Shen, helping himself to a spoon of white jade tofu flavored with green onion and sesame oil and nodding in approval, started. “Now, why is it called mandarin dress? There are a number of theories about it. For one, the Manchurians, both male and female, wore gowns of bright colors. It is also said that in the early period of the Qing dynasty, the Manchurians divided their people into eight groups, or qi, each sporting a flag of a special color and design. Qi is the same as in Qipao-mandarin dress, you know. It was not until the twenties and thirties, however, that the dress suddenly turned into a nationwide hit, shedding its ethnic suggestion. It then enjoyed great popularity until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In the mid-eighties, it was reembraced, and now it’s internationally popular. Hollywood stars wear mandarin dresses to the Oscar ceremonies. People believe that it hugs a woman’s body subtly, bringing out her curves like no other dress…”
It was a long introduction but Chen listened with great interest. The mandarin dress being an unmistakable signature of the murderer, a cop couldn’t be too knowledgeable about it.
“About the mandarin dress Liao showed me: it was made years earlier, probably more than ten years ago,” Shen said, producing several pictures, “based on the color of the thread-already yellow with time. When you consider the material, the special damask with its exquisite print pattern, it possibly goes back even earlier. The sixties, I would say. The same with the tiny steel press buttons. Tailors only used them during that time period or earlier. Since the early eighties, they’ve used plastic zippers instead, which are more comfortable and tighter fitting. The style of the dress also belongs to that period. Look at the whole-piece sleeves. Fashionable people now prefer separate-piece sleeves, which bring out the curves more eloquently. They are also much easier to make-”
Shen’s lecture was interrupted by the arrival of their main dishes. Among them, there was a glass bowl containing live shrimp immersed in white liquor. The drunken shrimp were still jumping, though less and less energetically.
“A fashionable dish,” Shen said, “sort of rediscovered too.”
For a man his age, Shen showed quite a good appetite. He chopsticked a twitching shrimp into his mouth and Chen followed suit. The shrimp tasted slightly sweet, but he didn’t like the slippery sensation on his tongue.
“Now I have to say a word about its tailoring,” Shen went on, puckering his lips. “A hundred percent handmade. Only an old, experienced Ningbo tailor could have produced such a dress. It took at least a week to finish. Today you may see a mandarin dress displayed in a high-end store, shiny and splendid with a staggering price tag, but the quality is just a joke. All machine made and not at all comparable to the one Liao showed me.”
“So it was made at least ten years ago, and the material and the style date back even earlier-the sixties or fifties,” Chen said, writing it down in his notebook. “In other words, the criminal had to special order material from an earlier period, and then custom-tailor it in a special way.”
“That’s beyond me,” Shen said. “But there’s something else in the way the victim wore the dress. The essence of mandarin dress aesthetics is subtle suggestiveness. The dress slits, for instance, reveal a woman’s legs, but not too much. A partial glimpse of her thighs could stir up the imagination most effectively.”
“So it’s like classical Chinese poetry,” Chen cut in. “Imagination rises out of what the poet does not say, or not directly.”
“Exactly. You know the difference. For example, a tall, buxom American star may wear a so-called modified mandarin dress, backless and extremely short in the skirt part. I, for one, would have lost all my sense of imagination at the sight of her bare back covered with speckles, and her legs and thighs shaven like mammoth tusks.”
“You are still so good with your Imagist touch, Master Shen.”
“To put it in another way, it is a dress that allows the wearer’s inner grace to shine through. Sensual, subtle, svelte. It’s not a costume that becomes everyone.”
“Yes, there is quite a lot of knowledge in that,” Chen echoed.
“The length of the side slits is another point of subtlety. For a woman of a good family, the slits are usually modest, suggesting her refined sense of decorum. Strictly speaking, when wearing a mandarin dress, a woman walks with small steps, without showing any dramatic body movement. A fashionable girl, however, may have to have higher slits for dancing or strutting around. As for a girl in the entertainment business, she would choose one with the highest slits possible, showing her legs and thighs seductively, and sometimes her buttocks too. It’s sort of the mandarin dress semiotics. In the thirties, a potential customer on Fourth Street would have approached her.”
“Yes, the dress etiquette speaks,” Chen said, swallowing another live shrimp without chewing it-a throat-scratching mistake with a terrible aftertaste. Fourth Street was an area where prostitutes had congregated before 1949.
“Also, an elegant lady wears stockings and high heels to match her dress, though not necessarily so formal at home. But look at the picture-no bra, no panties, no shoes, and the dress is rolled up high above her groin. Whoever did this murdered the dress too.” Shen paused for a moment before going on. “She’s a sex victim, I understand, but this dress is too old and rare to have been acquired by accident. Also, it is a fairly conservative dress-a woman doesn’t have sex in it. It doesn’t make sense.”
“A lot of things in this case don’t make sense,” Chen said, clearing his throat.
“I don’t know about the case, Chief Inspector Chen,” Shen said in confusion. “I know only about the dress.”
“Thank you, Shen. Your expertise has surely thrown light into the investigation.”
Chen did not say, however, that it also raised more questions than it resolved. The mandarin dress, if as old as Shen thought, was not popular when it was made. Whoever made it, made it against the fashion of the time. That suggested a possible cause embedded deeper in history, which only led to more questions.
Shen was picking up the last live shrimp with his chopsticks when Chen’s cell phone shrilled. Shen was startled, and the shrimp fell back into the bowl, splashing, jumping high as if having escaped its fate.
The phone call was from a Wenhui reporter, who wanted to find out Chen’s theory on the red mandarin dress case.
“Sorry, I can’t give you any theory. I’m on leave, working on my literature paper.”
The instant he hung up the phone, he regretted having made the statement. It was true, but it could cause speculation.
“Really?” Shen wanted to know, rising slowly. “‘The most useless is a scholar,’ like me, but there may not be too many capable cops, like you.”
Chen rose to support him on their way out without making a comment.
Near the exit, there were a couple of large glass tanks containing live shrimp and fish, all of them enjoying a leisurely swim, unaware that their fate might change with the next customer’s order.
NINE
OUTSIDE OF THE RESTAURANT, Shen moved slowly to the curb, then lowered himself into a taxi, his body doubled like a shrimp.
Waving at the taxi, Chen chided himself for the image. Shen was an original poet and an original scholar. Perhaps his academic success came from his Imagist poetics. He didn’t see a dress merely as a piece of clothing but as an image with meanings and associations.
An organic image full of life in itself, which may speak more than pages of words.
Chen recalled one such image of clothing in Random Harvest, the novel he’d read many years ago, in Bund Park. It was an image from the heroine’s first appearance-“a little fur hat, like a fez.” It was symbolic in the text because the protagonist’s niece also wore a fur hat like a fez on another occasion. A subtle suggestion, as Chen interpreted it, about something similar between the two. When he had read it the first time, fez was an English word he didn’t know. So he looked it up in a dictionary, which defined it as a “red felt headdress, shaped like an inverted flowerpot.”