“I was a student in Beijing years ago, and I would dream of coming here. So it’s for the sake of nostalgia as well.”

“That’s not a bad reason,” Diao said with a grin, showing cigarette-stained teeth. “Don’t you remember a line by our great leader Chairman Mao? ‘Six hundred million people are all Sun and Yao, great emperors.’ Poetic hyperbole, to be sure, but Mao’s right about one thing. People are interested in being emperors, or being like emperors.”

“You are absolutely right.”

“It explains the popularity of the restaurant. People come not only for the food, but for the imperial association too. For a short moment, they can imagine themselves being an emperor.”

That might have also been true for Shang – she might have enjoyed imagining herself as an emperor’s woman. Chen raised his cup, making no comment.

The waitress approached and offered them a small platter of dainty, golden ououtou, steamed buns usually made of maize. The ones Chen remembered from his college years had been somber in color, hard to swallow. These looked very different.

“It’s made from a special green bean,” the waitress said, reading his surprise. “Super delicious. The Empress Dowager’s favorite.”

“Great, we’ll try that,” Chen said. “Recommend some other specials to us.”

“For the private room, there is a minimum charge of one thousand yuan. You have to spend at least that amount anyway. So let me recommend an exquisite meal of light delicacies. All small dishes, about twenty of them – the Empress Dowager’s way. That was the minimum for one meal for her too. To begin with, the live fish from the Central South Sea steamed with tender ginger and green onion.”

“That’s good,” Chen said. No one would miss the association between the Forbidden City and Central South Sea.

“What else?” Diao asked for the first time.

“The roast Beijing duck, of course.”

“Duck from the palace?”

“Genuine Beijing ducks. Specially fed, six to eight months old. Most restaurants now cook with an electric oven. We stick to the traditional wood-burning oven, and we use not just any firewood, but a special pine wood so the flavor penetrates deep into the texture of the meat. It was unique practice used only for the emperors,” she said with pride in her voice. “Oh, our chefs follow the tradition of blowing up the duck with their mouths and sewing up its ass before placing it into the oven.”

“Wow, so much to learn about a duck,” Diao exclaimed.

“We offer the celebrated five ways of eating a duck: crisp duck skin slices wrapped in pancake, duck meat slices fried with green garlic, duck feet immersed in wine, duck gizzard stir-fried with green vegetables, and duck soup, but the soup takes about two hours before it turns creamy white.”

“That’s fine. I mean the soup,” Chen said. “Take your time with the soup. Bring up whatever specials you think are the restaurant’s best. Today, it is for a great writer.”

“You overwhelm me with your generosity,” Diao said.

“As a businessman, I’ve made a bunch of money, but so what? In a hundred years, will the money still be mine? Indeed, as our grand master Old Du said, literature alone lasts for thousands of autumns. It’s proper and right for a novice like me to buy a meal for a master like you.”

Chen’s speech echoed one by Ouyang, a friend Chen had met in Guangzhou. An amateur poet yet a successful businessman, Ouyang had made a similar statement over a dim sum meal.

As far as nonfiction was concerned, however, Chen was legitimately a novice, so he could in fact learn something from Diao.

“Your book was a huge success,” Chen went on. “Please tell me how you came to write it?”

“I was a middle school teacher all my life. As a rule, I would start my class by quoting proverbs. Now, for a proverb to be passed on from generation to generation, there must be something in it – something in our culture. One day, I quoted a proverb – hongyan baoming – a beauty’s fate is so thin. When my students pressed me for an example, I thought about the tragic fate of Shang. Eventually, I started contemplating a book project, but I hesitated to focus on Shang, for the reasons you might guess. In the process of researching it, I learned about the equally tragic fate of her daughter, Qian. Something clicked in my mind. That’s how I came to write it.”

“That’s fantastic,” Chen said. “You must have done a lot of research on Shang.”

“Some, but not a lot.”

“It’s like a book behind a book. In the lines about the daughter, people may read the story of the mother.”

“Readers read from their own perspectives, but it’s a book about Qian.”

“So tell me more about the story behind the story. I’m fascinated by the real details.”

“What cannot be said must pass over in silence,” Diao responded guardedly. “What’s true and what’s not? You like the Dream of the Red Chamber, so you must remember the famous couplet on the arch gate of the Grand Illusion – ‘When the true is false, the false is true. / Where there is nothing, there is everything.’ ”

As Chen anticipated, Diao wasn’t willing to speak freely to a stranger, not even to just admit that it was a true story, despite the lunch at Fangshan.

“People of my generation have heard all sorts of stories from those years,” Diao went on, taking a sip at the tea. “As long as the official archive remains sealed to the public, we may never be able to tell whether a story is true or not.”

“But you must have gathered more information than you used in the book.”

“I put in only what I considered reliable.”

“Still, you must have interviewed a lot of people.”

Diao didn’t respond. A speaker outside started playing a song from the popular TV series Romance of Three Kingdoms. “How many times, the sinking sun red, / a white-haired man angles, alone, in the river / rippling with stories from time immemorial… ” The TV series was based on the historic novel about the vicissitudes of the emperors and would-be-emperors in the third century, and the author ended the novel with a poem from the perspective of an old fisherman.

“Remember the poem titled ‘Snow’ by Mao?” Diao asked instead.

“Yes, particularly the second stanza. ‘The rivers and mountains so enchanting / made countless heroes bow in homage. / Alas, the First Emperor of the Qin and the Emperor Wu of the Han / were lacking in literary grace; / Emperor Tai of the Tang, and the Emperor Tai of the Song / had not enough poetry at heart; / Genghis Khan, / the proud son of Heaven for his generation, / knew only shooting eagle, bow outstretched. / All are past and gone! / To look for the really heroic, / you have to count on today.’ ”

The return of the waitress interrupted their talk. She placed a large platter on the table. “The live fish from the Central South Sea.”

“I had to distinguish between what would be publishable, and what wouldn’t,” Diao resumed after helping himself to a large fish filet.

“Tell me about your background research then.”

“What’s the point? It’s nothing but knocking upon one door after another. Let’s enjoy our meal. To be honest with you, I’m a budget gourmet.”

“Come on. The meal is nothing for a bestselling author like you. That’s why I decided to quit my business.”

“You keep talking about my book as a bestseller. A lot were sold, that’s true, but I got very little for myself.”

“That’s unbelievable, Mr. Diao.”

“Don’t dream of making money by writing books. For that, you’d better stick to your business. If it would help, I might as well tell you how much I’ve made. Less than five thousand yuan. According to the editor, he took a great risk with an initial printing of five thousand copies.”

“But what about the second and third printing? There must have been more than ten printings for your book.”

“There is never even a second printing. As soon as there is buzz on a book, pirated copies come into the market, and you don’t get a single penny.”