Death of a Red Heroine

“stamina” or “hormone” or “male essence” in Guangdong style. These food booths, like other private enterprises, had mushroomed in Guangzhou’s streets since Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the south.
    The booth Ouyang took him to was rather simple: several wooden tables with seven or eight benches. A big coal-burning stove and two small ones comprised the open kitchen. Its only sign was a red paper lantern with the traditional-style character “happiness” embossed on it. Beneath it were live eels, frogs, clams, and fish squirming and swimming in water-filled wooden basins and buckets. There was also an impressive glass cage with several snakes of various sizes and shapes. Customers could choose, and have their choice cooked in a specified way.
    A middle-aged woman was peeling a water snake by the cage. With its head chopped off, the snake was still twitching in a wooden basin, but in a couple of minutes, a coil of white meat would be steamed in a brown earthware pot. An old man wearing a white hat was flourishing a ladle and frying a carp in a sizzling wok. A young girl was serving the customers, bustling about with several platters placed on her slender bare arm, her wooden sandals clacking on the sidewalk. She called the white-hatted cook Grandpa. A family business.
    More diners were arriving; soon every table was occupied. The place obviously had a reputation. Chen had seen the booth ear- lier in the afternoon, but he had guessed that the cost was beyond his standard meal allowance.
    “Hi, Old Ouyang. What favorable wind has brought you here today?” The young girl coming over to their table appeared to know Ouyang well.
    “Well, today’s favorable wind is our distinguished poet, Chen Cao. It’s really a great honor for me. As usual, your special dishes. And your best wine, too. The very best.”
    Ouyang took out his wallet and put it on the table.
    “The best, of course,” the girl echoed, walking away.
    In less than fifteen minutes, an impressive array of bowls, dishes, pots, saucers, and platters appeared on the rough, unpainted table.
    The paper lantern cast a ruddy light on their faces and the tiny cups in their hands. In Guangzhou, Chen had heard, there was nothing with four legs that people had not found a way to turn into a delicacy. And he was witnessing such a miracle: Omelet with river clams, meatballs of four happiness, fried rice field eel, peeled shrimp in tomato containers, eight-treasure rice, shark’s fin soup, a whole turtle with brown sauce, and bean curd stuffed with crabmeat.
    “Just a few simple dishes, sidestreet cooking,” Ouyang said, raising his chopsticks, and shaking his head in apology. “Not enough respect to a great poet. We’ll go to another place tomorrow. It’s too late today. Please try the turtle soup. It’s good for yin, you know, for us men.”
    It was a huge softshell turtle. No less than two pounds. At about eighty Yuan per pound in the Guangzhou market, the dish must have cost more than a hundred Yuan. The exorbitant price arose from the medical folklore. Turtles, stubborn survivors in water or on land, were considered to be beneficial to yin , hence a possible boost to human longevity. That it was nutritious Chen could accept, but why it was good for yin , in terms of the yin and yang system in the human body, was totally beyond him.
    But Chen didn’t have time to muse. An eager host, Ouyang kept putting what he believed were culinary delights on Chen’s plate. After the second round of the Maotai wine, Chen, too, felt a sense of elation rising in him. Excellent food, mellow wine, the young waitress serving, light-footed, radiant as a new moon. The aromatic breath of the Guangzhou night was intoxicating.
    Perhaps more than anything else, Chief Inspector Chen was intoxicated with his new identity. A well-established poet being worshipped by his devotee.
    “‘ By the wine urn, the girl is the moon, / Her bare arms frost-white. ’” Chen quoted a couplet from Wei Zhuang’s “Reminiscence of the South.” “I’m tempted to think that Wei was describing a scene in Guangzhou, not too far from this booth.”
    “I have to put down those lines in my notebook,” Ouyang said, swallowing a spoonful of shark fin soup. “That is poetry.”
    “The image of a street tavern is quite popular in classical Chinese poetry. It could have originated from the Han dynasty love story of Zhuo Wenjun and Sima Xiangru. At the lowest point of their life, the