“Yesterday I walked out along a small road in the opposite direction of the park,” Chen said, for once not talking like a gourmand at a banquet. “I happened to pass by a chemical company. People were saying that somebody was murdered there. Have you heard anything, Director Qiao?”
“Yes, I heard about it too. Liu Deming, the general manager of the chemical company, was murdered in his home office,” Qiao said. “It is a very successful company, and he was killed right on the eve of a huge IPO too. What a pity! He could have become a billionaire.”
“A billionaire, but so what?” Ouyang cut in, shaking his silver-haired head like a dream lost in the light streaming through the windows. “As in the old proverb, rich or poor, people inevitably end up alike in a mound of yellow earth. There’s no escaping kalpa.”
“Or you may say karma, Ouyang,” Chen said. “I’ve heard people are talking about the ecological pollution caused by those lakeside factories.”
“No, not karma. I’m not a man of letters, Mr. Chen. I’m too dumb to understand those high-sounding theories about environment. Before the economic reform, however, people here had hardly enough to feed themselves. Many died of starvation during the so-called three years of natural disasters. As Comrade Deng Xiaoping put it well, development comes before everything else. Can you imagine the present-day prosperity of Wuxi without these factories?”
But at what a cost? Chen thought, but didn’t say out loud.
“The company donates a large annual sum to our center,” Qiao said pensively. “I don’t know if the new boss will continue to do that.”
Indeed, perspective determined everything, Chen thought. It was little wonder that local officials defended the pattern of the economic development.
Chen had lost his appetite, but he managed to get through the meal, absentmindedly eating, drinking, and saying things as if playing and replaying a CD from a hidden groove of his mind. Afterward, he took leave of his host with some sort of excuse and walked out.
The center was like a miniature park. The pavilions built in the traditional architectural style, alongside Western-style buildings, made for a pleasant mixture of Oriental and Occidental landscape. He followed a cobble-covered path without purpose or direction, walking past a man-made waterfall against grottos of exquisite rocks before he reached the foot of the verdant hill. He ended up near the fence door at the back, though he had come here by a different route last time. As before, no one was there. He sat on a slab of rock, looking out over the shimmering expanse of water.
It’s not the lake, but the moment / the lake comes flowing into your eyes …
He was thinking of her again, but that afternoon, he started to realize what a battle she had been fighting in her efforts to protect the environment.
Just like those people at the banquet, Liu and the others must have been putting a lot pressure on her.
From the overpass full of sound and fury,
you may see time is like water
covered with all the dirty algae,
empty cans, plastic bottles.
Water has so many delusions,
cunning currents that deceive
with whispering ambitions and vanities.
If you are lost in the revelries
of a solitary green reed in the wind,
the water flows away, leaving you behind.
The lake has so many exits,
once lost, you can never find your way back.
After so many years, you still don’t know
how the water flows?
Don’t forget what’s really important
in a tiny blue test tube.
Virtues are forced upon you
by the tears shaken from the forbidden tree.
The siren, coming from afar,
shouted in terror through the murky mist …
He was again surprised by the voice in the lines, apparently one of mighty authority, like Liu and his people, speaking out to Shanshan, though the persona here was also more of a collective one-not necessarily in Wuxi, nor just by Tai Lake. But that voice might work for an ambitious multivoice, multiperspective poem-along with the lines he had dashed off earlier that morning.
With that thought he turned and made his way toward the gate.
NINE
As before, he took the small quaint road and turned to the right, instead of going into the park. Sometimes, walking helped him think, especially along a quiet road.
That afternoon, the road was still quiet, but there was something he hadn’t noticed before. At the intersection before the small square, he saw a road sign indicating the direction to the Party School of Zhejiang Province. The school, though not in the park itself, was nonetheless in the same scenic area. A black Mercedes sped along in that direction, honking and kicking up a cloud of dust behind it.
Further along, a tourist attraction sign pointed to a bamboo pavilion partially visible up the hill in the woods. He might have seen an indication of the attraction on the tourist map, something with a poetic name, but that afternoon he was not in a tourist frame of mind.
Soon he arrived at the small square, but he didn’t turn in the direction of Uncle Wang’s place. He plodded on, thinking once again about the case.
Sergeant Huang alone couldn’t help that much, in spite of all the efforts he’d been making. But Chen knew nobody else in the city except for Shanshan, to whom he was still unwilling to reveal that he was a detective. No, a sudden revelation like that would be too dramatic for their relationship. She wouldn’t speak as freely to him if she knew he was a cop, of that much he was sure.
He came upon a small pub at the corner of a narrow street. The pub was a simple and shabby one, where customers might have a cup or two with a cheap dish or no dish at all, probably like the old-fashioned tavern in a story by Lu Xun. There were also a couple of rough wooden tables with wooden benches outside.
At one table sat two middle-aged men, hunched with nothing but a bottle of Erguotou between them, drinking determinedly in the middle of the day. Possibly they were two alcoholics already lost in a world of their own, Chen reflected, but he slowed down when he heard something like a drinking game between the two, each saying a sentence of repartee in response to the other, one after the other in quick succession.
“From a fairy tale told to our children long, long ago, the sky was blue-”
“The water was clear-”
“The fish and shrimp were edible-”
“The air was fresh-”
“From a fairy tale told to our children long, long ago … now I drink the cup-”
It was almost like the linked verse, a game among classical Chinese poets. The line “From a fairy tale told to our children long, long ago” sounded like a refrain. The participant could repeat it after every four or five lines, perhaps as an excuse to gain a breath. The one who failed to say a parallel line similar in content or in syntax lost the round and had to drink. The only problem with the game was when both of the drinkers wanted to drink. They could purposely lose in order to drink a cup.
Chen had no idea how long the game had been going on. Judging by the half-empty bottle, the two must have been sitting there for quite a while. It wasn’t the form of the game but its contents that attracted him. Absurd as those lines might have sounded, they presented satirical, scathing comments on society. Indeed, so many things that had been taken for granted now appeared to be unrealistic and unattainable, as if in a fairy tale.