A recurring theme among Chinese intellectuals was a concern for the unfair distribution of wealth in society-huibujun. But Comrade Deng Xiaoping must also have been right when he declared that some Chinese people should be allowed to get rich first in their socialist society, that the wealth they accumulated would “trickle down” to the masses.
As for the money those upstarts like Gu were making, God alone knew where it would lead. Though China in the nineties was still socialist in name, with a time-honored emphasis on egalitarianism for the entire society, the gap between the rich and the poor was quickly-alarmingly-widening.
Chen started climbing the stairs. It was dark; finding each step was difficult. It would not be easy for a stranger to climb these stairs without stumbling. There should have been a light, even in the middle of the day. In such a building, however, with so many families, each one’s share of the electricity bill would be a headache to calculate.
Some of the rooms on each floor were obviously makeshift subdivisions of space, Chen thought. There were sixteen families in the two-story building, about one hundred residents in all. Yu had his job cut out for him if each resident was a potential suspect.
Chen could not help stepping inside Yin’s room, though he had not intended to examine it. Yu would have done a thorough job already.
He felt melancholy as he stood there, alone, thinking about a solitary woman whose death he should have more actively investigated. The furniture was already covered in a thin layer of dust, which somehow made the scene familiar. There was a pile of old magazines in which bookmarks had been placed. He thumbed through them; in each case, the marked page contained a poem of Yang’s which had later appeared in the collection edited by Yin. A traditional Chinese painting of two canaries still hung high on the time-yellowed wall. There was nothing else left that was really personal to Yin.
Chen’s interest in the room was also piqued by the term tingzijian writer. There were poverty-stricken writers, unable to rent better rooms, in the thirties, and then in the nineties, too. The marginal status of a tingzijian room, something barely inhabitable between two floors, appeared symbolic. He wondered how such a room-or the attempt to write in such a room-could have been romanticized in fiction. Not everything could have been glamorous in times past, but nostalgia made it seem so. Things are miraculously mellowed in memories. That was a line from a Russian poem he had read, but failed to understand, in his high-school years. A subtle transformation in comprehension had occurred with the lapse of years.
Chen started pacing around in the tingzijian, though there was not much room for him to do so. He wanted to concentrate.
It could not have been easy for Yin to write here; it could not have been easy to do anything, for that matter, with people going up and down the stairs, with noise coming from various directions, and with all the various smells wafting about. An unpleasant tang like that of salted beltfish sizzling in a wok was surging up from the kitchen area. He sniffed in spite of himself.
He went over to the window and rested his elbows, gingerly, on the windowsill, from which most of the paint had already peeled off.
There might be one advantage, nonetheless, for a writer in a tingzijian room, with its window lower than on the second floor but higher than on the first. There was an almost eye-level view of the hustle and bustle of the lane, so close yet at the same time somehow distanced.
In spite of the cold weather, several residents were out in the lane, holding bowls, talking, or exchanging a slice of fried pork for a nugget of steamed fish. Late breakfast or early lunch, Chen could not tell which. Peddlers came in and out, hawking the various goods on their shoulder poles. An old man went by, carrying a green-headed duck in his hand, stopping to feed the duck at a tiny pool in the corner, then resuming his walk, light-footed as if he were on a cloud, his mind doubtless filled by the image of sesame oil-braised duck wings. He clutched the neck of the helpless duck tightly with a look of utter satisfaction on his face. Could this be Mr. Ren, the frugal gourmet? Chief Inspector Chen then remembered having been told that Mr. Ren did not cook at home often.
Once more, Chen’s glance followed the curve of the lane back to the corner where the shrimp woman was now stationed, sitting on the same bamboo stool, on the same spot with a large bowl full of glistening fish scales at her feet. Perhaps she had another contract with the food market to make a later delivery.
As he went downstairs to the back door, something else caught his attention. It was the space-or rather something covering the space-under the staircase.
In a shikumen house, any usable space was precious. Since no single family could claim the space under the staircase, it became an additional common storage area for all sorts of hardly usable stuff which, in its owner’s imagination, still had some potential value-like a broken bike of the Lis, a three-legged rattan chair of the Zhangs, a trunk of coal of the Huangs. But there was one difference here, Chen noticed: the space was covered by something like a curtain. It was a heavy material, possibly a once-expensive tapestry, which had been discolored by years of smoke from all the coal stoves.
The curtain seemed to be moving mysteriously. As Chen took a step toward it, out jumped two small boys. They must have been playing hide-and-seek behind the curtain. At the sight of Chief Inspector Chen, they ran away, laughing and shrieking. He lifted up the curtain; the space inside was full of the grimy discarded junk.
A middle-aged man squeezed past him to reach into a bag of coal balls that was leaning against the side of the staircase. “Sorry, lunch time,” he mumbled, as he filled a ladle with coal balls.
Looking at his watch, Chen realized that he had spent nearly three hours without finding out anything of value for the investigation. He might have gained some first-hand experience for his translation, but he had no idea whether it would really help him to visualize the New World.
He left the shikumen building, cutting through one sub-lane into another, and then returned to the main lane, which was throbbing with life just as Old Liang had described it. A middle-aged woman was drying a redwood chamber pot, another trotted back from the food market with a full bamboo basket, and still another was preparing a large carp in the lane sink, splashing scales and gossip around at the same time.
Turning another corner, he saw a white-haired old man playing go on a board resting on a stool, the black pieces in one of his hands and the white in the other, studying the board as if he were taking part in a national tournament. Chen liked go, too, but he had never tried to play the game solo.
“Hi,” he said, coming to a stop by the stool. “How come you are playing by yourself?”
“Have you read The Art of War?” the old man asked without looking up. “Know your enemy as you know yourself, and you will win every time.”
“Yes, I have read the book. You have to figure out why your opponent has made a certain move. So you must try hard to understand your opponent.”
“From my point of view, the positioning of the black piece does not make any sense, and the best I can do is to guess, to try to understand, as you put it. But that’s not enough. Knowing your enemy actually means that you not only have to think as if you were reading his mind, you have to be him.”