Death of a Red Heroine

pictures in her mind. Looking at her, he almost believed that she belonged there, expecting Baoyu—the young, handsome hero of the novel—to walk out of the bamboo grove any minute.
    She also seized the opportunity to share her knowledge of classical Chinese culture with Qinqin. “When Baoyu was your age, he had already memorized the four Confucian classics.”
    “The four Confucian classics?” Qinqin said. “Never heard of them in school.”
    Having failed to elicit the expected response from her son, she turned to her husband. “Look, this must be the stream where Daiyu buries the fallen flower,” she exclaimed.
    “Daiyu buries her flower?” he said, at a total loss.
    “Remember the poem by Daiyu—‘ I’m burying the flower today, but who’s going to bury me tomorrow ?’”
    “Oh, that sentimental poem.”
    “Guangming,” she said, “your thoughts are not in the garden.”
    “No, I am enjoying every minute of it,” he assured her. “But I read the novel such a long time ago. We were still in Yunnan, you remember.”
    “Where are we going now?”
    “To be honest, I’m a bit tired,” he said. “What about you and Qinqin going ahead to the inner garden? I’ll sit here for a few minutes, finish my cigarette, and then I’ll join you there.”
    “That’s fine, but don’t smoke too much.”
    He watched Peiqin leading Qinqin into the quaint inner garden through the gourd-shaped gate, effortlessly, as if she were moving back into her own home.
    He was no Baoyu, and never meant to be. He was a cop’s son. And a cop himself. Yu ground out his cigarette under his foot. He was trying to be a good cop, but he was finding it more and more difficult.
    Peiqin was different. It was not that she complained. In fact, she was contented. As a restaurant accountant, she earned decent money, about five hundred Yuan a month with perks. Enjoying a nice little niche, she did not have to work with the customers. And at home, small as it was, things were smooth and satisfactory, too, she had often said.
    But her life could have been different, he knew. A Daiyu or a Baochai, just like one of those beautiful, talented girls in the romantic novel.
    In the beginning of The Dream of the Red Chamber , there were twelve lovely girls who lived out their romantic karma as preordained in Fate’s heavenly register. According to the author, a love affair is predestined for lovers sauntering under the moon in the Grand View Garden. Of course that’s fiction. In real life, however, things might be stranger even than in fiction.
    He tried to extract another cigarette, but the pack was empty. A crumpled Peony box. The monthly ration coupons allowed him only five quality-brand packs, such as Peony and Great Wall, which he had already finished. He reached into his jacket pocket for a metal cigarette case, in which he kept some cigarettes he had rolled himself, a secret from Peiqin, who was worried about his heavy smoking.
    They had known each other since their early childhood. “Playmates on stilted bamboo horses, / Chasing each other, plucking green plum blossoms.” Doctor Xia had copied the couplet from Li Bai’s “Zhanggan Song” on two red silk streamers for Yu and Peiqin’s wedding.
    But that innocently romantic childhood had not been exactly true for them. It was just that her family had happened to move into the same neighborhood in the early sixties. So they became schoolmates in grade school, and then in high-school, too. Instead of seeking each other’s company, however, they’d kept their distance. The sixties was a revolutionary puritan period in China. It was out of the question for boys and girls to mix together at school.
    Another factor was her bourgeois family background. Peiqin’s father, a perfume company owner before 1949, had been sent to a labor-reform camp in the late sixties, sentenced to a number of years for something unexplained, and died there. Her family, driven out of their Jingan District mansion, had to move to an attic room in Yu’s neighborhood. A thin, sallow girl with a tiny ponytail secured with a rubber band, she was anything but a proud princess. Though a top student in their class, she was often bullied by other kids of working-class family background. One morning, several Little Red Guards were trying to cut off her ponytail. It went too far, and Yu stepped forward to stop them. He exerted a sort of authority over the neighborhood kids as the son of a police officer.
    It was