Red Mandarin Dress (8 page)

But Jia was different from the others. He didn’t take on only profitable cases. Partially because of his inheritance from his family after the Cultural Revolution, he didn’t have to work for the sake of money. From time to time, he would take on controversial cases, which put him on a blacklist composed by the city government, even before he took over the West-Nine-Block housing development case.

Chen decided not to read any more. During his college years, he, too, had been put on a blacklist, by groundless political interpretations of his modernist poetry.

It was past ten when Chen arrived at the library. Susu, the librarian with enchanting dimples, brought him a cup of fresh coffee, strong and refreshing.

Still, his mind started wandering. Perhaps he was more drawn to the murder case than to the love stories, a realization that did not exactly surprise him.

Only after the second cup of coffee did he manage to settle down to another tale selected for his paper, “The Story of Yingying.”

The Tang dynasty
cuanqi
story was composed by Yuan Zhen, a well-known poet and statesman. According to subsequent studies, the narrative was largely autobiographical. In the year 800, Yuan traveled to Puzhou, where he met a girl named Yingying. They fell in love. Yuan then went to the capital, where he married a girl of the Wei family instead. Eventually, Yuan wrote a story based on the Puzhou episode.

Chen turned to the story with interest. In it, a scholar named Zhang traveled to the Temple of Universal Salvation, where Mrs. Cui was staying with her daughter Yingying on their way to Zhang’an. As the troops nearby rose up in mutiny, Zhang obtained help from his friend to provide much-needed security for the people in the temple. Out of gratitude, Mrs. Cui invited Zhang to a banquet, during which he met Yingying and fell in love with her, though she rebuked his advances with Confucian moralist lectures. One night, however, in a dramatic turn, she came to his western-wing room, offering herself to him. Soon afterward, he left for the civil service examination in the capital, where he received a letter from her. Part of the letter read:

Yuan’s scholar-protagonist then showed the letter to his friends before he deserted Yingying with a surprising moralistic argument, which came at the end of the story:

At that point in the narrative, the author—posing as Zhang’s close friend in the text—stepped in to endorse Zhang’s behavior in his own words.

Zhang’s decision, Chen observed, came as a volte-face, severing at one stroke the romantic theme. The character’s argument amounted to an assertion that a woman, if irresistibly charming, should be disposed of as an “evil influence,” for she will “ruin” the man close to her like a “monster.”

Chen thought that a better self-defense could have been made. The self-justifying rhetoric about Yingying’s being a monster seemed to Chen nothing but brazen hypocrisy—a poor excuse for Zhang’s having seduced her and then deserted her, making the story fascinating and confounding. It invited speculation about its inconsistencies: romantic passion, for example, was commended in the first part of the story and condemned in the second.

But for the purpose of his paper, the story’s similarities to the other tales he’d read was beginning to suggest a topic for his project. “The Story of Yingying,” like “The Story of Xiangru and Wenjun,” effected a deconstructive turn in the narration of the romance. The Han-dynasty story attributed the hero’s death of thirsty illness to the heroine, who, implicitly evil in her sexual insatiability, depleted and eventually destroyed him. In the Tang-dynasty story, the hero averted his destruction by accusing the heroine of being a monster who ruins people close to her. In both stories, the romantic theme was eventually denounced.

Chen was reminded, unexpectedly, of something in the red mandarin dress case: the killer’s ambivalence or contradiction. The murderer stripped and killed the victims, but he put their bodies in expensive, elegant dresses.

It was an elusive parallel, fading from his thoughts before he could fully articulate it. So he tried to refocus himself on the books, exploring the background of Yuan further. In literary criticism, the biographical approach sometimes contributed to one’s understanding of a difficult text.

But what about the criminal investigation? With the perpetrator’s identity unknown, biographical analysis seemed out of the question, and the meaning of the contradictory clues seemed indecipherable.

Again he found his mind stuck, torn between the two projects, which further confused and confounded him.

Around one o’clock, Shen called him at the library.

“Any discovery, Shen?”

“It’s a long story, Chief Inspector Chen,” Shen said. “I’d better tell you in person, I think. I can show you some pictures.”

“Great. Let me buy you lunch. How about Five Fragrance Resort? It’s a restaurant across the street from the library.”

EIGHT

AS CHEN STEPPED INTO
the restaurant, a waiter who had known him for years greeted him warmly.

“You haven’t come here in a long time, Chen. What would you like to have today?”

“Whatever you recommend, but not too much. Only for two people.”

“How about the Chef’s Special Combination for two?”

“Great. And a pot of strong green tea, please.”

While waiting, Chen tried to think about his paper again. Perhaps it was not enough to analyze only one or two stories. If he succeeded in proving the thematic contradiction as something common in classical love stories, it might be an original, worthy project. So he had to choose one or two more stories. He wrote that down in his notebook.

Closing the notebook, he looked up to see Shen shuffle into the restaurant, leaning on a bamboo stick topped with a dragon head. A white-haired and browed man in his early eighties, Shen looked spirited, wearing a cotton-padded traditional Tang costume and black cloth shoes. Chen rose and helped the old man to the table.

As it turned out, Shen hadn’t had a pleasant experience at the bureau. Detective Yu had hurried out for something urgent; Inspector Liao received Shen instead. Liao, declaring that he had already consulted several old tailors, showed little interest in Shen.

There might be another reason, Chen suspected, for Liao’s manner. Shen’s coming to the bureau at Chen’s request could have rubbed Liao the wrong way. It wasn’t necessary, however, to explain the bureau politics to the elderly scholar.

“Don’t worry about Liao. He can occasionally be as stubborn as a mule, and as stupid too,” Chen said, pouring a cup of tea for Shen as the waiter started serving cold dishes. “Please give me an introduction into the history of the mandarin dress. I am all ears.”

Shen, helping himself to a spoon of white jade tofu flavored with green onion and sesame oil and nodding in approval, started. “Now, why is it called mandarin dress? There are a number of theories about it. For one, the Manchurians, both male and female, wore gowns of bright colors. It is also said that in the early period of the Qing dynasty, the Manchurians divided their people into eight groups, or
qi
, each sporting a flag of a special color and design.
Qi
is the same as in
Qipao
—mandarin dress, you know. It was not until the twenties and thirties, however, that the dress suddenly turned into a nationwide hit, shedding its ethnic suggestion. It then enjoyed great popularity until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In the mid-eighties, it was reembraced, and now it’s internationally popular. Hollywood stars wear mandarin dresses to the Oscar ceremonies. People believe that it hugs a woman’s body subtly, bringing out her curves like no other dress. . . .”

It was a long introduction but Chen listened with great interest. The mandarin dress being an unmistakable signature of the murderer, a cop couldn’t be too knowledgeable about it.

“About the mandarin dress Liao showed me: it was made years earlier, probably more than ten years ago,” Shen said, producing several pictures, “based on the color of the thread—already yellow with time. When you consider the material, the special damask with its exquisite print pattern, it possibly goes back even earlier. The sixties, I would say. The same with the tiny steel press buttons. Tailors only used them during that time period or earlier. Since the early eighties, they’ve used plastic zippers instead, which are more comfortable and tighter fitting. The style of the dress also belongs to that period. Look at the whole-piece sleeves. Fashionable people now prefer separate-piece sleeves, which bring out the curves more eloquently. They are also much easier to make—”

Shen’s lecture was interrupted by the arrival of their main dishes. Among them, there was a glass bowl containing live shrimp immersed in white liquor. The drunken shrimp were still jumping, though less and less energetically.

“A fashionable dish,” Shen said, “sort of rediscovered too.”

For a man his age, Shen showed quite a good appetite. He chopsticked a twitching shrimp into his mouth and Chen followed suit. The shrimp tasted slightly sweet, but he didn’t like the slippery sensation on his tongue.

“Now I have to say a word about its tailoring,” Shen went on, puckering his lips. “A hundred percent handmade. Only an old, experienced Ningbo tailor could have produced such a dress. It took at least a week to finish. Today you may see a mandarin dress displayed in a high-end store, shiny and splendid with a staggering price tag, but the quality is just a joke. All machine made and not at all comparable to the one Liao showed me.”

“So it was made at least ten years ago, and the material and the style date back even earlier—the sixties or fifties,” Chen said, writing it down in his notebook. “In other words, the criminal had to special order material from an earlier period, and then custom-tailor it in a special way.”

“That’s beyond me,” Shen said. “But there’s something else in the way the victim wore the dress. The essence of mandarin dress aesthetics is subtle suggestiveness. The dress slits, for instance, reveal a woman’s legs, but not too much. A partial glimpse of her thighs could stir up the imagination most effectively.”

“So it’s like classical Chinese poetry,” Chen cut in. “Imagination rises out of what the poet does not say, or not directly.”

“Exactly. You know the difference. For example, a tall, buxom American star may wear a so-called modified mandarin dress, backless and extremely short in the skirt part. I, for one, would have lost all my sense of imagination at the sight of her bare back covered with speckles, and her legs and thighs shaven like mammoth tusks.”

“You are still so good with your Imagist touch, Master Shen.”

“To put it in another way, it is a dress that allows the wearer’s inner grace to shine through. Sensual, subtle, svelte. It’s not a costume that becomes everyone.”

“Yes, there is quite a lot of knowledge in that,” Chen echoed.

“The length of the side slits is another point of subtlety. For a woman of a good family, the slits are usually modest, suggesting her refined sense of decorum. Strictly speaking, when wearing a mandarin dress, a woman walks with small steps, without showing any dramatic body movement. A fashionable girl, however, may have to have higher slits for dancing or strutting around. As for a girl in the entertainment business, she would choose one with the highest slits possible, showing her legs and thighs seductively, and sometimes her buttocks too. It’s sort of the mandarin dress semiotics. In the thirties, a potential customer on Fourth Street would have approached her.”

“Yes, the dress etiquette speaks,” Chen said, swallowing another live shrimp without chewing it—a throat-scratching mistake with a terrible aftertaste. Fourth Street was an area where prostitutes had congregated before 1949.

“Also, an elegant lady wears stockings and high heels to match her dress, though not necessarily so formal at home. But look at the picture—no bra, no panties, no shoes, and the dress is rolled up high above her groin. Whoever did this murdered the dress too.” Shen paused for a moment before going on. “She’s a sex victim, I understand, but this dress is too old and rare to have been acquired by accident. Also, it is a fairly conservative dress—a woman doesn’t have sex in it. It doesn’t make sense.”