Death of a Red Heroine

you in the near future.”
    “Not for me, but for yourself.”
    “Yes, you’re right.”
    “You have time to have supper with me, I hope?”
    “As long as you don’t make anything special for me.”
    “No, I won’t.” She stood up. “I’ll just need to warm up a few leftover dishes.”
    Not too many dishes, he suspected, looking into the small bamboo food cabinet on the wall. She could not afford a refrigerator.
    The small cabinet held only one tiny dish of cabbage pickles, a bottle of fermented bean curd, and half a dish of green bean sprouts. But a bowl of watery rice porridge and pickle tasted quite palatable after a week of exotic delicacies in Ouyang’s company.
    “Don’t worry, mother,” he said, adding a tiny bit of the bean curd to his porridge. “I’m going to attend a Central Party Institute seminar in October, and after that I’ll have more time for myself.”
    “And are you going to be a cop all your life?” she said.
    He could not help staring at her. That was not a question he was prepared for. Not this evening. He was startled by its bitterness. She had not been pleased with his career, he knew. She had hoped that her son would become an academic like his father. But being a police officer had not been a matter of his choice. It surprised him that she should have brought up the subject now that he had become a chief inspector.
    “I have been doing fine, really,” he said, patting her thin, blue-veined hand. “Nowadays, I have my own office in the bureau, and a lot of responsibility, too.”
    “So it has become your career for life.”
    “Well, that I don’t know.” He added after a pause, “I have been asking myself the same question, but I have not got the answer yet.”
    That, at least, was truthful. Occasionally he still wondered what would have become of him had he continued his literature studies. Perhaps he would be an assistant or associate professor at a university, where he could teach and write too, a career he had once dreamed about. In the last few years, however, he had somehow come around to a different perspective. Life was not easy for most people, especially during China’s transitional period between socialist politics and capitalist economics. There might be a lot of things of more importance or at least of more immediate urgency than modernist and postmodernist literary criticism.
    “Son, you still yearn after the other kind of life, don’t you— study, books, all that sort of thing?”
    “I don’t know. Last week I happened to read a critical essay, another interpretation of the poem about a butterfly flying in The Dream of the Red Chamber . The thirty-fifth interpretation, the author claims proudly. But what is all that to our people’s life today?”
    “But—but don’t you want Fudan or Tongji University anymore?”
    “I do, but I don’t see anything wrong with what I’m doing.”
    “Is police work a preferable way of making a living?”
    It was just one way to make a living, he thought. And literature, too, might be just another commodity, like everything else in today’s market. If an academic career provided him with no more than secure tenure and a middle-class living standard, would he feel more rewarded?
    “I don’t mean that, Mother. Still, if I can do something in my work to prevent one human being from being abused and killed by another, that’s worth doing.”
    He did not say anything more. There was no point elaborating on his defense, but he remembered what his father had once said to him. “A man is willing to die for the one who appreciates him, and a woman makes herself beautiful for the one who appreciates her.” Another quotation from Confucius. Chen did not worship Confucius, but some of his sayings seemed to stick with him.
    “You have been doing quite well in Party politics,” she observed.
    “Yes,” he said, “so far I’ve been lucky.”
    But his luck might be changing at that very moment. It was ironic that in the defense of his career choice, he had momentarily forgotten the trouble hanging over his head. He did not want to discuss it with his mother. She had enough worries of her own.
    “Still, I’d like to give you a piece of my mind.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “You’ve got luck, and talent, but you don’t have the inner makings for such a career. You’re my only son, I know. So cut your losses. Try something that really appeals to you.”
    “I will think about it, Mother.”
    He had thought about