A Loyal Character Dancer

Chapter 8

Standing by a Mercedes, Chen saw Catherine Rohn stepping out of the hotel’s revolving door wearing a white dress, like an apple tree blossoming in the April sunlight of Shanghai. She looked refreshed and she broke into a smile at the sight of him.

“This is Comrade Zhou Jing, our bureau’s driver,” Chen introduced her. “He will be with us for the day.”

“Nice to meet you, Comrade Zhou,” she said in Chinese.

“Welcome, Inspector Rohn,” Zhou said, looking over his shoulder with a broad grin. “People call me Little Zhou.”

“They call me Catherine.”

“Little Zhou is the best driver in our bureau.” Chen took his seat beside her.

“This is the best car,” Zhou said. “And we are doing our best, Inspector Rohn, or Chief Inspector Chen would not be with you today.”

“Really!”

“He’s our ace inspector, the rising star in the bureau, you know.”

“I know,” she said.

“Don’t exaggerate like that, Little Zhou.” Chen said. “Keep your eyes on the road.”

“Don’t worry. I’m familiar with the area. So I’m taking a short cut.”

Chen started speaking in English to her. “Any new information on your side?”

“Ed Spencer, my boss, checked the grocery store where Feng did his shopping. Feng does not drive. Nor has he any friends in D.C. Going to a couple of Chinese stores within walking distance is about all he does there. It is an old store, with no recorded connection to the secret societies. The receipt showed that Feng had visited the store on the day he phoned the warning. He bought noodles and rented several Chinese videotapes. On the way home, he also stepped into a Chinese gift and herb store, and a Chinese barbershop. So the warning could have been put into his grocery bag in these places too.”

“I’ve discussed the new development with Party Secretary Li. It is important, we believe, to find out how the gangsters discovered his whereabouts.”

“Beats me. Our special group consists only of Ed and me. Our translator, Shao, is an old CIA hand,” she said. “I don’t think there was a leak on our side.”

“The decision to let Wen go to the United States was made at a very high level of our government. Neither Party Secretary Li nor I had heard anything about Feng or Wen until the day before your arrival,” Chen countered.

“It was a blow to Feng’s confidence in our program. He called his wife without telling us first. Ed is about to relocate him.”

“I would like to make a suggestion, Inspector Rohn. Keep him where he is. Put more men around him for his protection. The gang may try to contact him again.”

“It may be dangerous for him.”

“If they had intended to take his life, they would have done so instead of warning him first. I believe they just want to prevent him from speaking out against Jia. They will make no attempt on his life unless they have no other choice.”

“You have a point, Chief Inspector Chen. I will discuss it with my boss.”

Due to Little Zhou’s short cut, they soon reached Shandong Road, where Wen Lihua, Wen Liping’s brother, lived with his family. It was a small street lined with old rundown houses from the turn of the century. The street in the Huangpu District had been part of the French concession but, in recent years, as it was surrounded with new buildings, it had become an eyesore. The street entrance was crammed with illegally parked bikes, cars, and illegally stored rusty steel and iron parts from a neighborhood factory. Little Zhou had a hard time maneuvering the car to a stop in front of a two-story house. On the discolored, cracked front door the faded number hardly showed.

The staircase was dark, steep, narrow, dust-covered, dim even during the day. The boards creaked under their feet, suggesting several steps were in bad repair. Most of the paint on the banister had long since peeled off. Catherine climbed up cautiously in her heels, and almost stumbled.

“Sorry,” Chen said, grasping her elbow.

“No, it’s not your fault, Chief Inspector Chen.”

He noticed her wiping her hands on a handkerchief as they reached the second floor. There they saw an oblong room packed with odds and ends: broken wicker chairs, discarded coal stoves, a table with a leg missing, and an antique cabinet that might have served as a cupboard. There was a dining table with several stools in a corner.

“Is this a storage area?” she asked.

“No. It was originally a living room, but now it’s a common room-for three or four families living on the same floor, each getting a portion of the space.”

There were several doors along one side of the common room. Chen knocked on the first one. It was answered by an old woman who shuffled out on bound feet.

“You’re looking for Lihua? He’s in the room at the end.”

The door at the end was opened by someone who had heard their footsteps. A man in his mid-forties, tall, lanky, bald, with thick eyebrows and a mustache, wearing a white T-shirt, khaki shorts, rubber-soled sandals, and a tiny bandage on his forehead. He was Wen Lihua.

They entered a room of fifteen or sixteen square meters. Its furnishing bespoke poverty. An old-fashioned bed sported a blue-painted iron headboard still displaying a plastic poster of Chairman Mao waving his hand on top of Tiananmen Gate; the original design on the headboard was no longer recognizable. In the middle of the room was a red-painted table, which bore a plastic pen holder and a bamboo chopsticks container-an indication of the table’s multiple uses. There were a couple of threadbare armchairs. The only thing relatively new was a silver-plated frame holding a picture of a man, a woman, and a couple of kids huddled together behind a collective smile. The picture must have been taken years earlier when Lihua had still had hair combed over his forehead in a rakish way.

“You know why we are here today, Comrade Wen Lihua?” Chen held out his card.

“Yes. It’s about my sister, but that’s all I know. My boss told me to take the day off to help you.” Lihua gestured them to be seated on the chairs around the table and brought over cups of tea. “What has she done?”

“Your sister has not done anything wrong. She has applied for a passport to join her husband in the United States,” Catherine said in Chinese, holding out her identity card.

“Feng’s in the United States?” Lihua scratched his bald head, then added, “Oh, you speak Chinese.”

“My Chinese is not good,” she said. “Chief Inspector Chen will conduct the interview. Don’t worry about me.”

“Inspector Rohn has come here to help,” Chen said. “Your sister has disappeared. We wonder whether she has contacted you.”

“Disappeared! No, she has not contacted me. This is the first time I’ve heard that Feng is there or that she plans to join him.”

“You may not have heard from her recently,” Chen said. “But anything you know about her will help us.”

Catherine took out a mini tape recorder.

“Believe it or not, I have not talked to her for several years,” Lihua sighed deep into his cup. “And she is my only sister.”

Chen offered him a cigarette. “Please go ahead.”

“Where shall I start?”

“Wherever you please.”

“Well, our parents had only the two of us, me and my sister. My mother passed away early. Father brought us up-in this very room. I’m ordinary. Nothing worth talking about. Not now, not then. But she was so different. So pretty, and gifted too. All her elementary-school teachers predicted a bright future for her in socialist China. She sang like a lark, danced like a cloud. People used to say she must have been born under a peach tree.”

“Born under a peach tree?” Catherine asked.

Chen explained, “We describe a girl as beautiful as a peach blossom. There is also a superstitious belief that someone born under a peach tree will grow up to be a beauty.”

“Whether born under a peach tree or not,” Lihua continued with another sigh wreathed in cigarette smoke, “she was born in the wrong year. The Cultural Revolution broke out when she was in sixth grade. She became a Red Guard cadre as well as a leading member of the district song-and-dance ensemble. Schools and companies invited her to appear and sing the revolutionary songs and dance the loyal character dance.”

“Loyal character dance?” she asked once again. “Please excuse my interruption.”

“During those years, dancing was not allowed in China,” Chen said, “except in one particular form-dancing with a paper cut-out of the Chinese character for Loyalty or with a red paper heart bearing the character, while making every imaginable gesture of loyalty to Chairman Mao.”

“Then came the movement of the educated youths going to the countryside,” Lihua went on. “Like others, she responded to Mao’s call whole-heartedly. She was only sixteen. Father was concerned. At his insistence, instead of leaving with her schoolmates, she went to a village in Fujian Province, Changle Village, where we had a relative who would look after her, we hoped. Things seemed not to be too bad at first. She wrote back regularly, talking about the necessity of reforming herself through hard labor, planting seeds in the rice paddy, cutting firewood on the hill, plowing with an ox in the rain… In those years, a lot of young people believed in Mao as if he were a god.”

“Then what happened?”

“She suddenly stopped writing. It was impossible for us to call her. We wrote to the relative, and he said vaguely that she was fine. After a lapse of several months, we got a short letter from her, saying that she was married to Feng Dexiang, and expecting a baby. Father went there. It was a long, difficult trip. When he came back, he was a changed man, totally broken, white-haired, devastated. He did not tell me much. He had cherished high hopes for her.

“We hardly heard from her at all then.” Lihua rubbed his forehead forcefully with one hand, as if in an effort to ignite his memory. “Father blamed himself. Had she remained together with her schoolmates, she, too, might have eventually returned home. This notion sent him to an early grave. And that’s the only time she came back to Shanghai. To attend Father’s funeral.”

“Did she talk to you when she came back?”

“Only a few meaningless words. She was totally changed. I wondered whether Father could have recognized her in her black homespun and white towel hood. How could Heaven have been so unfair to her? She cried her heart out, but talked little to anybody. Not to me. Nor even to somebody like Zhu Xiaoying, her best friend in high school. Zhu came to the funeral and gave us a quilt.”

Chen saw Catherine taking notes.

“Afterwards, she wrote back even less,” Lihua continued in a flat tone. “We learned that she got a job in a commune factory, but that was no iron rice bowl. Then her son died in an accident. Another devastating blow. We got the last letter from her about two years ago.”

“Are there others in Shanghai still in contact with her?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Well, her classmates had a reunion last year. A grand party in the Jin River Hotel, organized and paid for by an upstart who had an invitation card mailed to each classmate, saying that anyone unable to attend could send a family member instead. Wen did not come back for the reunion. So Zhu insisted on my going. I had never been to a five-star hotel before, so I agreed. During the meal, several of her former classmates approached me for information about her. I was not surprised. You should have seen her in high school. So many boys were infatuated with her.”

“Did she have a boyfriend in school?” she asked.

“No, that was unthinkable in those years. As a Red Guard cadre, she was too busy with her revolutionary activities.” Lihua added, “Secret admirers, perhaps, but not boyfriends.”

“Let’s say secret admirers,” Chen said. “Can you name any of them?”

“There were quite a few of them. Some were present at the reunion, too. Some of her schoolmates are down and out. Like Su Shengyi, totally broke. But he was a Red Guard cadre then, and came to our home a lot. He went to the reunion for a free meal, just like me. After a few drinks, he told me how he had admired Wen, his eyes brimming with tears. And Qiao Xiaodong was there too-he’s already in a waiting-for-retirement program, gray-haired, broken-spirited. Qiao had played Li Yuhe in The Story of the Red Lantern. They were in the same district song-and-dance ensemble. How things change.”

“What about the upstart who paid for the reunion?”

“Liu Qing. He entered a university in 1978, became a Wenhui Daily reporter, a published poet, and then started his own business. Now he’s a millionaire with companies in Shanghai and Suzhou.”

“Was Liu also a secret admirer of hers?”

“No, I don’t think so. He did not talk to me, too busy making toasts to other classmates. Zhu told me that Liu was a nobody in high school. A bookish boy with a black family background. He wouldn’t have presumed to be Wen’s admirer. It would have been like an ugly toad’s mouth watering at the sight of a white swan. Indeed, the wheel of fortune turns quickly. It does not have to take sixty years.”

“Another Chinese proverb,” Chen explained. “ ‘The wheel of fortune turns every sixty years.’ “

Catherine nodded.

“My poor sister was practically finished when she was only sixteen. She was too proud to come to the reunion.”

“She has suffered too much. Some people close up after a traumatic experience, but where there’s life, there is always hope.” Catherine said, “Is there no one your sister might contact in Shanghai?”

“No one except Zhu Xiaoying.”

“Do you have Zhu’s address?” Chen said. “And the addresses of some of her schoolmates too, like Su Shengyi and Qiao Xiaodong?”

Lihua took out an address book and scribbled a few words on a scrap of paper. “Five of them are in here. Among them, I’m not sure about Bai Bing’s. It’s a temporary one. He moves a lot, selling fake stuff in Shanghai and elsewhere. I don’t have Liu Qing’s, but you can find his easily enough.”

“One more question. Why didn’t she try to come back to Shanghai after the Cultural Revolution?”

“She never wrote to me about it.” There was a slight catch in Lihua’s voice. This time he rubbed his hand across his mouth. “Zhu may be able to tell you more. She also came back in the early eighties.”

As they stood up, Lihua said hesitantly, “I’m still confused, Chief Inspector Chen.”

“Yes. What do you want to know?”

“Nowadays so many people go abroad-legally or illegally. Particularly the Fujianese. I’ve heard quite a lot about them. What is so important about my sister?”

“The situation is complicated,” Chen said, adding his cell phone number to his card. “Let me say this. Her safe arrival there is in the interests of the United States and China. A Fujian triad also may be looking for her. If they get hold of her, you can imagine what they will do. So if she contacts you, let us know immediately.”

“I will, Chief Inspector Chen.”