“As you have mentioned,” Chen said, “she was the queen. There must have been a lot of people that admired her-and approached her, too. Have you heard or known about any such stories?”
“What do you mean?” Xiang said, literally glaring at him.
“For the investigation, I have to ask all kinds of questions. It doesn’t mean anything disrespectful to her, Professor Xiang.”
“No, I have not heard any story. A woman of her family background had to live with her tail tucked in, so to speak. Any peach-colored gossip could be disastrous. It was then a Communist-Puritan period-you were perhaps too young to understand. There was not a single romantic love song in the whole country.”
“Chairman Mao wanted people to devote themselves to the socialist revolution. No room for romantic love-” Chen broke off, unexpectedly reminded of something similar in his paper, except that there it was Confucianism. “Her husband also worked at the institute, didn’t he?”
“Her husband, Ming Deren, taught there too. Nothing so special about him. Their marriage had been-at least partially, I think-an arranged one. Before 1949, his father was a successful investment banker, and hers was only a struggling attorney. The Ming Mansion was one of the most extravagant in the city.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of the mansion. Did they have any problems in their marriage?” Chen wondered why Xiang brought up the topic of arranged marriage.
“Not that I know of, but people thought he was no match for her.”
“I see,” Chen said, realizing that for Xiang, no one could have been worthy of her. “Now, how did you come to know about the picture? She must have told you or shown you the magazine.”
“No. We shared an office, and I happened to overhear her phone conversation with the photographer. So I bought a copy of the magazine.”
“About the mandarin dress in the picture-had you seen her wearing it?”
“No, I didn’t. Neither before nor after the picture. She had several mandarin dresses, which she occasionally wore for performances, but not the one in the picture.”
“So she got into trouble because of the picture?”
“I don’t know. Shortly afterward, the Cultural Revolution broke out. Her father-in-law passed away and her husband committed suicide, which was condemned as a serious crime against the Party. She was turned into a ‘black family member of a current counterrevolutionary’ and driven out of the mansion into the attic above the garage. The mansion was taken over by a dozen ‘red families.’ She suffered the worst humiliating persecution.”
“So she died a tragic death because of it?”
“About the circumstances of her death,” Xiang said, taking a long sip at his tea, as if sipping at his memory, “my recollection may not be so reliable, you know, after all these years.”
“It happened more than twenty years ago, I understand. You don’t have to worry about the accuracy of the details. Whatever you tell me, I’ll check and double-check,” Chen said, also sipping at the tea. “Look at the picture. It’s like in a proverb, a beauty’s fate as thin as a piece of paper. Something really should be done for her.”
That clinched it for Xiang.
“You really mean it?” Xiang said. “Yes, you cops should have done something for her.”
Chen nodded, saying nothing for fear of interrupting.
“You have heard of the campaign of Mao Zedong Thought Worker Propaganda Teams and what they did at colleges and universities, haven’t you?” Xiang went on without waiting for a response. “They stood for political correctness during those years in the Cultural Revolution. A team arrived at our school too, bullying in the name of reeducating the intellectuals. The head of the team soon had a nickname whispered among us-Comrade Revolutionary Activity. It was because he talked all the time about his ‘revolutionary activity’-beating, criticizing, cursing us, the so-called ‘class enemies.’ What could we do except give him a nickname behind his back?”
“Was she the target of any of his ‘revolutionary activity?’ ”
“Well, he kept giving ‘political talks’ to her. There were stories about those talks behind closed doors, but to be fair to him, I didn’t notice anything really suspicious. Their talks weren’t too long. Nor was the door closed-not all the time. Still, she cringed like a mouse in front of a cat. I mean, in his company, which she tried her best to avoid.”
“Did you tell her about your concerns?”
“No. It would have been a crime to suspect a Mao member like that,” Xiang said with a bitter smile. “Then something happened. Not at the school, but at her home. A chalk-written counterrevolutionary slogan was found on their garden wall. By that time, there were more than ten families living in the house, but the neighborhood committee saw it as an anti-Party attack by another counterrevolutionary in her family. One of her neighbors claimed to have seen her son holding a piece of chalk, and another declared that she was there behind the scenes. So the committee came to our institute. Comrade Revolutionary Activity met them, and they formed a joint investigation group and put the boy into an isolation investigation-they locked him up in the back room of the neighborhood committee until he was ready to confess his crime.”
“That’s too much,” Chen said. “Did they torture him during the isolation investigation?”
“What exactly the joint group did there, I don’t know. Comrade Revolutionary Activity spent a lot of his time in her neighborhood-every day. She wasn’t put into isolation interrogation, however, like her late husband had been earlier, and like her son was then. She still came to the institute, looking deeply troubled. Then one afternoon, out of the blue, she ran out of the attic, unclothed, fell stumbling down the staircase, and died then and there. Some said she must have lost her mind. Some said she was taking a bath, jumping out upon the unexpected return of her son.”
“Was her son released that day?”
“Yes, he returned that afternoon, but when he reached the door of their attic room, he turned back and rushed down the staircase. According to one of her neighbors, she fell running out after him.”
“That’s strange. Even if he stumbled upon her in a bath, he didn’t have to run away at that, nor did she have to rush out naked.”
“She was so attached to her son. She could have forgotten herself in the overwhelming joy.”
“What did the Mao team member say about her death?”
“He said that her death was an accident. That’s about it.”
“Did anyone raise questions about the circumstances of her death?”
“No, not at the time. I was in trouble for ‘poisoning the students with decadent Western classics.’ Like a clay image crossing the river, I could hardly protect myself,” Xiang said. “After the Cultural Revolution, I thought about approaching the factory where Comrade Revolutionary Activity had come from. He had never explained his activity in her neighborhood. As the head of the Mao team, he was supposed to stay at our school, not her neighborhood. So why was he there? But I hesitated because I didn’t have anything substantial, and because it could drag her memory through the mire again. Also, I heard he had also fallen on hard times, wrecked through a series of mishaps, fired and punished.”
“Hold on-Comrade Revolutionary Activity. Do you remember his name?”
“No, but I can find out,” Xiang said. “Are you going to investigate him?”
“Was there anything else unusual about him?”
“Yes, there’s one more thing I noticed. Usually, for one school, the Mao team was made of workers from one factory, but for ours, Comrade Revolutionary Activity, the head of the team, actually came from a different factory.”
“Yes, that’s something,” Chen said, taking out a small notebook. “Which factory?”