Death of a Red Heroine

later.”
    The last picture was of Guan again: wearing a mask, manacled to the wall, but otherwise stark naked, staring into the camera with a mixed expression of uneasiness and wantonness.
    A model for a mask.
    Or a mask for a model.
    On the back of the picture was small printing: “A national model worker, three hours after she delivered a speech at the city government hall.”
    Chief Inspector Chen felt sick. He did not want to read any more.
    He was no moralistic judge. In spite of the Neo-Confucian principles the late Professor Chen had instilled in him, he did not consider himself traditional or prudish. However, the pictures, with these comments, were too much for him. He had a sudden, vivid picture of Guan lying on the hard board bed, moaning, arching herself up to the man’s thrust and writhing, beneath the framed portrait of Comrade Deng Xiaoping, who was seated, musing over the future of China.
    He heard himself groaning.
    There was a feeling of unreality about the whole thing. Chief Inspector Chen had finally found what he had been trying so hard to find. The motive.
    Now everything was coming into perspective. Toward the end of their relationship, Guan had got hold of the pictures, which Wu had used against her, but which she had later used to threaten him. She was aware of how destructive the pictures could have been to him, especially at the moment of his potential promotion. She suspected Wu would try to get them back. That was why she had hidden them.
    What she had not anticipated, however, was Wu’s desperation. It cost her her life. Wu’s political career was at a critical moment. With his father lying so ill, this might be his last chance to advance. A scandalous affair or a divorce, either would have damaged his chances. There was no choice left for him. To silence Guan forever would have been his only way out. Now he knew why Wu Xiaoming had committed the crime.
    Chief Inspector Chen put the pictures in his pocket, hung Deng’s portrait back on the wall, and turned off the flashlight.
    As he looked out of the dorm building, he saw a lone man loitering, casting a long shadow across the street. He decided to take a different lane exit. It led to a side street just one block away from the Zhejiang Movie Theater.
    A crowd was pouring out of the movie theater, chatting about a new documentary on the Shengzhen economic reform. People were requested to watch the movie as part of their political education. Its release was supposed to signify some dramatic turn in politics.
    Chen walked amidst the crowd.
    “It’s not just for pleasure that Comrade Deng Xiaoping has made the second trip to Shenzhen.”
    “Of course not. The special economic zone is under fire from those old conservatives.”
    “They are saying that China is no longer on the road of socialism.”
    “Capitalist or socialist, that’s none of our business. As long as we have three meals a day, we don’t care.”
    “And Old Deng has made the difference in your meals, putting chicken, duck, fish and pork on your plates, right?”
    “Yes, that’s what it is really about. We Marxists are proudly materialists.”
    The difference could be seen in the way ordinary people talked about politics on the street. Comrade Deng Xiaoping became “Old Deng”; in the early seventies, people were thrown into jail for saying “Old Mao.”
    In the bureau, Chen had also heard of Deng’s recent trip to the south. It might be a prelude to another dramatic political change, but he found it difficult to dwell on this at the moment. His thoughts were full of Guan, whose personal drama came nearer to him than all the political ones.
    At the beginning of his investigation, Chen had cherished a vision of Guan as a poor victim. An alabaster statue smashed by a violent blow. Guan was a victim. On May 11, 1990, she had been murdered by Wu, but even before that, she had long been victimized—by politics. And she was not an innocent, passive statue either. She was in part responsible for her own destruction.
    Likewise, he, once a college student dreaming of a literary career, had turned himself into Chief Inspector Chen. He came to this realization with a shudder.
    To make no choice is, in existentialist terms, in itself to make a choice.
    Guan could have married Engineer Lai, or somebody else. An ordinary housewife, bargaining over a handful of green onions in the food market, searching through her husband’s pockets in the morning, fighting for stove