Red Mandarin Dress

NINETEEN

FRIDAY MORNING CHEN FINALLY woke up refreshed and reinvigorated.

He wondered how he could have slept like that for almost two days. It could have been due to the fabulous bu dinner. Some special herb with a miraculous effect. Manager Pei had real medical knowledge; he must have diagnosed Chen’s problem from Gu’s description and arranged for the particular bu dinner Chen needed. In traditional Chinese medical theory, Chen recalled vaguely, certain herbs could bring out the symptoms, so the body would adjust itself accordingly. Chen had overworked himself, so the special dinner enabled him to sleep soundly, making up for all those years of lost rest. Now yin and yang or other elements in his body would move in harmony again. Whatever the Chinese medical theory and practice, Chen hadn’t felt so good in a long time.

But he was slightly disturbed too. He’d had a weird dream shortly before dawn. He was sitting in an exotic garden, watching a young woman perform a striptease, dancing, singing like a siren, when he was suddenly seized with a fit of inexplicable abhorrence. He grabbed her, trying to strangle her in the flower bed. Struggling against him, the woman was no other than White Cloud, her dress turning into the red mandarin dress against the green grass.

The red mandarin dress case was still on his mind, but the appearance of White Cloud in the dream bothered him, not to mention his own behavior. Perhaps it was because of his experience in the Old City God’s Temple Market. Or perhaps it was the bu feast-such an unusual boost to yin or yang that he was aroused. Still, it might be a good sign. He had recovered enough to dream like a young man.

He decided not to think about it. It was not a morning for dream interpretation. He thought about the case in Shanghai again. It was Friday, he realized. Chen was tempted to call Yu, but he thought the better of it. Once he did so, his vacation here would be, for all practical purposes, finished, though he felt it had only started. He hadn’t even walked around the village a single time. Nor had he done anything about his paper yet.

He called White Cloud instead. She hadn’t read or heard anything new about the case, and she urged him to enjoy his vacation. She had visited his mother, who was getting along fine at home, so he didn’t have to worry.

Looking out of the window, he thought that he might take a stroll along the lake.

It was a bit cold outside and the lake looked rather deserted this time of the year. There was only one old angler sitting on the waterfront, wrapped up in a worn-out army overcoat. The bamboo basket beside him was empty. He seemed to be lost in meditation, or in a pose of meditation.

Chen walked on without disturbing him.

Chen looked up at the mountains silhouetted against the horizon. There seemed to be a cascade murmuring, not too far away. Looking back, he glimpsed, now at distance, a faint flickering light in the hand of the old man.

Against the woods and hills, the tiny light gleamed and was gone. A rustle of the pines swept through. A long deep sigh of the wind. He was strangely saddened. Then he turned onto a slippery trail, which wound between clumps of larches and ferns. He had to move slowly. It must have rained while he slept. Soon he reached a long carpet of pine needles, which muffled his footsteps. Then the trail widened unexpectedly, leading him to a local market.

The market was already alive at this hour, and most of the people there were tourists looking for souvenirs. He spent several minutes making his way through the crowd, when he came to a stop at a booth displaying afterworld money, a superstitious product not commonly seen in Shanghai.

“Dongzhi is approaching,” the peddler said warmly, folding the silver paper into a yuanbao-shaped silver ingot. In the Chinese afterworld, the main currency seemed to still be the silver ingot. “Folks need money to buy winter clothes there.”

On an impulse, Chen purchased a bunch of the afterworld money. He didn’t believe in it, but his mother did, burning it now and then for the benefit of his late father, particularly during such festivals as Dongzhi or Qingming.

Back in his hotel room, he picked up the books he’d brought and went to the indoor swimming pool.

The pool room had a wall set in one-way glass, so the swimmers could enjoy the warm, luxurious privacy while looking out to the view of the lake and hills in the winter. After a vigorous swim, he sat in a reclining chair at poolside and started reading.

Perhaps because of his English studies at Bund Park, he’d developed the ability to read and concentrate while outside. At that time, there was the ever-changing background of the Bund to distract him. Here, in addition to the view outside, he was enjoying the sight of young girls frolicking in the pool, their luscious bodies flashing in the blue water whenever he looked up from the ancient Confucian classics. It was ironic, for Confucius says, “A gentleman should not look if not in accordance to the rites.”

In accordance to the rites or not, the background made the reading less boring for him. His late father having been a neo-Confucian scholar, and Confucian maxims still part of Chinese daily life, as at the bu banquet, “Confucius says” wasn’t unfamiliar to him. But he had never systematically studied Confucianism, which had been banished from the classroom during his school years. He wished he had talked more to his father, whose early death had cut short the older man’s plan to instill the tradition into his son.

Chen took out his notebook. Some of his earlier research notes seemed related to Confucian rites. For Confucius, rites are everywhere and ever present. As long as people behave in accordance with the ancient rites, everything will be right, as they had supposedly been in the golden old times. While there appeared to be so many rites regarding so many things, Chen had never learned or heard about any regarding romantic love.

That morning, checking through the books he had carried there, he failed to find anything. Confucian masters neglected romantic passion, as if it were nonexistent.

Then Chen extended his search to marriage-hunli literally meant marriage rites in Chinese. Sure enough, he found several paragraphs on the marriage rites, though not a single word touching on passion among young people. To the contrary, young people were not supposed to meet before the wedding, let alone have feelings for each other. Marriage was to be arranged entirely by the parents.

In the Book of Rites, one of the Confucian canons, there was a straightforward statement on the nature of marriage.

[The rites of] marriage exist to make a happy connection between two [families of different] names, with a view, in its retrospective character, to secure the services in the ancestral temple, and in its prospective character, to secure the continuance of the family line. Therefore the gentleman sets great store by it…

The marriage rites consist of six consecutive ritual steps, which are the matchmaker’s visit, inquiries about the girl’s name and birth date, a horoscope for the couple, betrothal gifts, choosing a marriage date, and the bridegroom’s welcoming the bride home on the day of the wedding.

Throughout these activities, Chen read, the man and woman did not have a chance to meet until the very day of their wedding. Marriage, conducted in the name of the parents, for the sake of continuing the family line, had nothing to do with romantic love.

In his copy of the Mencius, Chen underlined a passage condemning young people who fall in love and act for themselves in disregard of an arranged marriage.

When a son is born, what is desired for him is that he may have a wife; when a daughter is born, what is desired for her is that she may have a husband. This feeling of the parents is possessed by all men. If the young people, without waiting for the order of their parents and the arrangement of the go-betweens, shall bore holes to steal a sight of each other or climb over the wall to be with each other, then their parents and all other people will despise them.

What the philosopher Mencius described as hole-boring and wall-climbing, Chen knew, became standard metaphors for rendezvous between young lovers.

Closing the book, he tried to sort out what he had just read. In a family-centered social structure, arranged marriage was in its interest, for romantic love could transfer the center of affection, loyalty, and authority from the parents.

“Excuse me, may I sit here?”

“Oh,” he said, looking up to see a young woman, pulling over a recliner to his side. “Yes, please.”

She stretched herself out on the recliner beside him. An attractive woman in her early thirties, she had clear features with a straight mouth, her hair framing her face in delicate curls. Over her swimming suit, she wore a white wrapper or sari of light material, probably a white caftan, which floated around her long legs. She also had a book in her hand.

“It’s so lovely to read here.” She crossed her legs and lit a cigarette.

He was not in the mood for talk, but he didn’t see it as a bad thing to have a pretty woman reading alongside him. He smiled without saying anything.

“I saw you at the restaurant a couple of days ago,” she said. “What a banquet!”

“Sorry, I don’t remember seeing you there.”

“I was sitting outside at a table in the dining hall, looking in through the windows. Everybody was busy making toasts to you there. You must be a successful man.”

“No, not really.”

“A Big Buck?”

Again he smiled. She wouldn’t have believed him to be a cop-alone, trying to finish a literature paper. Nor was there any point in revealing his identity here.

But what could be hers? An attractive woman all by herself in an expensive vacation village. He checked himself from thinking like an investigator. A nameless tourist on vacation, he was under no obligation to pry into other people’s lives.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

“A Confucian classic,” he said.

“That’s interesting,” she said, casting a glance toward the young girls in the pool. “Reading Confucius by the poolside.”

He was aware of the subtle irony in her comment. Confucius was right about one thing: I have never seen one who likes studies as much as beauties.

She, too, started reading her book, her hair jet-black in the sunlight, her eyes shining with “autumn waves”-possibly an expression from those love stories. He felt her closeness, noticing her unshaven armpit as she stretched one arm behind her head. She wore a bangle of a red silk string, which accentuated her shapely ankle. And he remembered some lines about a man’s mind digressing at the sight of a woman’s legs, white and bare, but in the sunlight, with a down of light black hair.

He chided himself and began questioning the necessity of the vacation. The scary experience he had had at home was perhaps an attack of coffee sickness. He might have been too panicky. Now he felt his normal self again. So why go on with the vacation here? A serial murderer was at large in Shanghai, but he was reading by the poolside, in a vacation village hundreds of miles away, thinking of amorous poetic images.

At least he should try to make some progress on the paper. So he opened his notebook and started to put something down for the conclusion.

In traditional Chinese society, the institution of arranged marriage implied hostility toward romantic love. But then how did there come to be all these love stories? Though he had analyzed only three, there were a large number of them. The publication and circulation of them, against the social norm of arranged marriage, should have been impossible-

An interruption arrived in the form of a waiter who recognized Chen as the “distinguished guest” at the banquet dining room and came over with a bottle of wine in an ice bucket.

Perhaps it was part of the routine service here, Chen thought, saying, “Sorry, I don’t have the coupon with me.”

“Don’t worry, sir,” the waiter said, putting the bucket on a small table beside his recliner. “It’s on the village.”

Chen gestured him to pour out a glass for the woman on the recliner next to him first.

“You’re somebody,” she said, taking a small sip, nodding her approval, before she set the glass back on the table.

“A lone stranger, far away from home,” he said, quoting a line from a Tang dynasty poem.

“Well, my other half went away for a business meeting,” she said, leaning over the table toward him, accentuating the swell of her breasts. “So I am left here, all by myself. The tide always keeps / its word to come. / Had I known that, / I would have married a young tide-rider.”

It was a quote from another Tang poem, the first half of which read: How many times / I have been let down / by this busy merchant of Qutang / since I married him! A surprisingly clever and self-deprecating quote, which implied that her husband was a busy and callous one, and she was lonely here.

“But a tide-riding young man couldn’t afford to bring you to a luxurious vacation village.”

“How true, and how sad. My name is Sansan. I teach women’s studies at Shanghai Teachers College.”

“My name is Chen Cao. A part-time student at Shanghai University.”

“I like traveling. So I should consider myself lucky to have a husband capable of affording the vacation package. By the way, are you so interested in an academic career?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “You just quoted a line concerning the woman’s status in the Tang dynasty. At the time, she might not have had much choice for herself. Do you think her problem was a result of her arranged marriage?”

“A problem of an arranged marriage? No, I think that’s too simplistic an explanation. My parents had an arranged marriage. A most happy one, as far as I know,” she said, taking another drink. “But think about the divorce rate today among young couples who have pledged their love by mountains and seas.”

“That’s some statement from a scholar on women’s studies!” he said. “The Confucian classics talk about nothing but arranged marriage. So I wonder how the Chinese people lived for two thousand years without talking about romantic love.”

“Well, the world is in your interpretation. If you believe it-I mean the interpretation that parents understand and always work in the best interest of the young people-you then live accordingly. Just like today: if you believe a materialistic basis is essential to any superstructure-with romantic love as a decorative vase on the mantelpiece-then you won’t be surprised by all the personal ads seeking millionaires in our newspapers.”

“This is indeed a Chinese brand of socialism.”

“You can say that again. Do you believe that love is something that has always been there, from time immemorial?” she said cynically. “According to Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World, romantic love didn’t exist until it was invented by the French troubadours.”

He felt shaken, sitting there inhaling the scent of her hair. For the last few years, with one case after another on his hands, he hadn’t had much time for reading, while she like so many others had been reading things he hadn’t even heard of. Seven days up in the mountains, thousands of years down in the world. Perhaps it was already too late for him to dream of another career.

“So are you reading Confucian classics for a project on arranged marriage?” she asked.

“I have been reading a number of classical love stories, and there is one aspect they have in common. Inevitably, the heroines seem to be demonized in one way or another, and the love theme is thus deconstructed.” He added, “You’re a scholar in the field. Can you enlighten me on it?”

“I like your choice of terms. Demonization of women and the deconstruction of love,” she said. “Long ago Lu Xun said something on that point. Chinese people always put the blame on women. The Shang dynasty collapsed because of the Imperial Concubine Da; King Fucha lost himself, as well as his kingdom, through the beautiful Xishi; Minster Dong Zhu fell prey to the charms of Diaochan. The list could be much longer. Even today, we all blame the Cultural Revolution on Madam Mao, though everyone is aware of the fact that without Mao, Madam Mao would have been nothing but a B-movie actress.”

“But that’s not something one finds only in China,” Chen said. “In the West, there is a similar concept-the femme fatale. And stories of vampires too, you know.”

“Good point. But have you noticed one difference? There are male as well as female vampires. Can you think of anything similar here? Besides, the femme fatale isn’t the most common image of women in the mainstream of Western thought, not the most important one in the dominant or official discourse.”

“That’s true. Arranged marriage was definitely an inherent part of Confucianism. So do you think that the stories in question became distorted under the influence of those dominant ideologies?”

“And those lovely women cannot but be crushed-in one way or another. It cannot be helped.”

“Cannot be helped-” he echoed as he thought of the case again.

Perhaps an author was somehow like a serial killer, who couldn’t control himself. According to postmodernist criticism, people are spoken by the discourse, rather than the other way around. Once a particular discourse takes control, or, as in a Chinese expression, once the devil takes over the heart, it’s the devil that acts, in spite of the man himself. In Freudian theory, the man’s actions are dictated by something in the subconscious, or the collective unconscious. It would be easy to write the murderer off as a nut, but it would be hard, yet important, to discover what discursive system was dictating him to do the killing. And how that system had been formed for him-

“For instance, in Plum Blossom in Golden Vase,” Sansan went on, taking his preoccupation as being induced by her words, “Ximenqin has to die because he has too much sex with women, ending with a final image of his semen gushing nonstop into Pan Jinlian, the shameless slut who literally sucks him dry.”

“Yes, I remember that.”

“And in another novel, Flesh Cushion, the hero has to castrate himself in the end because he can’t resist the sexual attraction of women.”

Apparently her work focused on the unfair representation of women. The talk was a lucky random harvest for his paper, for it indirectly supported his thesis.

“Yes, I can think of several common expressions that support the idea,” he said. “Hongyan huoshui, disastrous water of beauty, and meiren shexie, a snake and a spider of a pretty woman.”

He was encouraged by this train of thought. Indeed, it could prove to be something that hadn’t been previously explored. Not specifically, anyway. An original paper, as Professor Bian had put it.

“The expressions speak for themselves,” she said, then she changed the subject. “You quoted a line from Wang Wei. A lone stranger. So you have traveled to write your paper here?”

“Well, the paper is part of it.” He added, “I was sort of stressed out, so I thought a vacation would do me good.”

With that, their conversation drifted toward other topics.

“When the only criteria for a man’s value is in terms of his money, how long can an individual hope to hide himself in something like Tang dynasty poetry? For a romantic morning, perhaps. That’s how my moneymaking husband can be so important to me.” She added, “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Repression won’t do you any good.”

It was a comment he hadn’t expected. It was almost a Freudian echo, and he was slightly uneasy about her. Not because there was something cynical about her or because she was a feminist. His glance fell on the bangle of red silk string and silver bells around her shapely ankle.

Taking a deep breath, he dispelled the confusing ideas. He was not a scholar, perhaps not meant to be. Nor a Big Buck having his fling at a luxurious hotel-not the man in her imagination.

He was but a police officer, incognito, on a vacation paid for by someone else.

He noticed the pool beginning to empty. Perhaps it was time for it to close.

“There will be a ball here this evening. Will you be attending?” Her voice came soft in the afternoon sunlight.

“I would love to go,” he said, “but I may have to make several phone calls.”

Was that a professional excuse or was he really a busy businessman, like her husband?

“We’re staying in the same building, I think. My room number is 122. Thank you for the wine,” she said. “See you again soon.”

“Bye.”

He watched her leave, her long hair swaying across her back. At the turn of the path, she looked back and waved her hand lightly.

“Bye,” he said one more time, and then audible only to himself, “Have fun tonight.”