Death of a Red Heroine

name. Sleepless, he lit a cigarette.
    A young woman, Guan must also have experienced her moments of surging loneliness—sudden sleeplessness, in that small dorm room of hers.
    The ending of a poem by Matthew Arnold came swelling to him in the night-air:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
    It was a poem he had translated years earlier. The broken and uneven lines, as well as the abrupt, almost surrealist transitions and juxtapositions, had appealed to him. The translation had appeared in Reading and Understanding, along with a short critical essay by him, claiming it as the saddest Victorian love poem. Whether it was really an echo of the disillusioned Western world, as he had maintained in the essay, however, he was no longer so sure. Any reading, according to Derrida, could be a misreading. Even Chief Inspector Chen could be read in one way or another.

Chapter 13
    S aturday in late May was once again clear and fine.
    The Yus were visiting the Grand View Garden in Qingpu, Shanghai.
    Peiqin was in her element, carrying a copy of The Dream of the Red Chamber . It was a dream come true to her.
    “Look, that’s the bamboo grove where Xiangyuan takes her nap on the stone bench, and Baoyu stands watching her,” she said, turning the pages to that part of the story.
    Qinqin was in high spirits, too, running about, losing and finding himself in a traditional Chinese garden maze.
    “Take a picture of me by the vermilion pavilion,” she said.
    Yu had the blues, but he was making a gallant effort to conceal his mood. He held up the camera, knowing how much the garden meant to Peiqin. A group of tourists also came to a stop in front of the pavilion, and the guide began elaborating on the ancient architectural wonder. Peiqin listened intently, oblivious to him for the moment. He stood among the crowd, nodding, but pursuing his own thoughts.
    He had been under a lot of pressure in the bureau. Commissar Zhang was unpleasant to work with, all the more so after the last group meeting. Chief Inspector Chen was not intolerable, but he obviously had something up his sleeve. The Party Secretary, while gracious to Chen and Zhang, brought all the pressure to bear upon Yu, who was not even the lead investigator for the case. Not to mention the fact that Yu actually had the main responsibility for the other cases in the squad.
    Little had come out of his renewed focus on the taxi bureau and travel agencies. The reward offered for information about any suspicious driver seen that night near the canal was a long shot. No response came, as Yu had expected.
    There was no progress from Chen either, with respect to his theory about the caviar.
    “The garden is a twentieth-century construction of the archetypal idea exhibited in The Dream of the Red Chamber , the classical Chinese novel most celebrated since the mid-nineteenth century.” The guide was speaking glibly, holding a cigarette with a long filter tip as he delivered his introduction. “Not only are the lattice windows, doors, or wood pillars exactly of the same design, the furniture also reflects the conventions of the time. Just look at the bamboo bridge. And the asparagus fern grotto, too. We’re truly living in the novel here.”
    Indeed, the garden was a draw to fans of the novel. Peiqin had talked about visiting it five or six times. There had been no putting off this visit.
    A moss-covered winding path led into a spacious hall with oblong windows of stained glass, through which the “inner garden” appeared cool and inviting, but Yu was in no mood for any further expedition. He felt stupid and out-of-place, as he stood by Peiqin in the crowd, though he pretended to be interested like everybody else. Some people were taking pictures. By a strange-shaped grotto stood a makeshift photography booth where tourists could rent so-called Ming dynasty costumes and jewelry. A young girl was posing in a heavy antique golden headdress, and her boyfriend was changing into a dragon-embroidered silk gown. And Peiqin, too, was being transformed by the splendor of the garden, as she busily compared the chambers, stone pavilions, and moon-shaped gates with the