A Loyal Character Dancer

her passport application. The Fujian police had been informed that an American officer was coming for Wen, so they were trying to speed things up. Wen was not at home. Nor was she at the commune factory. Zhao went there again in the afternoon, but still he had no luck. The next morning, he came to Changle with another policeman. The door to her house was locked. According to her neighbors, Wen had never before gone away for a whole day. She had to work in the commune factory, to take care of the family plot, and to feed the chickens and piglets. They looked into the pigsty, where the starving animals could hardly stand on their legs. So they decided to enter the house after checking for signs of forced entry. There were none, nor any sign of a struggle inside. They started canvassing the village, knocking at one door after another. Wen had last been seen there around 10:45 p.m. on April fifth, as she fetched water from the village well. By the afternoon of April seventh, they were sure that something had happened to her.
     
    The local police had searched the neighboring villages, as well as hotels within the radius of a hundred miles. They also made inquiries at the bus depot. Only one bus had passed the village that night. So far, all their efforts had yielded nothing.
     
    “It’s beyond us,” Zhao concluded. “Her disappearance is a mystery.”
     
    “What about the possibility of the Flying Axes kidnapping her?”
     
    “That’s not likely. Nothing unusual was noted in the village that night. She would have shouted or struggled, and someone would have heard. You will see for yourself in a minute.”
     
    It took them another fifteen minutes, however, before the village came in view. There was a striking discrepancy between the kinds of houses clustered there. Some were new, modern, substantial, like mansions in the best area of Shanghai, but others were old, shabby, and small.
     
    “It’s like two different worlds here,” Yu observed.
     
    “Exactly,” Zhao said. “There’s a huge gap between households with people abroad and those without. All these new houses have been built with money sent from overseas.”
     
    “It’s amazing. These new houses would be worth millions in Shanghai.”
     
    “Let me give you some numbers, Detective Yu. A peasant’s yearly income here is around three thousand Yuan, and that depends on the weather. Someone in New York can earn that sum in a week—living, eating, sleeping in a restaurant, and getting paid all in cash. One year’s savings there is enough to pay for a two-story house here, full of new furniture and appliances, too. How can families without people abroad compete? They have to remain huddled in those ancient huts, in the shadow of the upstarts.”
     
    “Yes, you cannot do everything with money,” Yu said, echoing the line from a new movie, “but you cannot do anything without it.”
     
    “The only way for the poor to turn the tables is to go abroad, too. Otherwise, they will be viewed as foolish, lazy, or incompetent. It’s a vicious cycle. So more and more people leave.”
     
    “Did Feng leave for the same reason?”
     
    “That must have been one of his reasons.”
     
    They came to Wen’s house. An old one, probably built as early as the turn of century, though not small, with a front yard, a backyard, and a pigsty. It looked extremely shabby compared to the improved standard of the village housing. The door was locked from the outside with a brass padlock. Zhao opened it by inserting a small knife into the lock. In the deserted front yard, Yu saw two baskets of empty wine bottles in a corner.
     
    “Feng drank a lot,” Zhao said. “Wen collected the bottles to sell.”
     
    They examined the yard walls, the tops of which were covered in dust, but found no traces of anyone having climbed over.
     
    “Have you found anything suspicious among the things she left behind?” Yu asked as they moved inside.
     
    “Well, there’s not much left behind.”
     
    Not much in the way of furniture anyway, Yu observed, taking out his notebook. The living room appeared inconsolably bare. A ramshackle table with two wooden benches were all he could see. There was, however, a basket of cans and plastic packages under the table. One of the packages bore a danger-inflammable notice. Whatever it was, it did not appear to be something people would normally keep in the living room.
     
    “What’s that?”
     
    “The material Wen used for her