“How I can afford secretarial assistance, General Manager Gu?”

“It’s in the interest of the New World that you have help. I will take care of it.”

The fragrance from her red sleeves accompanies your uniting deep in the night… a Tang dynasty line rose from the recesses of his mind, but Chen pulled himself back to the present. A free little secretary. Like a bottle of Maotai in addition to the moon cake falling from the skies.

So far, there had been no strings attached, Chen thought. A shrewd businessman like Gu might not play all his cards too obviously, so early, but the chief inspector believed he did not have to worry yet. It seemed that he was being offered a straight business proposition, albeit a very favorable one. If something came up later, he would then decide how to deal with it.

There are things a man can do, and things a man cannot do. That was one of the Confucian dictums his father, a Neo-Confucian scholar, had taught him at the time of the Cultural Revolution, when the old man refused to write a dictated “confession” incriminating his colleagues.

“Let me to talk to Party Secretary Li,” Chen said. “I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

“He won’t refuse you, I know. You are a rising star, with a most promising future. Here is part of the advance.” Gu took a bulging envelope out of his brief case. “Ten thousand Yuan. I’ll have the rest delivered to you tomorrow.”

Chen took the envelope, making up his mind not to worry about it. There were other things to concern him. He would buy a box of red ginseng for his mother. That’s the least he could do as her only son. Perhaps he should also engage an hourly maid for her; she lived alone in an ancient attic, and was in poor health. He drained his cup, saying, “Drinking with you, we talk to our hearts’ content, my horse tied to a willow tree, by a high building.”

“What is the allusion? You have to enlighten me, my poetic chief inspector.”

“It’s just a quote from Wang Wei,” Chen said without further explanation. The couplet referred to a promise given by a gallant knight in the Tang dynasty, but he and Gu had merely concluded a business deal, which was anything but heroic. “I will try my best.”

The bus, full of people packed like sardines, was stuck fast in an early-morning traffic jam. As a low-level cop, Detective Yu had no access to a bureau car, unlike his boss Chief Inspector Chen. This morning, Yu considered himself lucky when he obtained a seat in the overcrowded bus shortly after he boarded. Now, unbuttoning the top button of his uniform, he had plenty of time to think about the new murder case.

Party Secretary Li had called earlier in the morning, informing him that Chief Inspector Chen was on vacation, and that Yu would be in charge of the Yin case. Chen had also phoned, explaining that he was too busy translating a business proposal at home to come to work. Yu would have to investigate the Yin murder by himself.

Information had been gathered about Yin Lige already. He had been given a fat folder full of material from the Shanghai Archives Bureau, as well as from other sources. Detective Yu was not surprised at this evidence of bureaucratic efficiency. A dissident writer like Yin must have been the subject of secret police surveillance for a long time.

The folder contained a picture of Yin, a bamboo-thin, tallish woman in her mid-fifties, her high forehead and oval face deeply lined, sad eyes looking out through a pair of silver-framed eyeglasses. She wore a black Mao jacket and matching black pants. Her photo was like an image copied from an old postcard.

Yin had been a Shanghai College graduate, class of 1964. Because of the enthusiasm she displayed in student political activities, she had been admitted to the Party and, after graduation, assigned a job as a political instructor at the college. Instead of teaching classes, she gave political talks to students. It was then considered a promising assignment; she might rise quickly as a Party official working with intellectuals who forever needed to be reformed ideologically.

When the Cultural Revolution broke out, like other young people she joined a Red Guard organization, following Chairman Mao’s call to sweep away everything old and rotten. She threw herself into criticism of counterrevolutionary or revisionist “monsters,” and emerged as a leading member of the College Revolutionary Committee. Powerful in this new position, she pledged herself to carry on “the continuous revolution under the proletarian dictatorship.” Little did she suspect that she herself was soon to become a target of the continuous revolution.

Toward the end of the sixties, with his former political rivals out of the way, Chairman Mao found that the rebellious Red Guards were blocking the consolidation of his power. So those Red Guards, much to their bewilderment, found themselves in trouble. Yin, too, was criticized and removed from her position on the College Revolutionary Committee. She was sent to a cadre school in the countryside, a new institution invented by Chairman Mao on an early May morning, after which May 7th Cadre Schools appeared throughout the country. For Mao, one of their purposes was to keep politically unreliable elements under control or, at least, out of the way.

The cadre students consisted of two main groups. The first was composed of ex-Party cadres. With their positions now filled by the even more left-wing Maoists, they had to be contained somewhere. The other was made up of intellectuals, such as university professors, writers, and artists, who were included in the cadre rank system. The cadre students were supposed to reform themselves through hard labor in the fields and group political studies.

Yin, a college instructor, and also a Party cadre for a short while, fit into both categories. In the cadre school, she became the head of a group, and there Yin and Yang met for the first time.

Yang, much older than Yin, had been a professor at East China University. He had been in the United States and had returned in the early fifties, but soon he was put on the “use under control” list, labeled a Rightist in the mid-fifties, and a “black monster” in the sixties.

Yin and Yang fell in love despite their age difference, despite the “revolutionary times,” despite the warnings of the cadre school authorities. Because of their untimely affair, they suffered persecution. Yang died not too long afterward.

After the Cultural Revolution, Yin returned to her college, and wrote Death of a Chinese Professor, which was published by Shanghai Literature Publishing House. Although described as a novel, it was largely autobiographical. Initially, as there was nothing really new or unusually tragic in the book, it failed to sell. So many people had died in those years. And some people did not think it was up to her-as an ex-Red Guard-to denounce the Cultural Revolution. It was not until it was translated into English by an exchange scholar at the college that it attracted government attention.

Officially, there was nothing wrong with denouncing the Cultural Revolution. The People’s Daily did so, too. It had been, as the People’s Daily declared, a mistake by Chairman Mao, who had meant well. The atrocities committed were like a national skeleton in the closet.

To be aware of the skeleton, at home, was one thing, but it was quite another matter to drag it out for Westerners to see. So Party critics labeled her a “dissident,” which worked like a magical word. The novel was then seen to be a deliberate attack on the Party authorities. The book was secretly banned. To discredit her, what she had done as a Red Guard was “uncovered” in reviews and reminiscences. It was a battle she could not win, and she fell silent.