A Case of Two Cities

release the names of those officials involved if we do not stop persecuting him.”
     
    “Let him do so. The more he blabs, the easier our work will be here.”
     
    “Do you think he’ll tell the truth? And no matter how blatant his lies, some Americans will use what he says against China.”
     
    “What else can we do?”
     
    “Xing may be bluffing there, I think, trying for some sort of deal. We have to push on with our work here.”
     
    “Well,” Chen said, failing to see the connection here. Nor was he clear about what deal Zhao meant. He didn’t want to give any details about his new approach. “I have been doing my best.”
     
    “Now, I don’t think I have to repeat myself,” Comrade Zhao concluded. “You are an emperor’s special envoy in Shanghai.”
     
    * * * *
     
    Late that afternoon, Chen decided to pay a visit to his mother. He hadn’t seen her since his interview with Dong.
     
    There was not much, however, he could do for her. He had tried to talk her into staying with him, but she had invariably declined. His was a one-bedroom apartment. It would be too inconvenient, she declared, when he had visitors, especially young female visitors. As an alternative, he tried to find her a maid—a “provincial sister” in a live-in arrangement—but she would not listen to this, either.
     
    The traffic snarls were terrible, especially at rush hour. When the car finally came in sight of Jiujiang Road, the lane, enveloped in the graying dusk, appeared shabbier than he had remembered.
     
    In the bureau, he had heard people talking about the possibility of a three-bedroom apartment for him, so that his mother could move in with him. The housing system was still on a dual track. While some people had started buying their own apartments, the majority remained dependent on the government quota. A Party cadre, once promoted to a given rank or position, would be granted corresponding benefits, including better housing in the overcrowded city. The prospect for him was complicated, however, with so many lower-level cops on the waiting list, bickering and complaining. A special housing quota directly from the city government, as Dong had suggested, would have helped.
     
    Around the street corner, he saw several kids playing in the shadow cast by a Coca-Cola umbrella. The red and white umbrellas had mushroomed everywhere. According to Shanghai Morning, they were a part of the colorful Shanghai landscape, along with the billboards presenting life-size Chinese stars drinking to their hearts’ content. But he was still surprised at the sight of the umbrella there, close to the lane, where most of the inhabitants would find the drink too expensive, if not too exotic.
     
    Aunt Qiang, a short, gray-haired woman who lived next door, stared at him as he got out of the taxi. She had a bamboo basket dripping with shepherd’s purse blossom, a rural delicacy he had first read about in a poem by Qiji. She took a step forward and said, “Oh, you. Little—”
     
    It appeared as if nothing had changed from his childhood memories, surely not the fresh, luscious shepherd’s purse blossom, but the old neighbors might no longer consider it appropriate to address him by his small name.
     
    He passed by a Chinese chess game in front of a dingy hot-water shop. Usually, the players and the audience would smoke, drink, and sometimes eat inside the water shop. The outside location was perhaps due to one of the players, Wong Ronghua, an ex-member of Shanghai Chess Team, attracting a large audience. Wong, a gaunt, grizzled man, grinned at Chen, revealing his teeth stained through years of bitter tea and poor cigarettes. He straddled one end of a wooden bench, and his opponent perched on the other end, keeping it precariously balanced. The chessboard was placed between them. Stripped to the waist in his black shorts, Wong appeared sallow, malnourished, with his ribs visible, looking like a washboard.
     
    There were three or four hot-water bottles lined along the bench, squatting on the ground like the audience on the other side, who would probably remain in that position to the end. The neighborhood was not exactly a slum, but these were the people left out of the materialistic transition of the society.
     
    His mother was upstairs watching TV in the attic room. The same fifteen-inch TV set he had bought years ago—still at the “state price” then. She had made a scarlet velvet cover for the TV, which must have