Death of a Red Heroine

housewarming party for the world, you lucky fellow.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Don’t forget to put some beer in your refrigerator. And glasses, too. It’ll make a huge difference.”
    “I’ve put in half a dozen bottles already. Qingdao and Bud. And the Shaoxing rice wine will not be warmed until the moment of your arrival, right?”
    “Now you may count yourself as half a gourmet. More than half, perhaps. You’re certainly learning fast.”
    The comment was pure Lu. Even from the other end of line, Chen could hear in Lu’s voice his characteristic excitement over the prospect of a dinner. Lu seldom talked for a couple of minutes without bringing the conversation around to his favorite subject—food.
    “With Overseas Chinese Lu as my instructor, I should be making some progress.”
    “I’ll give you a new recipe tonight, after the party,” Lu said. “What a piece of luck, dear Comrade Chief Inspector! Your great ancestors must have been burning bundles of tall incense to the Fortune God. And to the Kitchen God, too.”
    “Well, my mother has been burning incense, but to what particular god, I don’t know.”
    “Guanyin, I know. I once saw her kowtow to a clay image—it must be more than ten years ago—and I asked her about it.”
    In Lu’s eyes, Chief Inspector Chen had fallen into Fortune’s lap—or that of whatever god in Chinese mythology had brought him luck. Unlike most people of his generation, though an “educated youth” who had graduated from high school, Chen was not sent to the countryside “to be reeducated by poor and lower-middle peasants” in the early seventies. As an only child, he had been allowed to stay in the city, where he had studied English on his own. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, Chen entered Beijing Foreign Language College with a high English score on the entrance examination and then obtained a job at the Shanghai Police Bureau. And now there was another demonstration of Chen’s good luck. In an overpopulated city like Shanghai, with more than thirteen million people, the housing shortage was acute. Still, he had been assigned a private apartment.
    The housing problem had a long history in Shanghai. A small fishing village during the Ming dynasty, Shanghai had developed into one of the most prosperous cities in the Far East, with foreign companies and factories appearing like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, and people pouring in from everywhere. Residential housing failed to keep pace under the rule of the Northern warlords and Nationalist governments. When the Communists took power in 1949, the situation took an unexpected turn for the worse. Chairman Mao encouraged large families, even to the extent of providing food subsidies and free nurseries. It did not take long for the disastrous consequences to be felt. Families of two or three generations were squeezed into one single room of twelve square meters. Housing soon became a burning issue for people’s “work units”—factories, companies, schools, hospitals, or the police bureau—which were assigned an annual housing quota directly from the city authorities. It was up to the work units to decide which employee would get an apartment. Chen’s satisfaction came in part from the fact that he had obtained the apartment through his work unit’s special intervention.
    Preparing for the housewarming party, slicing a tomato for a side dish, he recalled singing a song while he stood beneath the portrait of Chairman Mao in his elementary school, a song that had been so popular in the sixties—”The Party’s Concern Warms My Heart.” There was no portrait of Chairman Mao in this apartment.
    It was not luxurious. There was no real kitchen, only a narrow corridor containing a couple of gas burners tucked into the corner, with a small cabinet hanging on the wall above. No real bathroom either: a cubicle large enough for just a toilet seat and a cement square with a stainless-steel shower head. Hot water was out of the question. There was, however, a balcony that might serve as a storeroom for wicker trunks, repairable umbrellas, rusted brass spittoons, or whatever could not be decently squeezed inside the room. But he did not have such things, so he had put only a plastic folding chair and a few bookshelf boards on the balcony.
    The apartment was good enough for him.
    There had been some complaining in the bureau about his privileges . To those with longer years of service or larger families who