A Loyal Character Dancer

leg missing, and an antique cabinet that might have served as a cupboard. There was a dining table with several stools in a corner.
     
    “Is this a storage area?” she asked.
     
    “No. It was originally a living room, but now it’s a common room—for three or four families living on the same floor, each getting a portion of the space.”
     
    There were several doors along one side of the common room. Chen knocked on the first one. It was answered by an old woman who shuffled out on bound feet.
     
    “You’re looking for Lihua? He’s in the room at the end.”
     
    The door at the end was opened by someone who had heard their footsteps. A man in his mid-forties, tall, lanky, bald, with thick eyebrows and a mustache, wearing a white T-shirt, khaki shorts, rubber-soled sandals, and a tiny bandage on his forehead. He was Wen Lihua.
     
    They entered a room of fifteen or sixteen square meters. Its furnishing bespoke poverty. An old-fashioned bed sported a blue-painted iron headboard still displaying a plastic poster of Chairman Mao waving his hand on top of Tiananmen Gate; the original design on the headboard was no longer recognizable. In the middle of the room was a red-painted table, which bore a plastic pen holder and a bamboo chopsticks container—an indication of the table’s multiple uses. There were a couple of threadbare armchairs. The only thing relatively new was a silver-plated frame holding a picture of a man, a woman, and a couple of kids huddled together behind a collective smile. The picture must have been taken years earlier when Lihua had still had hair combed over his forehead in a rakish way.
     
    “You know why we are here today, Comrade Wen Lihua?” Chen held out his card.
     
    “Yes. It’s about my sister, but that’s all I know. My boss told me to take the day off to help you.” Lihua gestured them to be seated on the chairs around the table and brought over cups of tea. “What has she done?”
     
    “Your sister has not done anything wrong. She has applied for a passport to join her husband in the United States,” Catherine said in Chinese, holding out her identity card.
     
    “Feng’s in the United States?” Lihua scratched his bald head, then added, “Oh, you speak Chinese.”
     
    “My Chinese is not good,” she said. “Chief Inspector Chen will conduct the interview. Don’t worry about me.”
     
    “Inspector Rohn has come here to help,” Chen said. “Your sister has disappeared. We wonder whether she has contacted you.”
     
    “Disappeared! No, she has not contacted me. This is the first time I’ve heard that Feng is there or that she plans to join him.”
     
    “You may not have heard from her recently,” Chen said. “But anything you know about her will help us.”
     
    Catherine took out a mini tape recorder.
     
    “Believe it or not, I have not talked to her for several years,” Lihua sighed deep into his cup. “And she is my only sister.”
     
    Chen offered him a cigarette. “Please go ahead.”
     
    “Where shall I start?”
     
    “Wherever you please.”
     
    “Well, our parents had only the two of us, me and my sister. My mother passed away early. Father brought us up—in this very room. I’m ordinary. Nothing worth talking about. Not now, not then. But she was so different. So pretty, and gifted too. All her elementary-school teachers predicted a bright future for her in socialist China. She sang like a lark, danced like a cloud. People used to say she must have been born under a peach tree.”
     
    “Born under a peach tree?” Catherine asked.
     
    Chen explained, “We describe a girl as beautiful as a peach blossom. There is also a superstitious belief that someone born under a peach tree will grow up to be a beauty.”
     
    “Whether born under a peach tree or not,” Lihua continued with another sigh wreathed in cigarette smoke, “she was born in the wrong year. The Cultural Revolution broke out when she was in sixth grade. She became a Red Guard cadre as well as a leading member of the district song-and-dance ensemble. Schools and companies invited her to appear and sing the revolutionary songs and dance the loyal character dance.”
     
    “Loyal character dance?” she asked once again. “Please excuse my interruption.”
     
    “During those years, dancing was not allowed in China,” Chen said, “except in one particular form—dancing with a paper cut-out of the Chinese character for Loyalty or with a red paper heart