On an impulse, Chen purchased a bunch of the afterworld money. He didn’t believe in it, but his mother did, burning it now and then for the benefit of his late father, particularly during such festivals as Dongzhi or Qingming.

Back in his hotel room, he picked up the books he’d brought and went to the indoor swimming pool.

The pool room had a wall set in one-way glass, so the swimmers could enjoy the warm, luxurious privacy while looking out to the view of the lake and hills in the winter. After a vigorous swim, he sat in a reclining chair at poolside and started reading.

Perhaps because of his English studies at Bund Park, he’d developed the ability to read and concentrate while outside. At that time, there was the ever-changing background of the Bund to distract him. Here, in addition to the view outside, he was enjoying the sight of young girls frolicking in the pool, their luscious bodies flashing in the blue water whenever he looked up from the ancient Confucian classics. It was ironic, for Confucius says, “A gentleman should not look if not in accordance to the rites.”

In accordance to the rites or not, the background made the reading less boring for him. His late father having been a neo-Confucian scholar, and Confucian maxims still part of Chinese daily life, as at the bu banquet, “Confucius says” wasn’t unfamiliar to him. But he had never systematically studied Confucianism, which had been banished from the classroom during his school years. He wished he had talked more to his father, whose early death had cut short the older man’s plan to instill the tradition into his son.

Chen took out his notebook. Some of his earlier research notes seemed related to Confucian rites. For Confucius, rites are everywhere and ever present. As long as people behave in accordance with the ancient rites, everything will be right, as they had supposedly been in the golden old times. While there appeared to be so many rites regarding so many things, Chen had never learned or heard about any regarding romantic love.

That morning, checking through the books he had carried there, he failed to find anything. Confucian masters neglected romantic passion, as if it were nonexistent.

Then Chen extended his search to marriage-hunli literally meant marriage rites in Chinese. Sure enough, he found several paragraphs on the marriage rites, though not a single word touching on passion among young people. To the contrary, young people were not supposed to meet before the wedding, let alone have feelings for each other. Marriage was to be arranged entirely by the parents.

In the Book of Rites, one of the Confucian canons, there was a straightforward statement on the nature of marriage.

[The rites of] marriage exist to make a happy connection between two [families of different] names, with a view, in its retrospective character, to secure the services in the ancestral temple, and in its prospective character, to secure the continuance of the family line. Therefore the gentleman sets great store by it…

The marriage rites consist of six consecutive ritual steps, which are the matchmaker’s visit, inquiries about the girl’s name and birth date, a horoscope for the couple, betrothal gifts, choosing a marriage date, and the bridegroom’s welcoming the bride home on the day of the wedding.

Throughout these activities, Chen read, the man and woman did not have a chance to meet until the very day of their wedding. Marriage, conducted in the name of the parents, for the sake of continuing the family line, had nothing to do with romantic love.

In his copy of the Mencius, Chen underlined a passage condemning young people who fall in love and act for themselves in disregard of an arranged marriage.

When a son is born, what is desired for him is that he may have a wife; when a daughter is born, what is desired for her is that she may have a husband. This feeling of the parents is possessed by all men. If the young people, without waiting for the order of their parents and the arrangement of the go-betweens, shall bore holes to steal a sight of each other or climb over the wall to be with each other, then their parents and all other people will despise them.

What the philosopher Mencius described as hole-boring and wall-climbing, Chen knew, became standard metaphors for rendezvous between young lovers.

Closing the book, he tried to sort out what he had just read. In a family-centered social structure, arranged marriage was in its interest, for romantic love could transfer the center of affection, loyalty, and authority from the parents.

“Excuse me, may I sit here?”

“Oh,” he said, looking up to see a young woman, pulling over a recliner to his side. “Yes, please.”

She stretched herself out on the recliner beside him. An attractive woman in her early thirties, she had clear features with a straight mouth, her hair framing her face in delicate curls. Over her swimming suit, she wore a white wrapper or sari of light material, probably a white caftan, which floated around her long legs. She also had a book in her hand.

“It’s so lovely to read here.” She crossed her legs and lit a cigarette.

He was not in the mood for talk, but he didn’t see it as a bad thing to have a pretty woman reading alongside him. He smiled without saying anything.

“I saw you at the restaurant a couple of days ago,” she said. “What a banquet!”

“Sorry, I don’t remember seeing you there.”

“I was sitting outside at a table in the dining hall, looking in through the windows. Everybody was busy making toasts to you there. You must be a successful man.”

“No, not really.”

“A Big Buck?”

Again he smiled. She wouldn’t have believed him to be a cop-alone, trying to finish a literature paper. Nor was there any point in revealing his identity here.

But what could be hers? An attractive woman all by herself in an expensive vacation village. He checked himself from thinking like an investigator. A nameless tourist on vacation, he was under no obligation to pry into other people’s lives.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

“A Confucian classic,” he said.

“That’s interesting,” she said, casting a glance toward the young girls in the pool. “Reading Confucius by the poolside.”

He was aware of the subtle irony in her comment. Confucius was right about one thing: I have never seen one who likes studies as much as beauties.

She, too, started reading her book, her hair jet-black in the sunlight, her eyes shining with “autumn waves”-possibly an expression from those love stories. He felt her closeness, noticing her unshaven armpit as she stretched one arm behind her head. She wore a bangle of a red silk string, which accentuated her shapely ankle. And he remembered some lines about a man’s mind digressing at the sight of a woman’s legs, white and bare, but in the sunlight, with a down of light black hair.

He chided himself and began questioning the necessity of the vacation. The scary experience he had had at home was perhaps an attack of coffee sickness. He might have been too panicky. Now he felt his normal self again. So why go on with the vacation here? A serial murderer was at large in Shanghai, but he was reading by the poolside, in a vacation village hundreds of miles away, thinking of amorous poetic images.

At least he should try to make some progress on the paper. So he opened his notebook and started to put something down for the conclusion.

In traditional Chinese society, the institution of arranged marriage implied hostility toward romantic love. But then how did there come to be all these love stories? Though he had analyzed only three, there were a large number of them. The publication and circulation of them, against the social norm of arranged marriage, should have been impossible-

An interruption arrived in the form of a waiter who recognized Chen as the “distinguished guest” at the banquet dining room and came over with a bottle of wine in an ice bucket.