marriage

I

The letter arrived three days after Li asked Wu to circulate a poster of the girl’s face — an image reproduced from one of the photographs in Meilin’s medals cabinet. He had also asked Wu for background investigations on the girl’s family, and the boyfriend. Considering his attachment to a missing-persons case to be something close to demotion, Wu had instigated the checks with bad grace, and ordered teams of uniformed Public Security officers to paste up posters in public places all over Haidian. Now he came into Li’s office holding a sheet of paper and a torn envelope. His face was, unusually, bright with excitement.

‘We’ve got a response, Chief.’

Li looked up blankly from his desk.

‘Jiang Meilin. The missing girl.’ Wu waved the paper and envelope. ‘Anonymous letter.’

Li stood up and reached into his pocket. ‘And you didn’t think to wear gloves?’

Wu’s face fell. ‘I didn’t know what it was until after I’d opened it.’

Li produced a pair of latex gloves and put them on. He took the letter and envelope and placed them carefully on the desk, then leaned over to have a look.

‘It was posted yesterday in Haidian,’ Wu said, as if trying to compensate for his mistake.

Li examined the postmark, then ran his eyes over the neat calligraphy that the sender had used to address the envelope. ‘An educated hand,’ he said. His gaze returned to the postmark. ‘And this is the post office that serves Beida, if I’m not mistaken. It could be the letter was written by a student, or a professor, at Beijing University.’

Wu said nothing. He knew that this was not a conclusion he would have reached himself. But then, that was probably why he was still a detective, while Li was Section Chief.

‘The university recently installed a biometric fingerprint scanner to speed up processing in the canteen. So let’s see what prints we can lift off this...’ Li glanced at Wu, ‘... excluding yours, of course. Then do a comparison check with their database.’

Li turned his attention to the letter itself. It was a cryptic note:

I saw your missing girl at a ghost wedding last week. She was the bride.

Li looked up, perplexed. ‘Ghost wedding?’

Wu nodded. ‘That’s what I thought. I did some asking around. Apparently it’s a tradition that still exists in some remote rural communities. It’s bad luck for a young man to die unmarried. So the family buys the corpse of a recently deceased female and they perform some kind of marriage ceremony. A ghost wedding. It seems there’s a sociology professor at Tsinghua University who is something of an expert on the subject.’

II

Tsinghua University was once described by the nearly president of the United States, Al Gore, as the MIT of China. It was an eclectic collection of faculties, from mechanics and technology to law, sociology and medicine. Each faculty was represented by one of the vast stone or marble edifices on each side of a wide, tree-shaded avenue leading to the massive master building at the far end. At this time of year there were almost no students on campus. Only occasional cyclists passed along the boulevard, possibly here for special summer classes. Many of the staff, however, were still at work.

Professor Bao seemed happy for Li to interrupt the monotony of the summer vacation, and used the excuse to stretch his legs and get some air. Two young men in shorts and T-shirts played basketball on a macadam court as the young policeman and the elderly professor walked by.

‘Minghun,’ said Professor Bao, ‘is what it is called among the peoples of the Loëss Plateau. An afterlife marriage. It has its roots in the ancient form of ancestor veneration which maintains that we all continue to exist after death, and that the living are obliged to tend to our needs.’

‘Including the arranging of a marriage?’

‘Indeed. It is traditional Chinese belief that an unmarried life is incomplete, and some parents fear that an unmarried dead son could be an unhappy one. So they find a bride for him after death.’

‘How do they do that?’

‘Oh, usually through an informal network of family or friends, they will find parents who have recently lost a single daughter. Those parents will sell the body as a way of finding their daughter a place in the dead man’s family line. You see, Section Chief Li, outside of the cities, China is really still a paternal clan culture. A woman does not belong to her parents. She has no place on her father’s family tree. She must marry into her husband’s ancestral lineage.’

‘So money changes hands.’

The white-haired old professor nodded and smiled. ‘I know, I know. It is illegal to buy and sell bodies, but it happens.’

‘Even in Beijing?’

‘Unlikely, I would have thought. Unless you had a community of families from an area of China that practised the minghun.’

Which was exactly, Li thought, what he had discovered among the condemned urban slums of Haidian District.