Alone at home, although it was now late at night, sleep still remained the farthest thing from Chen’s mind, being so displeased, disgusted with himself.

  He had not wanted to drag Molong into any potential trouble, but he had already done so. He had not wanted Jin to expose herself to possible danger, but he had just told her to go to Red Dust Lane, in spite of Yan, the head of the Red Dust Neighborhood Committee, who was busy scheming and plotting in the background.

  But did he have any other choice?

  Considered in the light of existentialism, making no choice is, in itself, making a choice …

  He was suddenly seized with an urge to read the third memoir Mei had given him, penned by Mei herself. He thought he should have done so earlier. Its contents might help. At a minimum, it could enhance his understanding of the relationship between Mei and X.

  Though perhaps this was nothing but an excuse he was making to avoid worrying about Jin’s adventure the next morning.

  Regardless, Chen snatched up the folder on his nightstand.

  DAY 4

  Night

  “A Decorated Zither”

  Li Shangyin (813–858)

  A decorated zither, for no reason,

  is made of fifty strings—

  one string, one peg, each

  reminiscent of the youthful years …

  Waking in the morning, Master Zhuang

  wonders whether he dreams of being

  a butterfly, or if a butterfly dreams

  of being Master Zhuang.

  Emperor Wangdi poured out his grief

  into the cuckoo’s sad cries in the spring.

  A shimmering pearl holds its tears

  to the bright moon on the blue ocean.

  A jade-induced mist rises

  under the warm sunlight on Liantian field …

  Oh, this feeling, to be recollected later

  in memories, is already getting confused.

  “Li Shangyin’s English Version I”

  Chen Cao

  The tenderness of the tea leaf between her lips.

  Everything is possible, but not pardonable.

  Propped up against a couple of pillows,

  I am studying an English version

  of Li Shangyin’s poem. It is strange

  to find a rich allusion transformed

  into a cliché, as if undressed,

  unimaginative in nakedness.

  Still it puzzles me that in his poems,

  love always comes in the bell

  of illusion, the smell of jasmine

  drifting in an incense-veiled bronze mirror.

  “A zither, for no reason, has its fifty strings

  broken, and across a stubble of pegs, a cuckoo

  is pecking for the lost years—

  a tear-holding pearl, sea-blued.”

  What can be recaptured in memory if one

  was lost then and there? Master Zhuang awakes,

  wondering if it is he who dreamed

  of being a butterfly, or if he is

  a butterfly who dreams of being

  Master Zhuang. Now the zoom … zoom

  of the dryer she is applying to her hair

  after her bath, or the distant sound

  of guns the soldiers are firing

  among the people in the square.

  I begin making decisions: to go into exile,

  not to compromise on the Chinese original,

  to do justice to Li Shangyin. And she

  comes to bed, turning off the light.

  Written after the Tian’anmen Square tragedy of June 4th, 1989 in Beijing.

  “The Same River: Part III”

  By Mei

  I woke up with a start, disorientated, the broken images of a fading dream in the back of my mind. The fragments were disconnected, singularly disconcerting.

  In the dream, I was climbing up a wrought-iron staircase, alone, to a large cedar deck jutting out over the Bund, which overlooked the moonlight-flecked water of the Huangpu River. The night was still young, and lovers lined the riverbank, like snails stuck against the new embankment, talking, nestling against each other, whispering endearments, oblivious to others standing next to them or to any red-armbanded patrollers stalking around.

  Leaning against the concrete railing, I found myself listening to the waves lapping against the shore, clutching a red apple in my hand. White gulls were hovering over the dark vessels in the distance. I shifted my glance to a somber-colored sampan swaying in the tide underneath. Another wave shoveled the sampan, bringing down a cloth diaper from a clothesline stretched across the wooden deck.

  “A family sampan with the couple working down in the cabin,” I heard myself murmuring to a black-mask-covered man standing at my side, chewing a piece of gum playfully, and blowing out a bubble in the lambent moonlight, “and living there too, day and night.”

  “A torn sail married to a broken oar,” he responded readily, as though out of a poem.

  As if in response to our talk, a chubby baby started crawling out of the cabin under the discolored tarpaulin, looking up at us, and grinning like a red-and-white Wuxi earthen doll.

  I let the man take the apple from my hand and throw it down to the baby in the boat. For a moment, all of a sudden, we seem to have the river to ourselves. “Not the river, but the moment it starts rippling in your clear eyes …” he said to me. The big clock atop the Custom Building began chiming, sending the melody of “East Is Red” through the night breeze. Or was it another melody—light, flickering under the soft moonlight?

  But it turned out to be the telephone shrilling on the nightstand. I was reaching out my hand when the ringing stopped.

  I glanced at my watch. Twelve fifteen in the afternoon. The sunlight was pouring languidly through the large window. For the life of me, I could not tell the identity of the man in my dream, who’d been speaking softly at my side, as if reading a romantic poem to me.

  When I was still a young girl, I, too, had loved romantic poetry, but it was such a long time ago, almost in another life. In the dream, I must have been only fifteen or sixteen, judging from the surrounding scenes; it was characteristic of the Cultural Revolution. During those years, I went to Bund Park to study English for several weeks. Whether I had read the poetic lines, I failed to recall.

  But who was the man at the Bund—in the dream?

  Surely not my late husband, who was not a man of letters. Besides, I had not even met him in those days.

  An inexplicable sense of anxiety gripped me.

  It appeared as if I had been transported back to the days when I was as poor as the people in the sampan, but still full of youthful, idealistic passion.

  A distant siren seemed to be coming over from the river. I got out of bed and drew back the curtain. Gazing at my reflection in the window, I could not help feeling a slight chill on my bare arms.

  I still had a hangover from the business party the previous night. A group of Big Bucks and Big Bugs had popped champagne bottles, toasting to the success of my “Shanghai Number-One” real-estate company, drinking cup after cup.

  Indeed, I had come so far—from the young girl I’d been in the lingering dream, standing on the Bund. There was no way for me to turn back into that young, poor, yet idealistic girl gazing down at the Huangpu River, clutching an apple, ready to throw it to a baby in the cabin of a small sampan.

  But the phone rang again, breaking into my thoughts.

  “Good news about the Red Dust Lane project, Mei.”

  “Oh, Ouyang. How like you that the first words you say to me in the morning are about business.”

  Ouyang chuckled. “I’ve talked to Zhou Xin, the guy in charge of urban development in our great city of Shanghai. He told me that because of its central location, Red Dust Lane is considered an intolerable eyesore, which will only grow more intolerable for the city in the future. He is determined that the old, shabby, ramshackle lane will disappear from the map of Shanghai.”

  “People have talked about the potential project for a long time, though,” I said. “There must be a reason they have not done it yet.”

  I thought I knew why—because of the risks involved there. In the past, a developer could have easily relocated the residents with a government document, plus a symbolic sum to compensate them. With housing prices continuing to soar, however, people had begun to realize the worth of their property. Red Dust Lane was dense in terms of population. Consequently, the compensation expenses would be staggering too, and some of the lane residents might choose to stay stuck there like nails, unyielding to the pressure of official demands—and not-so-official violent demolition. With the current government emphasis on a harmonious society, any protests or fights breaking out in the demolition process could turn into a political disaster for the developers, and for the officials behind them too.

  “This time, the situation is totally different. The image of the city of Shanghai matters so much for the World Expo,” he responded. “Also, there will be a new subway cutting across there, with the station located close to the site of the lane. The area around it will be classified as a priority for redevelopment.”

  So it was an old trick being played under a new name—the World Expo. The number-one politics in China today. Things had to serve politics first, I knew. People would hardly be able to resist or negotiate.

  “Whatever the excuse or reason,” I said, “some people will refuse to listen to the government propaganda, after so many housing development scandals in the city.”

  “But we have to push ahead, Mei. We don’t know how long the housing market boom will last. Time and tide wait for no man.”

  “Alas, I’m a woman, Ouyang,” I said with a sigh.

  What he said, however, was true. There was a new expression in Chinese—to run a business is to jump into the sea—which meant that it involves risks as well as opportunities. I had started my career as a businesswoman running a small family restaurant, but I had achieved my success thanks to unbelievable opportunities—one of which had come when I’d served a steaming hot bowl of wonton soup to Ouyang on a cold, rainy evening. At that time, Ouyang was only a neighborhood production group director. That rainy night, Ouyang took a fancy to my soup—to be more exact, to the way I placed the soup on the table with an engaging smile that “flashed up the gray wall.” He had since enjoyed a meteoric rise in his official career, and he believed that I had brought him luck. He now served as the assistant to the city mayor. And I had also come a long, long way—all the way to my present multi-billion-yuan success.

  “For this project, a lot of people’s interests are at stake—some of them higher than us. With the old lane remaining on the corner, property values in the area will never rise,” he concluded on the phone. “So you don’t have to worry about it. When the sky falls down, it’s up to them to shoulder it up.”

  The discussion had lasted longer than I expected. When I put down the phone, the clock’s hand was drawing toward one thirty.

  There was nothing important for me to do at my company that afternoon, I contemplated, draining a small cup of black coffee. It might not be a bad idea for me to go and take a look at Red Dust Lane, to explore the feasibility of the project myself. Ouyang’s narration was not unbiased. He was an undisclosed partner of my Shanghai Number-One real-estate company, so his own business interests were involved.

  My maid Song knocked before she came in, then put a bowl of stewed swallow nest on the table, and said respectfully, “It’s still warm, Madam. You were talking on the phone, so I kept the bowl in hot water.”

  I did not like the taste of swallow nest, but I still helped myself to one spoonful. A Fujian business associate had sent me a large box of it, which I suspected was obscenely expensive. Swallow nest was supposed to enhance a woman’s youthful looks. It was said that local farmers had to collect the wild nests on the cliffs. It would be too wasteful not to finish it.

  After taking a quick shower, I dressed myself in a light gray short-sleeved cashmere suit and walked out of the door.

  The car was already waiting for me on the driveway. The chauffeur surnamed Zhu hurried out to open the door for me. “Where are you going, Madam?”

  “Red Dust Lane,” I said. “It’s located on the corner of Fujian and Jinling Roads.”

  “You are visiting a friend there?” the chauffeur asked. “People say the lane is like a forgotten corner of the city.”

  This probably came from the title of a movie, A Corner Forgotten by Love, which I had seen in the eighties. I still remembered it well.

  But Ouyang and his associates were merely thinking of the lane as another highly profitable project.

  “Yes, I’m visiting someone I have not seen for years,” I said in a low voice to the driver Zhu. There was no point revealing the real purpose of the visit to the driver. Speculation could start easily about someone in my position as the “number-one” developer in Shanghai.

  Resting back against the car’s soft leather seat, I took out a small mirror, noticing a couple of fine lines around the corners of my eyes—reminiscent of “fish’s tails,” as I remembered the description in a Tang dynasty poem. Time swims away like the ripples left by a fish tail in the water, as in a transient dream.

  For me, it was perhaps not a bad dream, in the background of a larger, more dramatic saga—the incredible rise of China through economic reform. In the early summer of 2009, China’s success story was reaching a climax, with the Olympics successfully held in Beijing the previous year, and with the World Expo in Shanghai the next year.

  But could my business success turn out to be like a magic bubble, growing unimaginably large, resplendent under the sunlight? It was all because of the government’s new policy regarding land that had belonged to the state. It was now practically in the power of Party cadres to sell it—in the name of economic reform—to one developer or another.

  And in my case, Ouyang, with his crucial government position and connections, had gone out of his way to help me from the beginning. When my Small Family restaurant had been demolished, I’d received an incredibly large sum in compensation for my “premium business property,” so I was able to purchase all the land nearby. Ouyang had provided me with inside information, at an inside price too. Not to mention all the bank loans arranged by him. It was with the help of his business planning that I started up a real-estate company, which soon expanded in leaps and bounds. After the untimely death of my husband, Ouyang came to my place more frequently than before—though not always for business—as Shanghai ushered in an unprecedented boom of housing construction. Several projects under me were ballooning to more than a hundred thousand yuan a square meter. And I found myself turning into a very wealthy, well-known businesswoman …

  The vibration of my cell phone broke into my reveries again. Again, the LCD showed Ouyang’s name.

  For the last couple of years, he hadn’t come to see me as frequently as before. I know that putting distance between us would be prudent, particularly with my son Qiangqiang growing into a college student. I also knew that Ouyang had his share of little secretaries, younger and prettier than me. We were both realistic about how things were, though we found ourselves bound together even more than ever by his undisclosed yet sizable shares in my company.

  In the meantime, I kept hearing things about him. Things that more often than not sent a chill down my spine.

  “The city traffic is impossible,” Ouyang said on the other end of the phone call. He was apparently in his car, with traffic noise surging around. “There are at least three hundred new cars coming onto the road every day. I’m stuck in the tunnel near Yangpu Bridge, unable to move an inch.”

  “Yes, it is horrible. It’s the same here.”

  “Where are you going this afternoon, Mei?”

  “I’m thinking of going to Red Dust Lane—depending on the traffic. I would like to take a look there first.”

  “Shall I meet you there in the lane?”

  “No. With the traffic like this, I have no idea when I’ll reach the lane in question.”

  After the phone call with Ouyang, I turned to the driver, saying with a smile, “Take your time, Zhu. I’m not traveling for a business meeting today.”

  It took more than an hour for me to reach Red Dust Lane, which came into view like a shabby, solitary island surrounded by an immense sea of high rises.

  I told Zhu to drive around the area a couple of times before pulling up near the back entrance of the lane. I had heard the lane was close to a large street-food market, but I saw only a handful of stalls scattered here and there, far fewer than I had imagined.

  “You go back home, Zhu,” I said, stepping out of the car. “I don’t know how long I may stay here. Qiangqiang may need you too. I’ll take a taxi back.”

  I started walking toward the lane, looking up to the stone arch of the back entrance where “Red Dust Lane” was inscribed. I could see two or three bats hovering above the arch, beating their wings in an eccentric flurry.

  Soon, I became aware of curious glances from several youngsters lounging near the entrance, smoking, cursing, and shouting loudly as if they were the only people in the world.

  “Go forward bravely, my pretty young girl …” one of them imitated singing in a hissing, strident voice, obviously in reference to me—an incongruous figure heading diffidently for the lane. It was probably a tune from the popular movie Red Sorghum years earlier, with several words missing.

  I hastened to tell myself that I was no longer young, not at all. Certainly not like the passionate heroine in the movie.

  The lane presented a sharp contrast to the jostling skyscrapers all around it—dirty, sordid, overcrowded, revealing its helpless tears through the passing years. For a short distance, the dripping clothes strung along the bamboo poles across the lane obliterated the sky. It somehow struck me as intimate, mysterious, as if there really was someone waiting for me there, as I had told my chauffeur.

  I was hit with an inexplicable sense of déjà vu, but I was pretty sure that I had never set foot in the lane before.