evening. She lived with her parents. He had only visited her home once. Old, prudish, traditional, her parents were not too friendly because they were aware of his attentions to their married daughter.
What was Wang doing at the moment? He wished he could call her, tell her that success in his career, gratifying as it appeared, was no more than a consolation prize for the absence of personal happiness.
It was a serene summer night. The moonlight was lambent among the shimmering leaves, and a lonely street lamp cast a yellow flickering light on the ground. A violin could be heard from an open window across the street. The melody was familiar, but he could not recall its name. Sleepless, he lit a cigarette.
A young woman, Guan must also have experienced her moments of surging loneliness-sudden sleeplessness, in that small dorm room of hers.
The ending of a poem by Matthew Arnold came swelling to him in the night-air: Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
It was a poem he had translated years earlier. The broken and uneven lines, as well as the abrupt, almost surrealist transitions and juxtapositions, had appealed to him. The translation had appeared in Reading and Understanding, along with a short critical essay by him, claiming it as the saddest Victorian love poem. Whether it was really an echo of the disillusioned Western world, as he had maintained in the essay, however, he was no longer so sure. Any reading, according to Derrida, could be a misreading. Even Chief Inspector Chen could be read in one way or another.
Chapter 13
Saturday in late May was once again clear and fine.
The Yus were visiting the Grand View Garden in Qingpu, Shanghai.
Peiqin was in her element, carrying a copy of The Dream of the Red Chamber. It was a dream come true to her.
“Look, that’s the bamboo grove where Xiangyuan takes her nap on the stone bench, and Baoyu stands watching her,” she said, turning the pages to that part of the story.
Qinqin was in high spirits, too, running about, losing and finding himself in a traditional Chinese garden maze.
“Take a picture of me by the vermilion pavilion,” she said.
Yu had the blues, but he was making a gallant effort to conceal his mood. He held up the camera, knowing how much the garden meant to Peiqin. A group of tourists also came to a stop in front of the pavilion, and the guide began elaborating on the ancient architectural wonder. Peiqin listened intently, oblivious to him for the moment. He stood among the crowd, nodding, but pursuing his own thoughts.
He had been under a lot of pressure in the bureau. Commissar Zhang was unpleasant to work with, all the more so after the last group meeting. Chief Inspector Chen was not intolerable, but he obviously had something up his sleeve. The Party Secretary, while gracious to Chen and Zhang, brought all the pressure to bear upon Yu, who was not even the lead investigator for the case. Not to mention the fact that Yu actually had the main responsibility for the other cases in the squad.
Little had come out of his renewed focus on the taxi bureau and travel agencies. The reward offered for information about any suspicious driver seen that night near the canal was a long shot. No response came, as Yu had expected.
There was no progress from Chen either, with respect to his theory about the caviar.
“The garden is a twentieth-century construction of the archetypal idea exhibited in The Dream of the Red Chamber, the classical Chinese novel most celebrated since the mid-nineteenth century.” The guide was speaking glibly, holding a cigarette with a long filter tip as he delivered his introduction. “Not only are the lattice windows, doors, or wood pillars exactly of the same design, the furniture also reflects the conventions of the time. Just look at the bamboo bridge. And the asparagus fern grotto, too. We’re truly living in the novel here.”
Indeed, the garden was a draw to fans of the novel. Peiqin had talked about visiting it five or six times. There had been no putting off this visit.
A moss-covered winding path led into a spacious hall with oblong windows of stained glass, through which the “inner garden” appeared cool and inviting, but Yu was in no mood for any further expedition. He felt stupid and out-of-place, as he stood by Peiqin in the crowd, though he pretended to be interested like everybody else. Some people were taking pictures. By a strange-shaped grotto stood a makeshift photography booth where tourists could rent so-called Ming dynasty costumes and jewelry. A young girl was posing in a heavy antique golden headdress, and her boyfriend was changing into a dragon-embroidered silk gown. And Peiqin, too, was being transformed by the splendor of the garden, as she busily compared the chambers, stone pavilions, and moon-shaped gates with the pictures in her mind. Looking at her, he almost believed that she belonged there, expecting Baoyu-the young, handsome hero of the novel-to walk out of the bamboo grove any minute.
She also seized the opportunity to share her knowledge of classical Chinese culture with Qinqin. “When Baoyu was your age, he had already memorized the four Confucian classics.”
“The four Confucian classics?” Qinqin said. “Never heard of them in school.”
Having failed to elicit the expected response from her son, she turned to her husband. “Look, this must be the stream where Daiyu buries the fallen flower,” she exclaimed.
“Daiyu buries her flower?” he said, at a total loss.
“Remember the poem by Daiyu-‘ I’m burying the flower today, but who’s going to bury me tomorrow?’”
“Oh, that sentimental poem.”
“Guangming,” she said, “your thoughts are not in the garden.”
“No, I am enjoying every minute of it,” he assured her. “But I read the novel such a long time ago. We were still in Yunnan, you remember.”
“Where are we going now?”
“To be honest, I’m a bit tired,” he said. “What about you and Qinqin going ahead to the inner garden? I’ll sit here for a few minutes, finish my cigarette, and then I’ll join you there.”
“That’s fine, but don’t smoke too much.”
He watched Peiqin leading Qinqin into the quaint inner garden through the gourd-shaped gate, effortlessly, as if she were moving back into her own home.
He was no Baoyu, and never meant to be. He was a cop’s son. And a cop himself. Yu ground out his cigarette under his foot. He was trying to be a good cop, but he was finding it more and more difficult.
Peiqin was different. It was not that she complained. In fact, she was contented. As a restaurant accountant, she earned decent money, about five hundred Yuan a month with perks. Enjoying a nice little niche, she did not have to work with the customers. And at home, small as it was, things were smooth and satisfactory, too, she had often said.
But her life could have been different, he knew. A Daiyu or a Baochai, just like one of those beautiful, talented girls in the romantic novel.
In the beginning of The Dream of the Red Chamber, there were twelve lovely girls who lived out their romantic karma as preordained in Fate’s heavenly register. According to the author, a love affair is predestined for lovers sauntering under the moon in the Grand View Garden. Of course that’s fiction. In real life, however, things might be stranger even than in fiction.
He tried to extract another cigarette, but the pack was empty. A crumpled Peony box. The monthly ration coupons allowed him only five quality-brand packs, such as Peony and Great Wall, which he had already finished. He reached into his jacket pocket for a metal cigarette case, in which he kept some cigarettes he had rolled himself, a secret from Peiqin, who was worried about his heavy smoking.
They had known each other since their early childhood. “Playmates on stilted bamboo horses, / Chasing each other, plucking green plum blossoms.” Doctor Xia had copied the couplet from Li Bai’s “Zhanggan Song” on two red silk streamers for Yu and Peiqin’s wedding.
But that innocently romantic childhood had not been exactly true for them. It was just that her family had
