Death of a Red Heroine

was still a fishing village. For thirty years after 1949, however, since Guangzhou was so near to Hong Kong, it had been put under special ideological surveillance, and as a result, its cultural and economic development lagged. It was not until Comrade Deng Xiaoping toured the southern provinces in the early eighties, pushing forward the Open Door Policy, that things began to change. With the rapid rise of free markets and private business, an economic revolution transformed Guangzhou and its surrounding cities. Guangzhou, like Shenzhen, a neighboring special zone city of commercial skyscrapers, became “special”—in the sense that most of the orthodox socialist codes were not applied to it. Now the advantages of socialism were redefined in terms of a better, more prosperous life for the people. Foreign capitalists and investors swarmed in. Its close connection to Hong Kong was further accentuated by a newly built railway.
    That explained why so many people came to Guangzhou, including Xie Rong, Chen reflected. At one end of the station, travelers were lining up along the platform, waiting for the new Guangzhou-Hong Kong express train. The local newspapers were full of discussions about a country with two systems. Peddlers were shouting “Hong Kong roast goose” and “Hong Kong barbecue pork,” as if everything, once labeled “Hong Kong,” immediately became more desirable.
    The issue that Chen was musing over was not, however, how to get to Hong Kong like those excited people on the platform. After 1997 when Hong Kong came under Chinese rule, he would probably visit there, and Hong Kong would still be capitalist in theory. At this moment, he had to find a place to stay in Guangzhou—a place within the bureau’s socialist budget.
    His budget plight had been further complicated by Commissar Zhang in the special case group meeting, where Chen had given a number of reasons for making the trip. Actually, there was one he had not mentioned. Maybe it was not that important, but it was there. He had intended to keep himself busy working on the case, so busy that he had no time to think about his own personal problem. And for that, an investigative trip away from Shanghai for a few days was just the thing. But in Guangzhou Chen found the budget situation worse than he had expected. Owing to price reforms, a small, shabby hotel room in a not-too-inconvenient location would cost forty Yuan per day. Chen had already used one hundred fifty Yuan for the round-trip train ticket. The remaining two hundred Yuan was inadequate even for five days. As a chief inspector, he got a maximum of five Yuan for his standard meal allowance, but a tiny bowl of shrimp dumplings and noodles eaten at a sidewalk stand would cost him more. The only solution was to find a cheap guesthouse with a small canteen.
    After spending twenty minutes at the station hotel service desk, he decided to make a phone call to Ms. Yang Ke, the head of the Guangzhou Writers’ Association.
    “Comrade Yang, it’s Chen Cao speaking.”
    “Little Chen, I’m so pleased that you’re calling me,” Yang said. “I recognized your Shanghai accent.”
    “So you still remember me?”
    “Of course, and the article you wrote about the movie, too. So where are you?”
    “I’m here in Guangzhou. And I want to say hi to you, a greeting to the well-known established writer from an unknown young writer.”
    “Thank you, but you’re not that unknown. And it is not common nowadays for the young to be respectful to the old.”
    A novelist in her mid-sixties, Yang had written a bestseller, The Song of Revolution , in the early sixties that was later made into a popular movie, showing Daojin, a revolutionary goddess, as a young heroine. Chen was too young to see the movie when it was first released, but he kept clippings from several movie magazines. Both the novel and the film were banned during the Cultural Revolution. When the movie was re-released afterward, Chen hastened to see it. To his great dismay, it was not at all the movie he had dreamed of. The story struck him as a stereotyped propaganda, the colors of the movie unreal, the heroine too serious, stiff, moving about with gestures familiar from revolutionary posters. Still, Chen wrote an essay arguing for the historical merit of the novel.
    “What has brought you here?”
    “Nothing particular. People are all saying that Guangzhou has changed a lot. So I want to see for myself, and hopefully find