happened to move into the same neighborhood in the early sixties. So they became schoolmates in grade school, and then in high-school, too. Instead of seeking each other’s company, however, they’d kept their distance. The sixties was a revolutionary puritan period in China. It was out of the question for boys and girls to mix together at school.
Another factor was her bourgeois family background. Peiqin’s father, a perfume company owner before 1949, had been sent to a labor-reform camp in the late sixties, sentenced to a number of years for something unexplained, and died there. Her family, driven out of their Jingan District mansion, had to move to an attic room in Yu’s neighborhood. A thin, sallow girl with a tiny ponytail secured with a rubber band, she was anything but a proud princess. Though a top student in their class, she was often bullied by other kids of working-class family background. One morning, several Little Red Guards were trying to cut off her ponytail. It went too far, and Yu stepped forward to stop them. He exerted a sort of authority over the neighborhood kids as the son of a police officer.
It was only in the last year of their junior high-school that something occurred to bring them together. The early seventies witnessed a dramatic turn of the Cultural Revolution as Chairman Mao came to see the Red Guards, once his ardent young supporters, standing in the way of his consolidation of power. So Mao said it was necessary for the Red Guards-then called “educated youths”-to go to the countryside to “be reeducated by the lower and middle-poor peasants,” so that the young people would be gone from the cities, unable to make trouble. A nationwide campaign was carried on with drums and gongs sounding everywhere. In their naive response to Mao’s call, millions of young people went to the far-away countryside. To Anhui Province, to Jiangxi Province, to Helongjiang Province, to Inner Mongolia, to the northern border, to the southern border…
Yu Guangming and Jing Peiqin, though too young to be Red Guards, found themselves labeled as educated youths, despite the fact that they had received little education, with copies of the shining red Quotations of Chairman Mao as their textbook. As educated youths, they, too, had to leave Shanghai to “receive education in the countryside.” They were to go to an army farm in Yunnan province, on the southern China / Burma border.
On the eve of their leaving home, Peiqin’s mother came to see Yu’s parents. The two families had a long talk that night. The next morning Peiqin came to his place, and her brother, a truck driver at Shanghai Number 1 Steel Mill, took both of them to the North Railway Station. They sat in the truck, facing each other, staring at the cheering crowds, holding on to two trunks-all their belongings- and singing a Chairman Mao quotation song: Go to the countryside, go to the frontier, go to where our motherland needs us the most…
It was a sort of arranged engagement, Yu guessed, but he accepted it without too much thought. The parents of the two families wanted them, two sixteen-year-olds sent thousands of miles away, to take care of each other. And she had grown into a pretty girl, slender, almost as tall as he. They sat shyly beside each other in the train. They did take care of each other there. There was no alternative for them.
The army farm was tucked into a faraway region called Jinghong, Xishuangbanna, in the depths of southern Yunnan Province. Most of the poor and lower-middle peasants there were of the Dai minority; they spoke their own language and held to their own cultural traditions. To keep themselves above the dank and humid earth, the result of frequent tropical rains, the Dais lived in bamboo shelters raised off the ground on solid stilts, with pigs and chickens moving around below. In contrast, the educated youth stayed in the damp and stuffy army barracks. It was out of the question for the young people to receive reeducation from the Dais. A few things they did learn, but not what Chairman Mao might have wanted. The Dai convention of romantic love, for instance. On the fifteenth of the fourth month in the Chinese lunar calendar year came the Water Splashing Festival, which was supposed to wash away the dirt, death, and demons of the previous year, but it was also an occasion when a Dai girl would declare her affection by pouring water on her beau. The beau then came to sing and dance beneath her windows at night. If she opened the door, he would be her bed partner for the night.
Yu and Peiqin were shocked upon first arrival, but they learned fast. It was not a matter of choice. They needed each other’s company during those years, for there were no movies, no library, no restaurant: no recreation of any kind. At the end of long working days, they had only each other. They had long nights. Like so many educated youths, they began to live together. They did not get married. It was not because they had not grown affectionate towards one another, but because there might still be a chance, while their status was still recorded as single, for them to move back to Shanghai. According to the government policy, the educated youth, once married, had to settle down in the countryside.
They missed Shanghai.
The end of the Cultural Revolution changed everything again. They could return home. The movement of educated youths going to the countryside was discontinued, if not officially denounced. Once back in Shanghai, they did marry. Yu “inherited” his police position as a result of his father’s early retirement, and Peiqin was assigned the restaurant accountant job. It was not what she wanted, but it proved fairly lucrative. One year after the birth of their son Qinqin, their marriage had slipped into a smooth routine. There was little he could complain about.
Sometimes, however, he could not help missing these years in Yunnan. Those dreams of coming back to Shanghai, getting a job in a state company, starting a new career, having a family, and leading a different life. Now he had reached a stage where he could no longer afford to have impractical dreams. A low-level cop, he would probably remain one all his life. He was not giving up on himself, but he was becoming more realistic.
The fact was, with his poor educational background, and with few connections, Detective Yu was in no position to dream of a future in the force. His father had served twenty-six years, but ended up a cop at the entry level. That would probably be his lot, too. In his day, Old Hunter had at least enjoyed a proud sense of being part of the Proletarian Dictatorship. In the nineties, the term “Proletarian Dictatorship” had disappeared from the newspapers. Yu was just an insignificant cop at the bottom, making the minimum wage, having little say at the bureau.
This case served only to highlight his insignificance.
“Guangming.”
He was startled from his reveries.
Peiqin had come back to his side, alone.
“Where is Qinqin?”
“He’s having a good time in the electronic game room. He won’t come looking for us until he spends all his coins.”
“Good for him,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about him.”
“You’ve something on your mind,” she said, perching on a slab of rock beside him.
“No, nothing really. I have just been thinking about our days in Yunnan.”
“Because of the garden?”
“Yes,” he said. “Don’t you remember Xishuangbanna is also called a garden?”
“Yes, but you don’t have to say that to me, Guangming. I’ve been your wife for all these years. Something is wrong at work, right?” she said. “I should not have dragged you here.”
“It’s okay.” He touched her hair gently.
She was silent for a while.
“Are you in trouble?”
“A difficult case, that’s all,” he said. “I’m just preoccupied.”
“You’re good at solving difficult cases. Everybody says so.”
“I don’t know.”
She stretched out her hand and placed it over his.
“I know I shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to. If you’re not happy doing what you’re doing, why not quit?”
He stared at her in surprise.
She did not look away.
“Yes, but-” he did not know what else to say.
But he would think about her question, he knew, for a long time.
“No progress with the case?” she was changing the subject.
“Not much.”
Yu had mentioned the Guan case to her, although he rarely brought up police work at home. Running criminals down could be difficult and dangerous. There was no point in dwelling on it with his family. Besides, Chen had emphasized the sensitivity of the case. It wasn’t a matter of trust, but more of professionalism. But he had
