Red Mandarin Dress (23 page)

On an impulse, he purchased a ticket and entered the temple he hadn’t visited in years.

The front courtyard appeared to have changed little, though it was covered with new cobbles. He strolled on like a pilgrim, sorting through his fragmented childhood memories—the miniature room with shining religious instruments, the monks with their large floating sleeves, the vegetarian meal in imitation of various fish and meat, the flight from the imagined ghosts along the corridors, the scripture–chanting sounding like mosquitoes on a summer night.

He felt slightly dizzy again, as if searching along a long dark corridor, expecting something ahead, but he wasn’t sure what. Sure enough, he saw a row of west-wing rooms still lining the wall. In the small rooms, people were sitting or kowtowing, their traditional offerings set out between burning candles. A file of monks moved in, beating fish-shaped wooden instruments and performing their religious service against the vanity of this mundane world. However, the resemblance to his childhood memory ended there.

A young monk strode out toward him, wearing a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and holding a cell phone. He greeted Chen with a look of expectation shining behind his light-sensitive glasses.

“Welcome to the temple, sir. Donate as much as you please, and your name will last forever here. We keep every offering in the computer’s record. Take a look at the billboard.”

Chen saw a donation billboard presenting an impressive picture of a tall gold Buddha, reaching out his hand, as if urging believers to donate. For the amount of one thousand Yuan, the donor could have his name engraved as a benefactor on a marble plaque, and for a hundred, his name would be stored in the electronic record. Next to the billboard was an office with its door ajar, showing several computers that guaranteed the proper management of the donations for the gold Buddha image.

Taking out a hundred Yuan bill, he inserted it into the donation box without signing his name in the register book.

“Oh, here is my card. In the future, you can send checks too,” the young monk said pleasantly. “A lot of people are burning incense at the burner over there. It really works.”

Chen took the card and headed to the huge bronze incense burner in the center of the temple courtyard. There he saw people putting afterworld paper money as well as incense into the burner.

An old woman was pouring in a bag of afterworld paper money, each piece already folded into the shape of a silver ingot. He had had no time for the job of folding, so he simply threw his bunch of silver paper into the burner. Slowly, it started burning with a somber flame, but its ashes swirled up high in a breath of wind, like a dancing figure, before vanishing out of sight.

“A sign,” the old woman murmured in an awe-stricken voice, alluding to the belief that the spirits take away the money in a sudden wind. “You don’t have to worry about her clothing in the winter.”

How could the old woman know that the offering was for a woman? He did it for Hong, thinking of her in that silk red mandarin dress.

Chen didn’t believe in the afterlife. Like a lot of Chinese, he simply felt a sort of comfort following some religious conventions. Somewhere, somehow, something possibly existed beyond human knowledge. Confucius says, “A gentleman doesn’t talk about spirits.” According to the sage, a gentleman has so many things to do in this world that there is no point worrying about the other world not known for sure. Still, Chen saw no harm in lighting a candle, holding incense, burning some afterworld money. Perhaps it could lead to a sort of communication with the dead.

He bought a bunch of tall incense and lit it, like others. He prayed that Buddha would guide him in his effort to catch the murderer, so that Hong would rest in peace.

As if that were not enough, he made a pledge, holding the incense: if he succeeded in catching the criminal, he would be a cop all his life, forgetting about all the other plans or ambitions he had for himself. A conscientious cop, contented.

Afterward, he moved to the back of the temple, where he climbed a flight of stone steps to a high-raised courtyard. Leaning against the white stone railing, he tried to think, gazing at the ancient eaves of the temple against all the postmodern skyscrapers.

He became aware of another monk coming toward him. It was an old monk with a weather-beaten face and a deeply lined forehead, carrying a long string of black beads in his hands, his steps barely audible on the stone.

“You look worried, sir.”

“Yes, Master,” Chen said, hoping that it wasn’t about making another donation. “I’m an ordinary man, lost in the mundane world of the red dust, so I am burdened with worries like a snail carrying its shell.”

“The snail may appear so because you think so. There is nothing but appearance.”

“You have put it so well, Master,” Chen said reverentially, for the old monk struck him as erudite. He recalled stories of sudden enlightenment in ancient temples. This could be an opportunity for his investigation. “Buddhists talk about seeing through—through the vanity of things in the world. I am trying hard, but I just can’t.”

“You are no ordinary man, that much I can see. Have you read the poem about the sudden enlightenment of Liuzhu?”

“I have read it, but it was such a long time ago. A metaphor about the bronze mirror, right?”

“Yes and no,” the old monk said. “When the elderly abbot was going to name a successor, he decided to test his disciples. The number one candidate came up with a poem. ‘My body is like a Bodhi tree, / my heart, a bronze mirror, / which I keep wiping, / so there’s no dust left.’ Not a bad one, you may say. But the dark horse, Huineng, a housecleaning monk, proved to be the wiser in his poem: ‘Bodhi is no tree, / and mirror is no heart. / There’s nothing there. / How comes the dust?’ ”

“Yes, that’s the story. Huineng was surely more thorough, and he succeeded.”

“Nothing but appearance. The tree, the mirror, yourself, or the world.”

“But we are still living in the world, Master.”

“While you still have a lot of things to do, you may not be able to see beyond that world so quickly. An ancient proverb says, Discard your knife and turn yourself immediately into a Buddha. It’s a proverb because it is by no means easy.”

“You are absolutely right. It’s just that I am so dumb.”

“No, it’s not easy to reach enlightenment. But you can try to clear your mind of all the disturbing thoughts—for a short while. You have to move ahead step by step.”

“Thank you so much, Master.”

“It’s our lot that we should meet here today,” the old monk said, pressing his palms together in a gesture of departing. “So why thank me? Good-bye. We will meet again if it’s so destined.”

According to Buddhism, everything happens through a sort of karma—a drink of water, a peck by a bird, or a meeting with an old monk, all of which must come out of what has happened earlier, and all of which leads in turn to something else.

So why not try, as the old monk suggested, to forget all the thoughts he had already had about the case and see it from a fresh perspective?

He remained standing by the railing, closing his eyes to empty his mind. He did not succeed at first. Perhaps people perceive only within the framework of preconceived ideas or images. No one lives in a vacuum.

So he took a deep breath, concentrating his mind on the
dantian
, a tiny spot above his navel. It was a technique he had learned in his Bund Park days. Gradually his energy seemed to start moving in harmony with the singular milieu of the temple.

All of a sudden, the image of the red mandarin dress came to him.

It appeared, however, in a way he hadn’t experienced before. He seemed to be seeing it
then and there
—in the sixties, against a background of red flags of the Socialist Education Movement, and himself wearing a Red Scarf, shouting revolutionary slogans with the “revolutionary masses.” It came to him that such a mandarin dress, whether in a movie or in real life, could have been controversial at the time, even though conservative by today’s standards.

He took out his cell phone and called Chairman Wang of the Chinese Writers Association. Wang didn’t pick up, so he left a message, emphasizing that, in addition to what they had already discussed, the image of the red mandarin dress could have been controversial in the early sixties.

Encouraged, Chen tried to repeat his experiment, but nothing came of it. He further modified it by lowering himself to the courtyard, where he sat in a lotus position with his legs crossed, reviewing the case from the very beginning—not like a cop, but like a man whose mind was not clogged by police training. Still nothing, though his mind seemed to obtain an intense clarity. He took a case folder out of the briefcase and began reading there, like a monk, as the temple bell began tolling.

Turning over a page, he lit upon something. Jasmine’s bad luck. Buddhists talk about retribution. “Retribution comes, but in time.” In a sort of secular Buddhist version, Chinese believe that people are punished or rewarded for what they do in this life—or even in the previous life.

Tian’s horrible luck might be so accounted for. It was too much, however, with Jasmine. Chen didn’t believe in punishment for a previous life. Nor did he see it as coincidence—that both father and daughter had such bad luck.

He thought of a novel he had read in his middle school years:
The Count of Monte Cristo.
Behind a series of inexplicable disasters was the mastermind Monte Cristo, working for his relentless revenge.

Was this possible in the case of Jasmine?

With her, and with her father too. A Mao Team member in those years, Tian could have persecuted or hurt someone who later carried out his or her revenge. If so, the style as well as the material of the dress would be accounted for.

But why the long wait—if done out of revenge for something that happened during the Cultural Revolution?

And what about the other girls?

He didn’t have immediate answers. Still, the last question let him see the difference between Jasmine and the other girls in a new light.

Those girls might not have been related to Jasmine at all.

The sound of the bell came again in the wind. He shivered with a vague possibility.

It was time for him to go to the bureau. He would talk to Detective Yu, whose frustration with his unannounced vacation was evident in the messages left on his phone. Whether he would be able to make a satisfactory explanation to his partner, he didn’t know. It didn’t seem a good idea to talk about his nervous breakdown, not even to Yu.

At the temple exit, he got a call from Chairman Wang in response to his message.

“Sorry I didn’t pick up in time, Chief Inspector Chen. I was in the bathroom, but I got your message about the possible controversy. It reminded me of something. Xiong Ming, a retired journalist in Tianjin, has been compiling a dictionary of controversies concerning literature and arts. He’s an old friend of mine, so I contacted him at once. According to him, there was a prize-winning picture of a young woman wearing a mandarin dress and the picture later became controversial. This is his phone number, 02-8625252.”

“Thank you, Chairman Wang. That really helps.”

Chen put another bill into the shining donation box at the exit and dialed Xiong’s number.

After introducing himself, Chen came to the point: “Chairman Wang told me that you have some information about a controversial picture of a woman in a red mandarin dress. You have been working on a dictionary of controversies, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have,” Xiong said from the other end of the line, in Tianjin. “Nowadays people hardly remember or understand the absurd controversies during those years when everything could be distorted through political interpretations. Do you remember the movie
Early Spring in February
?”

“Yes, I do. The movie was banned in the early sixties. I was still an elementary school student then, hiding a picture of that beautiful heroine in my drawer.”

“It was controversial because of the so-called bourgeois elegance of the heroine,” Xiong said. “The same with the picture of the woman in a mandarin dress.”

“Can you tell me more about the picture?” Chen said. “Is the mandarin dress a red one?”

“It represents a beautiful woman in a stylish mandarin dress, together with her son, a Young Pioneer wearing a Red Scarf. He is pulling her hand, and pointing toward the distant horizon. The picture is entitled, ‘Mother, Let’s Go There.’ The background is something like a private garden. It is a black and white picture so I’m not sure about the color of the dress, but it’s in a graceful style.”

“How could such a picture have caused a controversy?” Chen said. “It’s not a movie. There is no story in it.”

“Let me ask you a question, Chief Inspector Chen. What was the ideological prototype for women in Mao’s time? Iron girls, masculine, militant, wearing the same shapeless Mao suits as men. No suggestion of the female form or sensuality or romantic passion. So the political climate wasn’t favorable to the implicit message of the picture, particularly when it was nominated for a national prize.”

“What implicit message?”

“For one thing, it represented the ideal mother as feminine, elegant, and bourgeois. In addition, the garden background is quite suggestive too.”

“Can you describe the picture in greater detail?”

“Sorry, that’s about all I remember. I don’t have the picture in front of me. But you can easily find it. It was published in 1963 or 1964 in
China Photography
. That was the only photography magazine at the time.”

“Thank you, Xiong. Your information may be very important to our work.”

Chen decided to go to the library, which wasn’t too far away.

At the library, with the help of Susu, he got hold of a copy of the particular issue of
China Photography
in only ten minutes. It would usually take hours to unearth a magazine published in the sixties.