Don’t Cry, Tai Lake

up to take a closer look, leaving Peiqin behind.
    “It’s really convenient,” a young hotel attendant with a sweet dimple in her cheek came out and said to him. “And very clean too. We change the sheets after every customer. If you don’t have a companion, we can recommend one to you. ”
    The full meaning of the hourly rate advertised in the sign finally dawned on him. The hotel was charging for a couple of hours in bed and then a quick shower. That’s all that their operation was about. “Oh, no, thank you,” said Yu, retracing his steps in a hurry.
    For a hotel like that, Yu doubted that Fu and his companion had registered under their real names. It would be pointless to ask at the front desk, and he didn’t want to raise unnecessary alarm. In the city, such places were sometimes closely connected to the police, and he thought there was a good chance that this hourly hotel was one of them.
    But why would Fu have gone there if that was his girlfriend that he picked up? Was she possibly one of the girls “working” for the hotel? Would Fu come back to Shanghai just for that?
    “You know what kind of a hotel it is?” Peiqin said, as Yu walked up.
    “I think so,” Yu said, a bit sheepish. “Let’s sit down somewhere and wait for a while.”
    He decided to wait and watch for them to come out. Fu’s behavior was strange—even suspicious.
    Across the street, there was a small square. It sported a huge LCD screen mounted high and in the background. Next to it stood the celebrated Seventh Heaven, a notorious dance hall back in the pre-1949 era. After 1949, it was turned into the Shanghai Number One Pharmacy Store, but nowadays, it had reverted back to its original function as a nightclub attached to a hotel, though it was no longer that notorious. Nor as classy as its original name suggested. The seven-story building was now dwarfed by all the new surrounding high-rises.
    At the edge of the square, there was a somewhat fashionable teahouse, so they went over and took a table outside. No one would pay much attention to a middle-aged couple sitting at a teahouse.
    Yu ordered a cup of Lion Hill tea and Peiqin, a bowl of white almond tofu.
    “I wouldn’t have the pleasure of sitting with you here if it weren’t for your boss’s request,” she said in mock peevishness.
    “After Chen comes back, I will also request vacation time—a whole week. And I’ll sit here with you just like today, every day, all day, if that’s what you really want, Peiqin.”
    “No, I’m not complaining. You don’t have to envy your boss’s vacation. True, his may be an all-expenses-paid vacation with all the privileges of a high-ranking cadre, but does he have someone sitting beside him there, looking over that beautiful lake?”
    “One can never tell what Chen is up to,” Yu said. “What he has asked us to look into today, I suppose, may have something to do with that girl, the one who is connected to the man in trouble. It might possibly even be a murder case.”
    “That’s true,” she said with a low sigh.
    “Do you like the area?” Yu asked, changing the subject.
    “Yes, but for me, it might be more because of nostalgia. When I was still a small girl, back in the neighborhood we just visited, I sometimes passed by the Seventh Heaven, which then loomed up so high, seemed so unreachable, to me.”
    Sipping at the Lion Hill tea, Yu glanced back at the pedestrian street, which seemed to not have changed as dramatically as much of the rest of the city. Several of the old-brand stores remained standing there, though even those had been refurbished.
    In the square, a group of people began dancing to music that blared from a cassette player on the ground. A middle-aged, bald man, apparently the leader, dressed in an old sweat-drenched T-shirt with the character Dance printed on the front and in white silk pants with flared legs, danced intently, earnestly. For him, his green belt streaming in the breeze, the movement of the moment seemed to carry the meaning of the world. Across the square, another group was practicing tai chi, striking one pose after another, like floating clouds or flowing water. Continuing to look around the square, Yu then noticed something else going on across the street.
    Two young girls, probably only seventeen or eighteen, were approaching a stoutly built Westerner, pointing at the hotel sign. China had been changing so rapidly and radically, it was like the proverb his father, Old Hunter,