“Several years later, around 2020, sure enough, the housing market started deteriorating and prices went into freefall. A lot of developers declared bankruptcy. Thanks to the fortune he told for me, I’d started pulling my capital out of the housing market much earlier, and I paid off all my bank loans before the bubble burst. I have remained largely unscathed, despite the current housing market crisis, and I think I’m in a position to keep surviving, to say the least.”

  “That’s wonderful, Mei.”

  “So the retaining fee I paid to the Zhang Zhang agency is nothing to me, Director Chen.”

  Mei was serious. No question about that. Her slender fingers kept tapping nervously on the edge of the table. A drop of black coffee splashed out of her cup, falling on the white tablecloth like a punctuation mark.

  “You may have heard about this from the agency, but there is another thing that might possibly interest you about Xiaohui. He likes literature too. When he was a student at Shanghai University, the head of the philosophy department at the time picked him out to major in contemporary Western philosophy because of his extraordinary command of English. He continued writing poems and stories even after he started teaching philosophy at the university. You two are so alike.”

  “Yes, that’s something interesting indeed. Please go on, Mei.”

  “Here are two essays he wrote concerning me—possibly penned in his youth, like a diary, and later edited with the benefit of hindsight—which speak much better about our relationship than I could possibly express. He emailed them to me after our last meeting near Red Dust Lane. And the last piece is mine, written after our last meeting—in a fashion, after him. I did not even mail it to him. He’s a very proud man, and very sensitive too. But the stories we tell may prove to be helpful to your understanding of him in this ever-changing political climate. The three pieces span quite a long period—about forty years—with large gaps between them. Of course, these are personal memories—for your eyes only.”

  “In China, people are always made—or unmade—by changes in the political landscape,” Chen said thoughtfully. “For instance, certain values appeared in the late seventies after the Cultural Revolution, but then disappeared at the end of the eighties after the bloody Tian’anmen crackdown. And these now-vanished values and meanings may be considered totally passé in the new century.”

  “You put it so well, Director Chen. That sums up Xiaohui’s life too. As well as his pieces, he also sent me a poem by the Song dynasty poet Su Shi.”

  “Which one?”

  “It was a poem he wrote in exile, about seeing a solitary wild goose moving around on a solitary, snowy night. He compared life to the footprints left by that wild goose. Soon, all is gone in the melting snow, but a solitary passerby could have taken a specific meaning from the footprints left in the snow before they vanished. I am but a passerby in his life, but the footprints he’s left have meant a lot to me.”

  “Yes, I know that poem.”

  “‘Lines Written in Dinghui Temple, Huangzhou,’” she responded.

  “It’s one of my favorites.”

  Chen stood up like a man who’d been sitting too long at a coffee table, and began reciting the poem in a subdued voice:

  The waning moon hangs on the sparse tung twigs,

  the night falling deep, silent.

  An apparition of a solitary wild goose

  moves about like a hermit.

  Startled, it turns back,

  its sadness unknown to others.

  Trying each of the chilly boughs,

  it chooses not to perch on one.

  Freezing, the maple leaves keep falling,

  Rustling over the Wu River.

  It was a poem Su Shi had written in exile, allegedly about a difficult choice he had to make in his political career. Other readers tended to interpret it, however, as being about the choices facing him in his personal life.

  It was written in a time when it was impossible to talk about the personal without bringing up the political—which was even more so the case in today’s China. Of all the poems, it was not by chance that Xiaohui chose this particular one to send to Mei. But on second thoughts, Chen believed he could understand the poem on another level. In fact, he himself often thought of these lines when faced with critical choices in his career.

  “It was probably a subtle allusion to how he’d chosen to take a solitary, chilly path,” Chen said.

  “You are someone who truly understands the music Xiaohui is playing, Director Chen! I know you are a poet too,” Mei said.

  Understanding music was another allusion echoing from ancient China. A celebrated musician named Boya happened to hear a young man named Ziqi playing his harp, and immediately understood Ziqi’s aspirations and great vision through listening to the melody. The two became lifelong friends.

  It seemed to Chen that there was a long and complicated story between Xiaohui and Mei. The former inspector found himself increasingly drawn to it, not just as a story, but also as an opportunity to examine the national tragedy that had taken place in Tian’anmen Square all those years ago.

  The case of Xiaohui being disappeared was one he wanted to investigate in earnest.

  Chen looked up and said to Mei in seriousness, “I will accept your case. I’ll start reading the memoirs this afternoon. But let me tell you something first. At the moment, my hands are tied. Things can be so complicated, you know, in today’s China. I am not in a position to tell you how far I may be able to go, so I have to make this point clear.”

  “I understand. The ZZ agency was not the first agency I contacted for help. And all their answers invariably turned out to be no. You have agreed to help. It’s more than I could have prayed for.”

  “And there’s another coincidence,” Chen added with a faraway look in his eyes. “I too am familiar with Red Dust Lane. Believe it or not, I attended the ‘evening talk’ held there a couple of times, listening to the storytelling and the political discussions, though I don’t think I ever met X, or heard his name mentioned. As a matter of fact, I happened to have carried out one or two minor investigations involving the lane. It is a small world indeed.”

  “Another instance of events caused by unbalanced Yin and Yang!” she said. “So you’re the very one meant to help him.”

  “There’s one more thing. Here is my office secretary Jin’s contact information. I trust her implicitly. If you hear anything about X, you may contact her first. We’d better not be seen together too often.”

  “Got you, Director Chen. We cannot be too careful nowadays.”

  With the lambent noon light shining in through the window of his study, Chen thought he was ready to start reading the first of the three memoirs Mei had entrusted him with.

  He chose, however, to go through some new information from Old Hunter first, feeling more curious about the intriguing coincidences in the background of the case.

  In addition to the coincidences mentioned in the talk with Mei, X had studied English in Bund Park, and Chen had done so in Bund Park—or People Park—too. Their families were both within walking distance of Red Dust Lane.

  And the two of them had entered college the same year—X had majored in Western philosophy, and Chen in English literature. Mei had explained about the unexpected choice others had made for X, but then had Chen himself made his own choice to be a cop?

  His fingers tapping at the desk, his glance fell on a tiny green insect scuttling on the manila folder from Mei.

  So the investigation appeared to be custom-made for him. If anyone really could help, according to Mei, it had to be Chen.

  Perhaps Chen should have said no to the case concerning X. On second thoughts, Chen found X actually turning out to be like his double—in the same way that the protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s short story, The Secret Sharer, had encountered a man who could have had his life path, but for the twists of fortune—to be rather disturbing. The connection between them was mysterious and inexplicable. Chen was struck all over again by the bizarre list of things they had in common.

  He glanced at his cell phone to check the time. It was ten to twelve. He might as well have the slice of cheesecake and second tall cup of black coffee he’d brought back home with him from the café. The coffee could help his thinking, though it might upset his stomach. He would like to read for a short while before deciding what his next move would be.

  Chen opened the manila folder that Mei had given him, took out the personal essay Xiaohui had written for her, recollecting their first meeting, and began to read.

  “The Same River: Part I”

  By Xiaohui

  When I was a teenager, I was one of the few people my age who occasionally attended the evening talk in front of Red Dust Lane. I did not live there, but it took me merely four or five minutes to walk over, carrying a foldable bamboo stool in my hand.

  The contents of the evening talk there differed, depending on the time period and the political backdrop. During the course of the Cultural Revolution, in particular, it was out of the question for people to say anything that could have been interpreted as “feudalist, capitalist, bourgeois, and revisionist.”

  In fact, in the midst of the thunderous Cultural Revolution slogans, and frenzied gong-and-drum beating as though at the end of the world, the time-honored convention of holding evening political discussions in Red Dust Lane could easily have been swept away along with the notorious “Four Olds”—Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas—but for Old Root’s much-needed invention. A middle-aged lane resident, Old Root was one of the evening talk’s most experienced, resourceful star narrators, and he helped it survive by custom-tailoring it into something more like “political studies in the evening,” his hand constantly waving a copy of the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao’s Quotations.

  Old Root, whose class status was that of a worker, managed to pull some unorthodox tricks with impunity. For instance, he would make a point of choosing to retell stories that had been mentioned favorably by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao, which gave them a sort of political endorsement. So the Red Guards patrolling around the lane had to think twice about finding fault with those stories. I remember that one evening, after pointing out emphatically that Marx had quoted Dante’s Divine Comedy in the front page of Capital, Old Root recounted a romantic episode from the Italian masterpiece with great gusto.

  “Marx read Italian?” I asked incredulously at the end of Old Root’s long narration.

  “Yes, of course. For the writing of Capital, Marx had to do research in more than ten languages. ‘Follow your own course and let others talk’—that’s what Marx quoted on the front page of the book,” Old Root said, taking a sip directly from the purple sand tea kettle. “It’s from Dante’s Divine Comedy, as you may not know. And Marx also said on another occasion, ‘A foreign language is a powerful weapon for your battle in life.’”

  It ran counter to a popular political saying during the days of the Cultural Revolution, that the more a man has learned, the more counter-revolutionary the man may turn out to be. But it was Marx who highlighted the importance of studying foreign languages, so no one could say anything against it.

  Afterwards, when all the audience had left, I remained sitting alone on the bamboo stool, looking up to see the night clouds floating across the infinite sky, purposelessly, like a scroll of traditional Chinese landscape painting with a lot of blank space. Conventionally, a lot more could be conveyed in the blank space through the interaction with the viewer’s perspective. But I was not in an interpretive mood that evening.

  One of the reasons I’d come to the Red Dust Evening Talk that time was that I had no idea about what to do with myself in those days.

  I had just graduated from Yaojin Middle School. This coincided with the onset of the national movement of “educated youths going to the countryside for reeducation,” which was a political campaign launched by Chairman Mao. In response to Mao’s supreme instruction, millions of young people were consequently sent from the cities to poor rural, backward areas, where they were supposed to reform themselves through hard labor, and to receive reeducation from the “poor and lower-middle class farmers in the countryside.”

  Still, a small number of young students claimed that they were “unable” to go there because of health issues—including me. I used the convenient pretext that I was suffering from bronchitis. Young people like me were classified as “waiting-for-assignment youths,” meaning that we would have to wait until we’d recovered before we could go to the countryside. Upon recovery, however, we still had to leave the large cities we lived in to receive our reeducation in the countryside.

  At this point, out of school, out of a job, waiting, with no light at the end of the tunnel, I was literally worrying myself sick. Not to mention the fact that in terms of my class family background, I was classified as a “black puppy” because my father ran a small perfume company established before 1949—making him a “black capitalist” in accordance with Mao’s class struggle theory. As a “black puppy,” I thought my future in red socialist China was politically doomed.

  Later that evening, I happened to have a talk with a neighborhood acquaintance, Yingchang. Though only two or three years my senior, Yingchang was not classified as an “educated youth.” He had already been assigned to a job in a state-run factory in Shanghai before the outbreak of the nationwide “educated youths” movement.

  “Don’t worry too much, Xiaohui,” he said to me with a broad grin. “As the popular saying goes, ‘When your carriage moves close to the mountains, a road will eventually emerge.’ Worrying won’t help you at all. How about us going together to Bund Park in the morning to practice tai chi? I’ve heard the park has a tai chi corner. Tai chi and fresh morning air may prove to be helpful to your bronchitis!”

  Tai chi was a popular exercise, and was “politically OK” even in those days. The park was also located not too far away from my home. It was within walking distance for both my friend and me. So I jumped at the suggestion.

  As it turned out, several other young people in the neighborhood also became interested in the idea. The next morning saw a small group of us setting out, though each of us had his or her own reasons. Yingchang was eager to find an outlet for his youthful energy, which he declared was wasted in the stagnant water of the state-run factory. Sissy Huang followed, since he followed Yingchang everywhere like a tenacious tail. Meili, an attractive woman in her early thirties, who’d just turned in her immigration application to Hong Kong, found herself waiting with nothing else to do in the city of Shanghai. Wanyi, the eldest in our group, tagged along simply because the park was located close to his factory.

  The morning mist appeared to be opaque-colored as we walked, and I heard cocks crowing in succession from a distance. It was against city policy for people to raise chickens at home, but facing severe food shortages at the time, a number of resourceful housewives managed to keep their chickens out of sight—in the secret corners of their shikumen houses. After all, there were so many things during the Cultural Revolution that were far more important, far more politically sensitive, for the neighborhood committee officials to worry about and check into.

  “It’s like the ancient proverb says: we practice swordplay with the cock’s crow in the early morning,” I said, my steps quickening at the recollection of the legend, full of a sudden burst of exuberance. It was not just a proverb. In the third century, a young hero in ancient China had practiced his swordplay the moment a cock started crowing at dawn, declaring so gallantly, “Riding the long, long wind, we will break through waves upon waves for thousands of miles.”

  “Well, people practice tai chi swordplay in the park too,” Yingchang commented, also in high spirits, heading toward the park in big, eager strides.

  Bund Park was a tourist attraction in itself. In spite of its relatively small size, its location made it extremely popular with the people in Shanghai, with its front gate facing the grand Peace Hotel across Zhongshan Road, and its back gate adjoining the Waibaidu Bridge. The original Chinese name of the bridge remained unchanged, indicating that foreigners could cross the bridge for free, which had been the case since its legendary completion in the colonial years. At the Bund’s northern end, the park boasted a promenade, curving, stretching above the shimmering expanse of water that joined the Huangpu and Suzhou Rivers in the distance, with a panoramic view of vessels coming and going in the distant East China Sea.

  In one of my school textbooks, I had learned a story about the park in the context of patriotic education. At the turn of the century, the park was said to have been open only to Western expatriates. Red-turbaned Sikh guards had stood stiff at the entrance like wooden puppets, and a sign on the gate had declared: No Chinese or dogs allowed. Indeed, what a national humiliation the official history textbooks had portrayed!

  Under the crisp morning sky, however, it did not take me long to come to the realization that it was difficult to keep myself in high spirits like the young hero in ancient China, in spite of the proverbs and the park legend.

  Nor could I concentrate for long on my tai chi practice. Tai chi places emphasis on moving slowly rather than fast, subduing the hard by being soft, in accordance with Daoist Yin-Yang principles. In the tiny clearing of the park called “tai chi square,” I soon came to the realization that tai chi did not suit me.

  As the days passed, while the others made rapid progress, I kept on stumbling, wrecking one tai chi pose after another, in spite of my efforts to memorize the movements with names such as “a master strumming the lute,” “a wild horse shaking its mane,” “a hunter grasping the bird’s tail” …

  For me, “a white crane spreading out its wings” became “a white crane breaking its wings.” Similarly, I managed to convey “a hunter letting the bird’s tail slip out of his hand” instead of grasping it.