“What a crying shame!’ Chen said. ‘I still remember well the dramatic, exciting narrations that Old Root used to perform.”

  “He’s gone too, poor Old Root. More than a year ago, close to two, he was invited out by Internal Security for a cup of tea after one of our evening talks. A cup of tea—another new Internet term. You must have heard it. It simply means that Internal Security calls you into their office to give you a serious political warning, under the name of inviting you out for a cup of tea. The old man sank into depression after drinking such a cup of tea and passed away miserably a couple of months later—with two surveillance cameras still blinking above his door. We held an evening talk in his memory just ten days ago, but that was the first since his death—and I expect it will be the last. No one wants to be invited for a cup of tea and end up like Old Root.”

  “People cannot be too careful nowadays,” Chen said mechanically, glancing around the lane with an involuntary shudder. “You can imagine all too easily what will happen if you don’t mend your ways as instructed over a cup of tea.”

  “Exactly. As we all know, it happened in Wuhan to a doctor with a conscience named Li Wenliang. Li posted on WeChat a message about the fatal virus at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, but the government did not want people to know anything about it. He was then summoned into a police station for a cup of tea. So cruelly warned, and persecuted, he died shortly afterward from Covid.”

  “Yes, on his deathbed, Doctor Li wrote about his horrible experience with just such a cup of bitter tea.”

  “And that’s why Old Root repeatedly said to us in his last days: ‘You cannot be too careful,’” Zhang said, bowing low as if he were attending a Buddhist service for the deceased. “The remaining families are still under constant surveillance from security cameras.”

  “The horror, the horror,” Chen murmured, echoing in the depth of his mind the tragic ending of a novel about the heart of darkness. It was another novel by Conrad.

  “Still, now that the demolition process has been halted, I’m determined to be stuck here like a nail. For a poor, single retiree like me, what’s the point spending the compensation money I received to buy a ten-square-meter room located far, far away in the suburbs, and that only for the last five or ten years of my life? Other ‘nailed-down residents’ also refused to budge in spite of all the threats and pressure from the government.

  “Believe it or not, the neighborhood committee is still here, so it’s not just the cameras keeping us under surveillance. As you know, they can be like mobile surveillance cameras, moving around all the time. Yan has been working in her office just as before, relentlessly trying to force out the lane’s remaining residents and maintain political stability, whatever the cost—”

  “Zhang, let’s have a cup of wine, or a cup of our own tea, somewhere else. It’s so sad to see our old lane disintegrating helplessly into dust.”

  Zhang’s mention of Yan, the head of the neighborhood committee, instantly put Chen on high alert. Yan would recognize the former chief inspector if she happened to step into this section of the lane. They had met before. So he, too, could easily turn into one of the highly vigilant neighborhood committee’s surveillance targets.

  “Where?” Zhang asked.

  “Let’s go to the Old Half Place. My treat today. It’s not easy for me to meet with people like you, so let’s have a good talk about the past and the people who’ve lived in the lane.”

  They moved out of the back exit of the lane in a hurry. Across the road in the Ninghai street-food market, the sign of the Red Dust Neighborhood still glared across the street in the sunlight. They immediately turned right and crossed the rusted steel overpass arching overhead on Yan’an Road.

  It took them just seven or eight minutes to come in sight of a two-storied restaurant standing on the corner of Zhejiang and Fuzhou Roads.

  The Old Half Place had been founded toward the end of the Qing dynasty. Originally, it had been a sort of high-end club for wealthy Yangzhou businessmen who’d gathered in Shanghai. The restaurant had been known for its long history, secret recipes, and exclusive specials, but now it was known for its inexpensive yet tasty food. The restaurant charged only fifteen yuan for a plate of green cabbage fried rice cooked in a big, sizzling wok, plus a bowl of curry-flavored beef bones strewn with chopped scallions. Not too long ago, the restaurant had been praised in Wenhui Daily for its excellent service to working-class people. The article read like an echo from the Cultural Revolution.

  In Chen’s memory, the restaurant was always packed with customers seeking its budget-friendly but gourmet-quality food. To his confusion, the restaurant turned out to be far from crowded that afternoon. He was also puzzled to notice that the prices on the blackboard menu beside the staircase remained unchanged, in spite of the serious inflation. In fact, Old Half Place’s menu actually sported a “half-price series” for the day. Some of the chef’s specials were incredibly cheap, and the blackboard menu also declared that the second-floor dining room, which used to demand a minimum spend per head, had canceled the stipulation.

  Chen led Zhang up the vermilion wooden staircase. Few customers were visible on the second floor either. Things in China changed so fast. It was like the old saying: “A day spent in a mountain cave can last a hundred years in the world of red dust.”

  But this was partly because, for quite a long period of time now, the former inspector seldom left his house. He had to keep a low profile, being still on convalescent leave, and still under constant surveillance by the government.

  China’s economy had been deteriorating recently, and people were gripped by the gloom of a seemingly inevitable recession. The restaurant was empty because its regular customers weren’t in the mood to spend money as before, Chen realized, leading Zhang to a table by the window on the second floor which overlooked Fuzhou Road.

  Across the street, his glance swept over to one of his favorite bookstores, which sported a large “Out of Business” sign on its glass door.

  Zhang started mumbling the moment he seated himself at the table, “China is going to the dogs.”

  Chen did not make an immediate comment, but appeared to be busy studying the menu.

  “So many terrible things have been happening around here,” Zhang went on without waiting for a response from Chen. “The zero-Covid policy was, and still is, so disastrous, with the whole country locked down for three years. So many people perished in the pandemic, as well as those deaths caused by collateral damage, and now the national economy is in collapse. A large number of companies have gone bankrupt. It might not affect Party officials like you that much, but ordinary people—their pensions cut, medical insurance cut, benefits cut—are all discussing their ‘running strategies.’”

  “Running strategies?” Chen asked.

  “That’s another newly coined phrase that netizens are loudly discussing online. To put it simply, it means ‘how to run out of China.’ Some people are even sharing a pamphlet on the Internet which covers various types of running: illegal immigrant running, non-illegal immigrant running, wife-and-child-out-first running, clearance running—”

  “Hold on, Zhang. What’s ‘clearance running’?”

  “Selling all your belongings before running.”

  “Such a variety of running strategies indeed,” Chen said, shaking his head in resignation.

  In the early 1980s, China had witnessed a peak of “illegal immigrant running” out to the West. Chen remembered it vividly, as he had been involved in the investigation of an illegal immigration case along with an attractive American counterpart. The case—which Chen had filed away in his records under the heading “A loyal character dancer”—had turned out to be a complicated one. Chen’s mission was to track down a Mao loyalist, Wen Liping, a former loyal character dancer who’d vanished from a poor, backward village in Fujian province, but the case had been mired in the history and politics of the Cultural Revolution—

  One of the Old Half Place’s young waitresses, dressed in a scarlet uniform, approached their table. Chen pulled himself back to the present moment. He ordered a small side dish of thin-sliced xiao pork with ginger slices, a large smoked carp head supposedly from the Yangchen Lake, a chef’s special of sizzling fried rice-paddy eels, and noodle soup made with the eel bones, which would be served afterwards.

  Rather than putting on a show of offering to pay, Zhang simply thanked his host by clasping his fingers in front of his chest, a gesture of gratitude popular in traditional martial arts novels.

  “Any questions, Chief Inspector Chen?”

  “No, as I may have told you, I’m no longer a chief inspector in the Shanghai Police Bureau, but the Director of the Shanghai Judicial System Reform Office. I’m not carrying out a specific investigation today. But,” Chen continued, “you were just talking about the disappearance of the evening talk in the lane. It’s such a pity. Years ago, I too was a loyal audience member of the evening talk, as you may still remember. But did you say that there was an evening talk ten days ago? Can you tell me more about it?”

  Zhang did not give an immediate response, frowning over his glasses as the young waitress came over to place a hot platter on the table. His lenses were as thick as the bottom of a beer bottle, shining in the afternoon light. The waitress poured a small pot of boiling sesame oil on top of the eels with a burst of sizzling sounds.

  After putting a steaming hot spoonful of the fried eels, topped with chopped green onion, into his mouth and sighing a satisfied sigh, Zhang cleared his throat and launched into his narration.

  “You want to know more about the last ever evening talk that happened in our lane, Director Chen?”

  “It sounds intriguing.”

  “Yes, but it was sad too.”

  “Oh?”

  “To begin with, it was held in memory of Old Root. We did not do it immediately after his death. People were terror-stricken, like frozen cicadas in the winter, and we were too scared to carry on the evening talk tradition. But with the lane disappearing before our eyes, we finally decided to hold a last evening talk in his memory before it was too late.”

  “Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but I have heard stories about a man named Xiaohui who lived in the lane. He also gave a talk that evening, right? Do you happen to know him?”

  “The fortune teller, X!”

  “Yes, that’s him. So you know him?”

  “His name is Xiaohui, but the people in the lane abbreviated it to X when he set up his fortune-telling stall. It adds a touch of mystery to him. You weren’t there when that happened, Director Chen. But it does not matter. It’s a story I want to tell you anyway.”

  “Yes, please tell me about X from the very beginning, Zhang, in as much detail as possible. That would help me a lot.”

  “X moved into the lane near the end of 1989. Half a southern wing of the shikumen adjoining the courtyard was assigned to him. Perhaps this was not too bad for a bachelor in his thirties, but it was said that he had been fired from his position at a university, and expelled from a new three-bedroom apartment there.

  “Fortune Teller X is one of the mysteries of our Red Dust Lane. The prefix ‘fortune teller’ sounds derogatory—at least so it was believed by a lot of people. So that’s another reason we chose to call him X.

  “We did not know—not at first—what X’s life had been like before his arrival in our lane. But rumors soon spread that before the bloody Tian’anmen crackdown in the summer of 1989, he had been promoted to the position of the youngest full professor at Shanghai University. It’s reasonable to assume that he got into trouble because of the horrible tragedy in Beijing. Speculations and theories about it popped up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. But we did not know any reliable versions or details.

  “According to one of the unverified stories, after the bloody crackdown, the government wanted him to retract a statement he’d made during an interview with the Associated Press. X had said in front of the TV cameras that if the troops chose to open fire on the students in the square, then the government could not be anything but a fascist one. After the crackdown, the higher authorities urged him to retract the statement with the excuse that he had been drunk that day. He refused to take back his words, however, insisting that the interview was done in the morning, and that he hadn’t drunk—he had not taken a drop at the time. So he was exiled into our lane.

  “At first, he did not come out to mix with us after he’d moved in. It was not until he’d been living in the lane for a month that he made his first public appearance, but he still chose not to mingle with us. He simply sat at a small white-cloth-covered table, a short distance away from the spot where the Red Dust Evening Talk usually takes place. The table in front of him sported a variety of pens—brush pens, fountain pens—a sheet of white paper, a green jade paperweight in the shape of a lion, a container of bamboo divination slips, and an open book. Above his head, there streamed a colorful banner declaring ‘Red Dust Fortune Telling’ like a vertical sign.

  “He looked pretty much like a Daoist stepping out of an ancient mural, except that he did not wear a square Daoist cap or a long Daoist gown like in the movies.

  “It was no less surprising that Old Root made a passionate speech supporting him at our next evening talk, even though X wasn’t there: ‘Everyone is fighting their own battle, with reasons not necessarily known to others. We don’t know any details about his battle, so we cannot rush to judgment as to whether his actions were right or wrong. All we know is that he’s in trouble right now. It’s possible that he did not want others to get into trouble because of him.’

  “So our lane simply left him alone.

  “Rightly or wrongly, in today’s China a man is judged by his success or failure. The journey from a promising young professor to a fortune teller sitting in front of the lane could not but designate him a failure.

  “Besides, a fortune teller has to tell fortunes in a credible way to his customers if he is to make a living out of it. But how could X prove himself when he was unable to tell his own fortune that summer? Plus, as a learned professor of Western philosophy, how could he know much about the art of Chinese fortune telling?

  “After being fired from the university, with no income whatsoever, he had to make a living for himself. We understood that, but we still wondered why he had chosen that particular profession. It wasn’t a surprise that his fortune-telling clients were few, at least for the first couple of years.

  “Then we discovered that while waiting for his clients at his small table, he kept himself busy by writing something on a piece of paper, with a book spread out before him. Judging by the way he consulted a small dictionary from time to time, he could have been translating the book.

  “That made sense to us. The fortune-telling business was not enough for him, so he had to do some translation work on the side. We learned that one of his old friends was giving him translation jobs in the field of contemporary Western philosophy. While not that lucrative, it helped. But X had to use a pen name for his translations, in compliance with the request of the publishing house.

  “X still kept a distance from us. When a resident of the lane approached him about the possibility of tutoring his son, who was in grade school, X politely said no. We understood. He was trying not to get others into trouble.

  “Occasionally, he also led some of his fortune-telling customers into his so-called ‘home office,’ which was made out of the shikumen courtyard. He even installed a heater there for the winter days. Those were probably his wealthier clients.

  “Time flows away like water in the river. With the passing years, X turned into part of the Red Dust Lane landscape. Always sitting there, alone under the streaming fortune-telling banner.

  “In recent years, however, he seemed to have established a mysterious base of rich or super-rich clients. They came in luxurious cars and headed straight into his home office for a consultation. They must have paid him handsomely. Most of them appeared to be middle-aged women. It was said one particular middle-aged woman had introduced all of them to his Red Dust Lane fortune-telling business, after his fortune telling had saved her business.

  “In the meantime, Old Root was too old to come out to the evening talk as much as he would have liked. His health was failing fast after the invitation out ‘for a cup of tea,’ and the neighborhood committee had been paying more and more attention to our evening talk.

  “On the day Old Root passed away, almost two years ago now, X appeared carrying a large flower wreath. He placed it at the door of the deceased, bowing low three times. The way he paid tribute to the old man surprised us. After all, he had never joined our evening talk.

  “Some people suspected that, as someone who’d once been a professor, X could have looked down on ordinary people like us. It would not have been surprising, though, if X had heard of Old Root’s high opinion of him …

  “After Old Root’s death, the Red Dust Evening Talk’s few remaining audience members had so many things to worry about that the evening talk completely stopped. Eventually, we decided to hold one last evening talk in Old Root’s memory. It was also an opportunity to bring proper closure to the time-honored tradition. We just needed a keynote speaker for the special event.

  “So that’s how X came to the evening talk for the first and last time,” Chen said.

  Zhang seemed to be lost in a trance caused by another wave of surging memories. He drained a cup of amber-colored rice wine without saying anything else, and was silent for a couple of minutes.