Don’t Cry, Tai Lake

of disposable chopsticks like flowers. It was a warm day for May, and he had walked quite a distance. Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he was grateful for a fresh breeze coming fitfully along the street.
    An old man came shuffling out of the kitchen in the rear, carrying a dog-eared menu. Most likely he was the owner, chef, and waiter here.
    “Anything particular you would like, sir?”
    “Just a couple of small dishes—any local specialties, I mean,” he said, not really hungry. “And a beer.”
    “Three whites are the local specialties,” the old man said. “The white water fish may be too large for one person. And I wouldn’t recommend the white shrimp—it’s not that fresh today.”
    Chen remembered, from his Wuxi trip with his parents, his father raving about the “three whites”—white shrimp and white water fish were two of them, but he couldn’t recall what the third white was. Another local specialty he liked was the Wuxi soup buns, sweet with a lot of minced ginger. At the end of that long-ago trip, his mother carried home a bamboo basket of soup buns. He still remembered that, but couldn’t recall the third “white.” Perhaps he really was a “helpless gourmet,” as his friends called him, he thought with a touch of self-irony.
    “Whatever you recommend, then.”
    “How about Wuxi ribs and sliced lotus roots filled with sticky rice?”
    “Great.”
    “And a local beer—Tai Lake Beer?”
    “Fine,” Chen said. The lake was known for its clear water, which could mean a superior beer.
    It took the old man only a minute to return to the table with a bottle of beer and a tiny dish of salted peanuts.
    “The appetizer is on the house. Enjoy. So, are you a tourist here?”
    Chen raised the map in his hand, nodding.
    “Staying at Kailun?”
    Kailun might be a hotel nearby, but Chen didn’t know anything about it. “No, at the Wuxi Cadre Recreation Center. Not far from here.”
    “Oh,” the old man said, turning back toward the kitchen. “You’re a young man for that place.”
    The old man was understandably surprised: the center was only for high-ranking cadres, most of whom were old, while Chen looked only thirtyish.
    Though the vacation had come as a surprise to Chen himself, he didn’t say anything in response, but simply took out his book and put it on the table. Instead of reading it, however, he started sipping his beer.
    Life could be more absurd than fiction. In college, he had majored in English, but upon graduation he was state-assigned to a job in the Shanghai Police Bureau, where, to the puzzlement of others as well as himself, he had been rising steadily through the ranks. At the Zhenjiang Party School, some predicted that Chen had a most promising official career ahead of him, that he was capable of moving much further than his current job as chief inspector.
    But here, he was quite content to be a nameless tourist on vacation, with a bottle of beer and a mystery novel. Su Shi, one of his favorite Song dynasty poets, had once declared it regrettable to “have no self to claim,” but at the moment, at least, Chen did not find it so.
    The old man was bringing the dishes Chen had ordered.
    “Thank you,” Chen said, looking up. “How is business?”
    “Not too good. People are telling stories, but it’s really the same everywhere.”
    What stories? Chen wondered. Presumably about the poor quality of the food. That wasn’t uncommon for a tourist city, where customers seldom go to a restaurant a second time, stories or not. But the ribs were delicious, done nicely with plenty of mixed sauce, rich in color and taste. The sliced lotus root, too, proved to be crisp, fresh, yet surprisingly compatible with the sweet sticky rice filling.
    It was a rare privilege to be the only customer in a place, he thought, crunching another slice of the pinkish lotus root. Soon, he had a second beer, without having opened the book yet, and his mind began wandering.
    So many days, where have you been—/ like a traveling cloud / that forgets to come back / unaware of the spring drawing to an end?
    Shaking his head, he pulled himself out of the unexpected wave of self-pity, and took out his cell phone. He dialed Detective Yu back in Shanghai.
    “Sorry, Yu, that I didn’t come back to Shanghai before leaving on vacation. Zhengjiang was simply closer to Wuxi.”
    “Don’t worry about it, Chief. There are nothing but small cases here, and none of them special, either. There’s