Regaining his seat in the corner, he decided to do some reading about human smuggling in Fujian. The material was in English, as this topic was banned from Chinese publications. He had read no more than two or three lines when a young mother pushing a stroller came to the seat beside him. She was an attractive woman in her mid-twenties, with thin, clear features and a touch of shadow under her large eyes.

“English?” she said, glancing at the material in his hand.

“Yes.” He wondered whether she had taken the seat next to him because she had glimpsed his English reading matter.

She wore a white dress of light material, a caftan, which seemed to be floating around her long legs as she rocked the stroller with a sandaled foot. There was a blond baby sleeping in it.

“He has not seen his American daddy yet,” she said in Chinese. “Look at his hair-the same golden color.”

“He’s cute.”

“Blond,” she said in English.

There were many stories about cross-cultural marriages nowadays. The sleeping baby looked adorable, but her emphasis on the color of his hair bothered the chief inspector. It sounded as if she thought anything associated with Westerners was something to be proud of.

He got up to make another phone call. Luckily, he discovered a booth that took coins for a long distance call. Time is money. That was a newly popular, politically correct slogan in the nineties. It was certainly correct here. The call was to Comrade Hong Liangxing, superintendent of the Fujian Police Bureau.

“Superintendent Hong, this is Chen Cao. Party Secretary Li has just assigned me to the Wen case, and I don’t know anything about the investigation. You are really the one on top of the situation.”

“Come, Chief Inspector Chen. We know the decision has been made by the ministry. We will do everything possible to help.”

“You can start by filling me in on the general background, Superintendent Hong.”

“Illegal emigration has been a problem for years in the district. After the mid-eighties, things took a turn for the worse. With the Open Door policy, people gained access to the propaganda of the West and began to dream of digging into the Gold Mountains overseas. Taiwan smuggling rings established themselves. With their large, modern ships, the journeys across the ocean became possible, and hugely profitable too.”

“Yes, people like Jia Xinzhi became snake heads.”

“And local gangs like the Flying Axes helped. Especially by making sure people made timely payment to the smuggling rings.”

“How much?”

“Thirty thousand U.S. dollars per person.”

“Wow, so much. People could live comfortably on the interest of such a sum. Why should they take the risk?”

“They believe they can earn that much in one or two years there. And the risk is not that great because of changes in our legal system in recent years. If they’re caught, they are no longer put into prison or labor camp. Just sent back home. Nor are there political pressures on them afterward. So they are not worried about the consequences.”

“In the seventies, they would have received long prison sentences,” Chen said. One of his teachers had been put into jail for the so-called crime of merely listening to the Voice of America.

“And one of the factors is-you won’t believe it-American policy. When people are caught there, they should be sent back to China at once, right? No. They are allowed to stay for long periods and encouraged to apply for political asylum. So we have been overwhelmed. If the Americans can nail Jia this time, it will be a heavy blow to the smuggling rings.”

“You are so familiar with all the factors involved, Superintendent Hong. Detective Yu and I really must depend on your help. I don’t know if Yu has arrived in Fujian yet.”

“I believe he did, but I haven’t heard from him directly.”

“I’m waiting for the American at the airport. My coins are running out. I have to finish now. I’ll call you again tonight, Superintendent Hong.”

“Call me any time, Chief Inspector Chen.”

The discussion seemed to have gone more smoothly than he had expected. Normally, local police would not be so cooperative with an outsider.

Putting down the phone, he turned to the arrival/departure monitor again. The time posted had changed. The airplane would arrive in twenty minutes.

Detective Yu Guangming had left for Fujian by train instead of by air. There was hardly any difference in travel time, but his preference for the train was prompted by frugality. The police bureau had its regulations about travel expenses. The traveler could pocket half of the difference between the air fare and the train fare-a sizable amount when one went via “hard seat” instead of in a soft sleeper. More than one hundred fifty Yuan, with which he planned to buy an electric calculator for his wife, Peiqin. She was a restaurant accountant, but still used a wooden abacus at home, clicking and clacking the abacus pieces under her slender fingers late into the night.

So, sitting on a wooden bench, Detective Yu started reading material about Wen. There was not much in the folder. The part about Wen being an educated youth, however, gave him a sense of déjà vu. Both Peiqin and he had been educated youths in the early seventies.

Halfway through the dossier, he lit a cigarette and gazed thoughtfully at the spiraling smoke rings. The present always changed the past, but the past changed the present, too.

Classmates of the class of ‘70, Yu and Peiqin, no more than sixteen years old, had to leave Shanghai to “receive reeducation” on an army farm tucked away in remote Yunnan Province, on the southern China/Burma border. On the eve of their departure, the parents of the two young people had a long talk. The next morning, Peiqin came to his place, got into a truck, and sat with Yu, bashfully, unable to look up at him all the way to the Shanghai Railway Station. It was a sort of arranged engagement, Yu realized. Their families wanted them to take care of each other thousands of miles away. That they did, and more, though they did not get married there. Not because they had not grown affectionate, but because there might be a chance, with their status still listed as single, for them to move back to Shanghai. Under government policy, once married, educated youths had to settle down forever in the countryside.

The movement was discontinued, if not denounced, toward the end of the seventies, and they had come back to the city. Peiqin was assigned a job in Sihai Restaurant by the Office of Educated Youths. His father, Old Hunter, arranged to retire early so Yu could take his place as a cop in the Shanghai Police bureau. They got married. One year after the birth of their son Qinqin, their lives had slipped into a smooth yet ordinary routine-quite different from what they had dreamed of in Yunnan. A restaurant accountant, working in an oven of a tingzhijian cubicle over the kitchen, Peiqin’s only indulgence was to read The Dream of the Red Chamber, which she did over and over during her half-hour lunch break. A low-level cop, Yu came to the realization that he would probably remain one. Still, he thought there was not much for him to complain about-Peiqin was a marvelous wife, and Qinqin was growing up to be a wonderful son.

He wondered why Wen had not returned to Shanghai like so many others. Many educated youths who had married got divorced so they could return home. In those years of absurdities, one had to do even more absurd things to survive. It would be difficult for people to comprehend nowadays, even for Chief Inspector Chen who, though only a few years younger, had not been to the countryside.

“Attention, it is the time for the night meal. Passengers who want to have a night snack please go to compartment six.” A husky-voiced woman started reading an announcement over the train loudspeaker. “For tonight, there are fried rice cakes with pork, dumplings with Qicai stuffing, and noodles with mushrooms. We also serve beer and wine.”