Red Mandarin Dress

hundred Yuan bill for her.
    “For your service.” Jia reseated himself at the table. “He must have gone to great lengths to find you.”
    “Thank you.” She turned to Chen. “How do you want the snake cooked?”
    “Whatever way you recommend.”
    “In Chef Lu’s usual style then. Half to fry, half to steam.”
    “Fine.”
    She withdrew, treading high-footed on the carpet.
    “It’s not so convenient to talk in a restaurant,” Chen said to Jia. “But you were talking about holes in the story.”
    “Well, here is one hole,” Jia said. “In your story, Jasmine must have had opportunities of getting out from under of his control, yet he managed to keep control of the situation all those years. Why not this time? He’s a resourceful attorney; instead of resorting to killing, he could have thwarted her plans some other way.”
    “He might have tried, but for one reason or another, it didn’t work out. But you have a point, Mr. Jia. A good point.”
    It was obvious that Jia was trying to undermine the whole basis of the story, and Chen welcomed his engagement in the exercise.
    “And here is another such hole. If he were so passionately attached to his mother, then why would he strip his victims and dress them in such a way? That kind of attachment is a skeleton in the family closet, to say the least—one he would be anxious to keep hidden.”
    “A short, simple explanation is that things are twisted in his mind. He loves her, but he can’t forgive her for what he considers to be her betrayal. But I have a more elaborate explanation for this psychological peculiarity,” Chen said. “I’ve mentioned the Oedipus complex, in which two aspects are mixed. Secret guilt and sexual desire. For a boy in China during the sixties, the desire part could be more deeply embedded.
    “Now, the memory of her most desirable moment, the afternoon when she was wearing that mandarin dress, was juxtaposed with that of another moment, the most horrible memory, that of her having sex with another man. Unforgettable and unforgivable because in his subconscious, he substitutes himself as the one and only lover. So those two moments are fused together like two sides of a coin. That’s why he treated his victims as he did—the message was contradictory even to himself.”
    “I am no expert or critic,” Jia said, “but I don’t think you can apply a Western theory to China without causing confusion. For me—as a reader—the connection between his mother’s death and him subsequently killing appears groundless.”
    “About the difficulty of applying a Western theory to China, I think you’re right. In the original Oedipus story, the woman is no devil. She doesn’t know, she’s just doing what’s commonly expected in her position. It’s a tragedy of fate. J’s story is different. And it happens to involve something I’ve been exploring in a literature paper. I’ve been analyzing several classical love stories in which beautiful and desirable women suddenly turn into monsters, like ‘The Story of Yingying’ or ‘Artisan Cui and His Ghost Wife.’ No matter how desirable the woman is in the romantic sense, there’s always the other side—which is disastrous to the man with her. Is it something deep in Chinese culture or in the Chinese collective unconscious? It’s possible, especially when we take into consideration the institution of arranged marriage. Demonization of women, especially of women involved in sexual love, is therefore understandable. So it’s like a twisted Oedipus message with Chinese characteristics.”
    “Your lecture is profound but beyond me,” Jia said. “You should write a book about it.”
    Chen, too, wondered at his sudden exuberance here, in the company of Jia. Perhaps that was what he had been struggling with in his paper, and it took an unexpected parallel to the case to make him see the light.
    “So for J, his peculiar way of killing proved overwhelming, with the force coming not just out of his personal unconscious, but out of the collective one as well.”
    “I’m not interested in the theory, Chief Inspector Chen. Nor do I think your readers will ever be interested. As long as your story is full of holes, you can’t make a case.”
    Jia evidently believed that Chen had played all his cards and was unable to touch him. In return, Jia was picking up the holes in the story to let Chen know that he thought the cop was merely bluffing in a game at psychological