Death of a Red Heroine

Alzheimer’s patient might not be deranged all the time. There were days when the light could miraculously break through the clouds of her mind.
    Chen decided to try his luck.
    After lunch, he dialed Wang Feng. She was not in the office, so he left a message expressing his thanks to her. Then he left. On his way to the bus stop he bought several copies of the Wenhui Daily at the post office on Sichuan Road. Somehow he liked the editor’s note even more than the poem itself. He had not told many of his friends about his promotion to chief inspectorship, so the newspaper would do the job for him. Among those friends he wanted to mail the newspaper to, there was one in Beijing. He felt that he had to say something about his being in this position, an explanation to a dear friend who had not envisioned such a career for him. He thought for a moment, but he ended up scribbling only a sentence underneath the poem. Somewhat ironically self-defensive, and ambiguous, too. It could be about the poem as well as about his work: If you work hard enough at something, it begins to make itself part of you, even though you do not really like it and know that part isn’t real.
    He cut out the section of the newspaper, put it into an envelope, addressed it, and dropped it into a mailbox.
    Then he took a bus to Ankang, the nursing home on Huashan Road.
    The nursing home arrangement was not common. It was not culturally correct to keep one’s aged parent in such an institution. Not even in the nineties. Besides, with only two or three nursing homes in Shanghai, few could have managed to move in there, especially in the case of an Alzheimer’s patient. Undoubtedly her mother’s admission had been due to Guan’s social and Party status.
    He introduced himself at the front desk of the nursing home, A young nurse told him to wait in the reception room. To be a bad news bearer was anything but pleasant, he reflected, as he waited. The only cold comfort he could find was that Guan’s mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, might be spared the shock of her daughter’s violent death. The old woman’s life had been a tough one, as he had learned from the file. An arranged marriage in her childhood, and then for years her husband had worked as a high-school teacher in Chengdu, while she was a worker in Shanghai Number 6 Textile Mill. The distance between the two required more than two days’ travel by train. Once a year was all he could have afforded to visit her. In the fifties, job relocation was out of the question for either of them. Jobs, like everything else, were assigned once and for all by the local authorities. So all those years she had been a “single mother,” taking care of Guan Hongying in the dorm of Number 6 Textile Mill. Her husband passed away before his retirement. When her daughter got her job and her Party membership, the old woman broke down. Shortly afterward she had been admitted to the nursing home.
    At last, the old woman appeared, shuffling, with a striking array of pins in her gray hair. She was thin, sullen-faced, perhaps in her early sixties. Her felt slippers made a strange sound on the floor.
    “What do you want?”
    Chen exchanged glances with the nurse standing beside the old woman.
    “She is not clear here,” the nurse said, pointing at her own head.
    “Your daughter wants me to say hi to you,” Chen said.
    “I have no daughter. No room for a daughter. My husband lives in the dorm in Chengdu.”
    “You have one, aunt. She works in Shanghai First Department Store.”
    “First Department Store. Oh yes, I bought a couple of pins there early this morning. Aren’t they beautiful?”
    Clearly the old woman was living in another world. She had nothing in her hand, but she was making a gesture of showing something to him.
    Whatever might happen, she did not have to accept the disasters of this world. Or was she merely such a scared woman, anticipating such dreadful news, that she had shut herself up?
    “Yes, they are beautiful,” he said.
    She might have been attractive in her day. Now everything about her was shrunken. Motionless, she sat there, staring vacantly ahead, waiting for him to go. The look of apathy was not unmixed, he reflected, with a touch of apprehension. There was no point trying to gather any information from the old woman.
    A worm safe and secure inside its cocoon.
    He insisted on helping her back to her room. The room, holding a dozen iron beds, appeared congested. The aisle