Former Chief Inspector Chen—who hoped Zhang would say more—did not want to interrupt Zhang’s reminiscences, but, as it happened, his phone started ringing again. He recognized the number. This could be a highly sensitive phone call. So he excused himself, walked out to the front of the restaurant, and called the number back.

  “We were talking about the lane people holding the last Red Dust Evening Talk in memory of Old Root, Zhang,” Chen said, the moment he returned to the second floor of the restaurant.

  “Yes, I am leading up to it right now, Director Chen,” Zhang said, nodding as the noodles in eel-bone soup was served on the table. “Before the evening talk, which happened around ten days ago, X had spent the day sitting under his fortune-telling banner as usual. His business has been suffering because of the demolition process, what with the dust flying high and the debris spreading around. He did not seem to be too disturbed by it, though. Like others, he would have his relocation compensation. And with the steady increase in his wealthy clients, he might have been thinking of moving his office into an upscale neighborhood. It’s rumored that quite a lot of his rich clients are consulting him about their futures—about running out of China, one way or another.

  “At dusk, I was gathering on the lane with some other participants, ready to begin the evening talk. X passed us, heading toward a small convenience store located near the front entrance of the lane. One of our group inquired whether X would be interested in joining us for tonight’s evening talk, but X responded that he was just going to the convenience store for a couple of bulbs.

  “‘How about joining us here on your way back? This will be the last Red Dust Evening Talk,’ another participant surnamed Pan cut in. ‘It’s been a time-honored tradition here for more than sixty years.’

  “X hesitated before replying but then agreed, his brows knitted in deep lines. He even quoted from a Han dynasty scholar, saying something to the effect that when the whole bird’s nest has fallen to the hard ground, how could people expect to find an unbroken egg buried under the debris?

  “‘I’m afraid you’re right. Times have changed,’ I said, with an echoing sigh. ‘Talking about anything concerning the current CCP government could turn out to be a thoughtcrime. Anything not in line with the official propaganda could land people in big trouble. We all understand. But tonight, our last evening talk will be in memory of Old Root, who was one of the founders of this time-honored tradition, and who had a high opinion of you, X. Will you tell a story tonight? Something that’s set long ago in China’s history.’

  “Pan then suggested that X tell the story of the romance between General Cai and Little Phoenix Fairy: ‘It’s a hot topic online. People cannot help but feel nostalgic nowadays. It’s a story that took place at the beginning of the last century, just after the revolution in 1911. There’s nothing in it that’s to do with the current government’s politics. Indeed, General Cai is the famous revolutionary hero who thwarted the would-be Emperor Yuan’s plans to dissolve the Republic. How could retelling his love story possibly be controversial? You know the tale, right? When he was alive, Old Root kept telling us that you are a man of great learning, knowledgeable about a lot of things, whether they happened in the past or in the present.’

  “Another participant of the evening talk added that the discussion of the story online was triggered by someone sharing an anonymous poem, which presented a surprising pro-Party twist at the end of the story:

  Where can we find Little Phoenix Fairy today?

  And where is the gallant general who won her heart

  in his heroic fight for the Republic of China?

  Alas, we can only find the would-be Emperor Yuan

  still dreaming his spring and autumn dream

  of mounting the splendid eternal throne …

  “X went to the store, then came back with the bulbs in his hand. He sat down among us and narrated the romantic story of General Cai and Little Phoenix Fairy. You must be so familiar with it that I don’t think I need to retell it to you in detail. But in brief, the story is about how the general and the courtesan fell into an amorous entanglement, filled with genuine affection. Their romance happened after the would-be Emperor Yuan had declared his ambitious plan to restore the monarchy system, even though he’d already become the first president of the Republic of China.

  “Suffice it to say that X performed the story wonderfully, like a professional Suzhou Opera singer. The audience applauded. I even noticed that someone took out a phone when he started speaking, possibly to take pictures of X or record his vivid narration.

  “Just a few days later, however, the fortune teller got mysteriously disappeared. I am still calling him a fortune teller, even though I have never believed in the superstitious practice. Evidently, he failed to foretell his own future once again.”

  “Got disappeared indeed,” Chen cut in, ignoring Zhang’s negative remarks about the fortune-telling profession. “Disappear is an intransitive verb in our Chinese language, but when it is used in the passive voice, it could mean that things happened against his or her will. A well-known professor surnamed Lu, the compiler of a large English and Chinese dictionary, has recently written to me that he was great-walled. You see, even a noun could be used in such a structure. One of the conventional rules of Chinese is that speakers should avoid the passive voice as much as possible. So it was not difficult for people to grasp the association. Ironically, the net cops have done an incredible job of enriching contemporary Chinese expressions.”

  “Alas, what can possibly be said?” Zhang said. “In this age of state surveillance, people have no choice but to invent these coded expressions. They’re like cicadas trembling in the late autumn, fearful of the coming winter. It’s open to question, however, whether X’s disappearance was caused by his talk that night,” Zhang concluded, chopsticking the last piece of xiao pork into his mouth. “No one could rule out the possibility.”

  “A question, Zhang. When X was telling the story, did he make any negative references or draw any unflattering parallels to the current political situation?”

  “That I cannot remember. I have a vague impression that he narrated cautiously, which did not surprise me, considering the trouble he had got into in 1989. But after the narration of a story, the audience would have the opportunity to ask questions, and then it’s up to the storyteller to answer with their own interpretations. It’s a tradition from Old Root’s days. So I cannot tell whether his disappearance was truly caused by his narration during the last evening talk.”

  “Can I ask you a favor, Zhang?”

  “Sure, anything I can do to help, Director Chen.”

  “Keep me posted about any new information that comes up about the vanished X. But not a single word to others about it.”

  “My lips are sealed, Director Chen.”

  After parting with Zhang outside the Old Half Place restaurant, Chen chose to take the subway home. Before he reached the subway station near People’s Square, however, Chen got another phone call from Old Hunter.

  “Anything new, Director Chen?”

  “After meeting with Mei in the café, I went to Red Dust Lane. I happen to know someone in the lane.”

  “Did you learn anything from that acquaintance of yours?”

  “He participated in the last evening talk in the lane, so he provided me with some background information. I don’t know whether it could really lead to anything. I have to do more research about it.”

  Then the two started a fairly long discussion on the phone. Putting in his Apple wireless earbuds and strolling in leisure around the subway station, Chen thought he must look like an “old stick”—Shanghai slang for a well-to-do, sophisticated middle-aged man.

  DAY 2

  Evening

  “Frontier City”

  Wang Zhihuan (688–742)

  The Yellow River stretching

  far into the white clouds,

  a single, solitary city stands

  silhouetted against thousands

  and thousands of high mountains.

  Why should a Qiang flute play

  that heartrending melody

  of “Parting Beneath the Willows”?

  Alas, the spring wind

  has never crossed the Yumen Pass.

  Located in the present-day Dunhuang County, Ganshu Province, Yumen Pass was an important pass on the borders in the Tang dynasty.

  “Journey”

  Chen Cao

  You keep on murmuring the name

  of each new platform

  each time the train slows

  down, as if anxious to make sure

  you are not losing yourself

  to an unchanging aisle with changing feet,

  in black loafers, in shiny boots, in red slippers,

  in muddy sandals, coming and going.

  Your destination is not

  on the unfolded map, nor

  in the punched tickets. Here is

  never where you want to be.

  Snow falls in the evening.

  You turn to a fly circling

  the window’s corner. Every time

  you raise your hand, it drones away—

  only to return buzzing

  around the same spot, inexplicably, like a cliché.

  Overnight, the land is buried

  in white. Breathing hard

  against the pane, you try to wipe

  the vapor away with your hand, when

  the window frames your reflection,

  ever returning—like a fly.

  It was quite late when Chen got back home.

  But he couldn’t resist the temptation to go on reading the memoir he’d received from Mei. He whistled, like one entering the dark woods, and dove back into X’s reminiscences of the time he practiced tai chi in Bund Park with young people from his neighborhood.

  “The Same River: Part I” (continued)

  By Xiaohui

  As it says in an ancient Chinese proverb, there is no story constructed without coincidence.

  Standing in the park that morning, I saw a young girl stepping over to sit on a green-painted bench. She was holding a book in her hand, and her shoulder-length black hair was occasionally rumpled by the light breeze from the river. The green bench she sat on was not far from our tai chi group.

  I soon discovered that, as a rule, she stepped into the park quite early. Sitting on the same green bench each day, she was completely absorbed in her reading, hardly paying any attention to the people moving around and displaying a variety of tai chi poses. Behind her, the dew drops clung to the green foliage, glistening like a myriad of bright eyes waking up in the morning light.

  It was an uncommon scene during those days. A popular political slogan at the time declared, “It’s useless to study.” The slogan contained the ideological concept that underlay the “educated youth” movement, sending millions of young students away to the impoverished countryside.

  Judging by the red plastic book cover in her hand, I thought she must have been reading the Selected Works of Chairman Mao—the Big Red Book. She also kept on the bench beside her a smaller red-covered book, which she picked up from time to time. Possibly Quotations from Chairman Mao—the Little Red Book?

  People in the park could not help casting curious glances in her direction. I found her far more than attractive. Her large, clear eyes, occasionally looking up from the book, radiated with a beauty from within.

  My friend Yingchang, too, came to saunter around that green bench, like a solitary crow circling a lone tree in the winter. With his close-range observation, he discovered that the smaller book beside her was an English–Chinese dictionary, rather than Mao’s Little Red Book. That was strange, but he soon made another even more surprising discovery.

  The book she held in her hand was not the Big Red Book, as I’d assumed. She’d simply used its red plastic cover to conceal an English book. More likely than not, it was an English language textbook with illustrations.

  “It’s not too difficult to understand why someone might use such a trick these days,” Yingchang commented, grinning. “Red-armbanded park patrollers could storm over any time, demanding, ‘For what reason are you studying English in the Cultural Revolution?’”

  That posed no question to me, though. For the future, in which she passionately believed—and I believed in too.

  Then a question occurred to me. If she could choose to study English for the sake of her future, what about me?

  I was nominally an “educated youth,” so I knew only too well about the limited education I had received.

  I told myself that I could not afford to continue wasting my time doing nothing, waiting either at home or in the park in my role as a “waiting-for-recovery educated youth,” practicing those tai chi poses I could never hope to master. I decided that I, too, should start to learn something for my future, even though I could not tell what the future would turn out to be like.

  For the moment, why not study English like her, in the same park, with the same river circling around, the waves lapping the same bank?

  English textbooks were hardly available in bookstores or libraries in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, I contemplated, leaving the park in a hurry.

  Once I was back home, I began to make inquiries, and a couple of days later, I managed to obtain a set of English textbooks from my uncle. My uncle had worked at a British company before 1949 and then had succeeded in transforming himself into an ordinary worker after 1949. The college textbooks he’d used to learn English were stuffed in a dusty cardboard box under his bed. It was an unbelievable stroke of luck for me.

  The next morning saw me stepping into the park, carrying the first volume of the English textbook. I stretched energetically, then chose an unpainted wooden bench not far from hers.

  That morning, she was wearing a long red jacket like a trench coat, a blaze of color burning against the verdant willow shoots behind her. Occasionally, she looked up from her English book to observe the changing scenes in the park.

  For me, she was the only scene in the park I wanted to watch.

  It was not easy for me to study English by myself, but I was determined to go on—particularly with her studying nearby, on a green park bench.

  My new pursuit kept me away from my tai chi friends, who probably came up with all sorts of interpretations for the sudden shift of my interest. In their eyes, it must have looked as if I’d fallen hard for the girl with the red book on her lap, but I was too bookish to approach her in a direct way. So, I’d picked up an English textbook in a pathetic attempt to catch her attention.

  Yingchang, the most impulsive one in the group, took the initiative to approach her. But his overtures of friendship were no more successful than the ones he’d made to the tall, willowy girl he’d initially nicknamed “Graceful”—and then “Frosty.” The following morning, Yingchang dubbed the woman on the green bench “Popsicle,” a nickname that suggested that, like “Frosty,” she was too cold to approach, though without giving away any specific details.

  But for me, it was more than enough to sit on another green bench close by, from where I could steal an occasional glance at her.

  I was not unaware of the implications of Yingchang’s nickname, which made me even more nervous about approaching her. There was no reason for her to be interested in a “waiting-for-assignment” youth, who was lagging far behind her in his English studies. Whatever motivations might have been attributed to the abrupt change in me, I just hoped that I would be able, one of those days, to speak to her in another language—a language understandable only to the two of us.

  I wanted to ask her in English what her name was—though I was in no hurry for that—while, in the background, a vessel sailed slowly along the Huangpu River, like in a movie I’d seen long ago.

  Eventually, my mother became worried that I was staying longer and longer in the park, but my father, immersed in Daoism after his retirement, claimed that doing this might be propitious for a young man like me. Using my birth date and name, and considering the feng shui of the lane I often frequented too, he predicted that a place in close association with water would turn out to be beneficial to me. And he elaborated on this, using his favorite theory of the five universal elements to support his prediction.

  “Xiaohui—morning, strong sunlight, Red Dust—too much soil, you see,” my bookish father said in conclusion.

  But for me, the park turned into a place imbued with a different meaning. One mist-enveloped morning, sitting at my usual seat, I saw her glancing up from her books. Our eyes met for just a second.

  She was wearing a pink sweater, silhouetted against the flaming clouds in the morning sky. Aware of my gaze, she hurried to hang her head low with a shy smile, like a lotus flower swaying soft, supple in a cool breeze.

  It reminded me of a short poem by Xu Zhimo.

  Softly, you hang your head low,

  like a water lily,

  shy, trembling in a cool breeze,

  farewell, farewell,

  with sweet sadness in your voice,

  SA YO U NA RA.

  Then I happened to notice something else that morning. A stout, gray-haired old man shambled over to the green bench and sat close beside her. It was not uncommon for people to share a bench in the park, but as she was reading her English book, the old man seemed to be nodding, pointing at the open book in front of her, and murmuring almost imperceptibly when he thought no one else could see him.

  A realization hit me. The old man was giving instruction to her on the park bench! I understood why the old man and the young girl had to behave in such a cautious way. In the early seventies, teaching English in a public place could have appeared suspicious in the light of the “class struggle.” Hence the deceptive appearance of the two of them, sitting side by side on the same park bench as if they were two strangers.

  I decided that, instead of approaching her, I too was going to consult the old man with questions about my studies. It was not easy, after all, to study English by myself.