Red Mandarin Dress

something he had to do, something with a purpose—it gave him no break.
    Before he could leave for the library to continue his work, there was another special delivery to his home. It was a package of new information about Jia Ming from Director Zhong.
    Mostly it was speculation about Jia’s motive for making trouble for the government. Jia and his entire family had suffered during the Cultural Revolution; Jia ultimately lost his parents. He had become a lawyer in the early eighties, when such a career choice was uncommon. During the sixties and seventies, attorneys were hardly existent or relevant in China. Lawyers, like stocks, were considered part and parcel of capitalist society: hypocritical and for the rich. Major cases were determined or predetermined by the Party authorities, all in the name of the proletarian dictatorships. Liu Shaoqi, chairman of the People’s Republic of China, had been thrown in jail without a trial, and there he died alone, without a notice sent to his family for years. Jia had deliberately chosen to become an attorney at a time when it was far from a popular profession: he had planned to make trouble for the government from the beginning.
    Because of his early entry into the field, he was quickly successful. As a legal system was advocated and recognized as part of China’s reform, he became well known for his defense of a dissident writer. He made such a brilliant defense that the judge appeared tongue-tied several times, which people caught on TV and applauded. The “new” legal practice gathered steam, and law offices sprung up like bamboo shoots after a sudden spring rain.
    But Jia was different from the others. He didn’t take on only profitable cases. Partially because of his inheritance from his family after the Cultural Revolution, he didn’t have to work for the sake of money. From time to time, he would take on controversial cases, which put him on a blacklist composed by the city government, even before he took over the West-Nine-Block housing development case.
    Chen decided not to read any more. During his college years, he, too, had been put on a blacklist, by groundless political interpretations of his modernist poetry.
    It was past ten when Chen arrived at the library. Susu, the librarian with enchanting dimples, brought him a cup of fresh coffee, strong and refreshing.
    Still, his mind started wandering. Perhaps he was more drawn to the murder case than to the love stories, a realization that did not exactly surprise him.
    Only after the second cup of coffee did he manage to settle down to another tale selected for his paper, “The Story of Yingying.”
    The Tang dynasty cuanqi story was composed by Yuan Zhen, a well-known poet and statesman. According to subsequent studies, the narrative was largely autobiographical. In the year 800, Yuan traveled to Puzhou, where he met a girl named Yingying. They fell in love. Yuan then went to the capital, where he married a girl of the Wei family instead. Eventually, Yuan wrote a story based on the Puzhou episode.
    Chen turned to the story with interest. In it, a scholar named Zhang traveled to the Temple of Universal Salvation, where Mrs. Cui was staying with her daughter Yingying on their way to Zhang’an. As the troops nearby rose up in mutiny, Zhang obtained help from his friend to provide much-needed security for the people in the temple. Out of gratitude, Mrs. Cui invited Zhang to a banquet, during which he met Yingying and fell in love with her, though she rebuked his advances with Confucian moralist lectures. One night, however, in a dramatic turn, she came to his western-wing room, offering herself to him. Soon afterward, he left for the civil service examination in the capital, where he received a letter from her. Part of the letter read:
    When I offered myself to you in your bed, you took me with the kindest passion. I was so ignorant as to believe that I could depend on you ever after. How could I have realized that having succumbed to the attraction of a gentleman like you without following the proper marriage rites, there was no chance of serving you openly as a wife in the future? To the end of my days that will be an everlasting regret—I could do nothing but to stifle my sighs and be silent. If you, out of the greatest kindness, would condescend to grant the fulfillment of my secret wish, though in death I would be happy as in life. But if, as a man of the world, you curtail your feeling, sacrifice the