Red Mandarin Dress

murderer, showed no traces of sex before her death. Nor was her body washed afterward.
    Shortly before noon, he arrived at the street Jasmine had lived in: a long and shabby lane on Shantou Road, seemingly forgotten by the reform. It was close to the Old City area.
    It turned out to be almost like a visit back to his old neighborhood. At the lane entrance, he saw several wooden chamber pots airing with contented grins in the midst of the chorus of two women’s sweeping with their bamboo brooms, a scene still fresh in his memory.
    The neighborhood committee was located at the end of the lane. Uncle Fong, the head of the committee, received Yu in a tiny office and poured a cup of tea for him.
    “She was a good girl,” Uncle Fong started, shaking his head, “in spite of all the problems at home.”
    “Tell me about her problems at home,” Yu said, having heard of some of them, but Liao’s version was not detailed.
    “Retribution. Nothing but retribution. Her old man deserves it, but it’s not fair for her.”
    “Can you be more specific here, Uncle Fong?”
    “Well, her father, Tian, was somebody during the Cultural Revolution, and he had his fall afterward. Fired, jailed, and paralyzed. So he became a terrible burden for her.”
    “What did he do during the Cultural Revolution?”
    “He was one of the Worker Rebels, wearing an armband, bullying and beating people. Then he became a member of a Mao Zedong Thought Worker Propaganda Team sent to a school. Really powerful and swashbuckling at the time, you know.”
    Yu knew. The Mao Zedong Thought Worker Propaganda Teams—sometimes shortened as “Mao Teams”—were a product of the Cultural Revolution. At the beginning of the movement, Mao had rallied young students in the name of the Red Guards to take back power from his rivals in the Party, but the Red Guards soon went out of control, posing a threat to Mao’s own power base. So he declared that the workers themselves should play the leading role in the Cultural Revolution, and he sent Mao Teams to schools as unchallengeable forces, crushing the students and teachers. A teacher at Yu’s middle school had been beaten into a cripple by a Mao Team member.
    “So he was punished,” Uncle Fong said. “But there were millions of rebels like him in those years. It’s just his luck to be chosen as an example. Sentenced to two or three years in prison. What karma!”
    “Jasmine was still quite young?”
    “Yes, she was only four or five then. She lived with her mother for a couple of years and then, after her mother’s death, she moved back. Tian never took good care of her, and five or six years ago, he became paralyzed,” Uncle Fong said, taking a long thoughtful drink of his tea. “She, on the other hand, took good care of him. It wasn’t easy, and she had to save every penny. He didn’t have a pension or medical insurance. She never had a boyfriend because of him.”
    “Because of the old man? How come?”
    “She did not want to leave him alone. Any prospective suitor would have had to take over the burden. And few were interested in doing that.”
    “Very few indeed,” Yu said, nodding. “Didn’t she have any friends in the lane?”
    “No, not really. She did not mix with girls of her own age. Too busy working and taking care of things at home. She had to work at other odd jobs, I believe.” Uncle Fong added, putting down the teacup, “Let me take you there, so you may see for yourself.”
    Uncle Fong led Yu to an old shikumen house in the midsection of the lane, pushing open a door directly into a room that looked to have been partitioned out of the original courtyard. It was an all-purpose room with a disorderly bed in the center, a ladder to an attic of later construction, an unlit coal briquette stove close to the bed, an ancient chamber pot practically uncovered, and hardly any other furniture. For the last few years, this small room must have been the world for Tian, who now sprawled face-up on the bed.
    Jasmine might have had reasons not to stay at home much, Yu realized, nodding at her father.
    “This is Tian,” Uncle Fong said, pointing. The man looked as emaciated as a skeleton, except for his eyes, which followed the visitors around the room. “Tian, this is Comrade Detective Yu of the Shanghai Police Bureau.”
    Tian hissed something indistinct in response.
    “She alone understood his words,” Uncle Fong commented. “I don’t know who will come to help now. It’s no