Red Mandarin Dress

hotel.

SIX
    PEIQIN , TOO , HAD BEEN giving a lot of thought to the mandarin dress case.
    Not just because there were so many puzzling things about it, but also because it was Yu’s first case as acting squad head.
    As before, she drew a line for herself between what she could and could not do. She didn’t have the resources available to the cops, nor the time and energy. So she chose the red mandarin dress as an entrance point.
    As an accountant, Peiqin didn’t have to work at her office in the restaurant from nine to five every day. So on the way to the restaurant, she stepped into a boutique tailor shop. It wasn’t known for its mandarin dresses, but she was acquainted with an old tailor there. She explained the purpose of her visit and showed him an enlarged picture of the dress.
    “Judging from its long sleeves and low slits, it’s quite old-fashioned, possibly a style from the early sixties,” the white-haired-and-browed tailor said, adjusting the glasses along the ridge of his angular nose. “I doubt it’s mass-produced nowadays. Look at the craftsmanship. The double-fish-shaped cloth buttons. It probably takes a day to make them.”
    “Do you think it was made in the sixties?”
    “I cannot tell that from a picture. Altogether, I’ve only made about half a dozen of them. I am no expert, but if a customer gave me the material and the design, I think I could do the job.”
    “One more question: do you know any other store that could have made it?”
    “Quite a number of them. In addition, there are private tailors who work at the customer’s home. No stores for them, you know.”
    So there was another problem. Many private tailors worked like that, moving from one customer family to another. The cops were incapable of investigating all the possibilities.
    Leaving the store, Peiqin decided to go to the Shanghai Library. If she was going to help, she had to proceed in a way different than the cops.
    In the library, she spent about an hour checking through the catalogue and requested a pile of books and magazines.
    It was already past ten when she climbed up into her office at Four Seas Restaurant, carrying a plastic bag of books in her arms. Manager Hua Shan wasn’t there that morning. He had been out for two days, starting his own company, though he still kept his job at Four Seas.
    In spite of its good location, the state-run restaurant was having a hard time. Between socialism and capitalism, as the new saying went, falls a shadow of difference—that between the people working for themselves and the people working for the state. The restaurant had suffered losses for months. Hence, there were talks about introducing management responsibility: the restaurant would remain state-run in name, but the new manager would be responsible for its profit or losses.
    In the midst of a chorus of ladles clanking and clattering on the woks downstairs, she made an effort to focus on the books in the tiny office above the restaurant kitchen.
    What she had told Yu was true. She knew little about the dress. In her school days, she had seen it only in movies. And then in a Cultural Revolution–era photograph of Wang Guangmei, the “ex-first lady” of China, who was forced to display herself in public wearing a torn scarlet mandarin dress and a chunk of white Ping-Pong balls in imitation of oversized pearls—both the dress and jewelry serving as evidence of her decadent bourgeois lifestyle.
    Looking at the materials spread out on the desk, Peiqin was at a loss. She leafed through one book after another until a black and white picture caught her eye: a picture of Ailing, a Shanghai novelist rediscovered in the nineties, wearing a florid mandarin dress in the thirties. In a recent TV show, Peiqin recalled, a young girl strolled musingly along Huanghe Road, as if stepping about on the clouds of fashionable nostalgia, and pointed at a building behind her. “Perhaps it is here, from this quaint building, Ailing would walk out, blossoming in a mandarin dress she herself had designed. What a romantic city!”
    A self-proclaimed fashion critic, Ailing had drawn a series of sketches of Shanghai-style clothing, which was reprinted at the end of the book. But Peiqin became more interested in the personal story of Ailing. Ailing started publishing early and became well-known for her stories about Shanghai. She endured a heartbreaking marriage with a talented womanizer, who later made a small fortune by writing about