A Case of Two Cities

and everywhere, too.
     
    He stepped into the bookstore, which consisted of two sections. One selling so-called antiques, and the other selling books.
     
    The antique section exhibited a hodgepodge of objects. A time-yellowed picture of an old woman shuffling in her bound feet along the Qing trail, a long brass opium pipe immortalized with the moss of ages, a cigarette box card of a Shanghai courtesan flashing her thighs through the high slits of her floral cheongsam. To his surprise, things as recent as the Cultural Revolution were also marked as antiques, cramming a whole glass counter. A stamp of Marshal Lin Biao standing with Chairman Mao on the Tiananmen Gate. Lin was killed shortly afterward in an unsuccessful coup. The stamp was now marked as worth ten thousand Yuan. There was an impressive collection of Chairman Mao badges—plastic or metal—copies of the Little Red Book of Mao’s Quotations, the four-volume Collected Works of Chairman in the first edition . . .
     
    Next to the collection of the Cultural Revolution, Chen saw a poster of Dietrich in Shanghai Express. This city seemed to be suddenly lost in a collective nostalgia for the twenties and thirties, an allegedly golden period of exotic and exuberant fantasies. Things from those days were being discovered and rediscovered with a passion. The poster stood as a plastic-covered valuable, fetching a much higher price than a larger portrait of Chairman Mao standing on Tiananmen Square.
     
    Chen took a bamboo shopping basket. He picked a stainless steel lighter in the shape of a Little Red Book, marked for only five yuan. He also chose something like a large plastic Mao badge with a long red silk string attached. Possibly a pendant, but the red string was too short.
     
    Looking up, he saw a middle-aged man in a traditional Tang jacket in a corner partially sheltered by a bookshelf. He recognized him to be none other than Qiao. Qiao, who had changed a great deal, deeply wrinkled like a shrunken gourd, did not come over. Perhaps what Chen had chosen were merely cheap imitation antiques.
     
    Chen then walked toward several special-price bookshelves with some of the books marked as eighty to ninety percent off. Qiao moved over, drawing his attention to a section marked “beauty authors.”
     
    “A lot of people buy these books,” Qiao said.
     
    Not because of those glamorous authors on the covers, Chen knew, but because of the pornographic contents—allegedly autobiographical. Like Lei Lei, the author of Darling, Darling, whose cover bore a blurb praising the book as “a lush, lustful account of her sexual experience with three Americans.” Or like Jun Tin, the author of Peacocks, notorious through her fight with Lei Lei for the number one Chinese-female-Henry-Miller title. With the first lessening of the government censorship, books featuring sexual descriptions turned into the hottest product. Surprisingly, there was a bronze ancient monster crouching on top of that particular shelf, as if moving out of a Chinese myth.
     
    “American Lover by Rain Cloud,” Qiao said, picking up a book. “Graphic description of the sexual ecstasy between a Chinese woman and her American lover. The book has caused a sensation because the alleged protagonist’s daughter sued the author. Rain settled the case for a large sum, but guess what—the book was then reprinted to roaring success, bringing in far more than what she paid.”
     
    “How?” Chen said.
     
    “She claimed that the trial was orchestrated by the government. Once a writer was ‘persecuted,’ her book sold like hotcakes. It was translated into five foreign languages. People are contrarily curious. Not to mention all the lurid details, much reported during the trial.”
     
    “What a shameless profiteer!”
     
    “Is there any ashamed profiteer? Look at that paragraph. ‘They write not with their pens, but with their pussies,’“ Qiao read aloud from a newspaper clipping taped above the book.
     
    “Well, what else can you say?” Chen picked a couple of different books at random and put them into the bamboo basket.
     
    “Look at this red silk string, so cute,” Qiao said, noticing the other chosen objects in the basket. “You can hang it in your car.”
     
    “Are Shanghai people so nostalgic for the old days?”
     
    “Are you a professor or a PhD?” Qiao’s wrinkles seemed to be expanding in surprise.
     
    “Ah—” That was an allusion to a popular saying: As poor as a