Red Mandarin Dress

had an unexpected discovery in Weng’s custom declaration. On the slip, Weng had checked the “married” box on his marriage status. That necessitated a second interview.
    Chen put the second interview tape into the cassette player, skipping the preliminary part, going to where Yu questioned Weng about his relation with Jasmine in the context of his marital status.
    WENG : When I first met her, I was still married, but already separated from my wife. I was just waiting for the divorce to be final. Jasmine knew that too, though perhaps not at first.
    YU : Was she upset with the discovery?
    WENG : I think so, but she was also relieved.
    YU : Why?
    WENG : I tried to start up an antique business of my own. With my anthropology background, I thought I could do much better than those quack dealers, especially with a huge market in China nowadays. So I wanted her to move to the States, where she might help run a store. I looked into the possibility of putting her father up at a nursing home here. But she was not too anxious to leave, worrying about him. In fact, everything could have been taken care of in a couple of weeks. It’s just her luck. She was really cursed!
    YU : You’ve mentioned her bad luck. Can you give me some examples?
    WENG : A lot of ill-fated things happened to her. So inexplicable. Not to mention what happened to her father—
    YU : Well, let’s start with her father. So we’ll have a complete story, starting with her childhood.
    WENG : Tian was a Worker Rebel during the Cultural Revolution. Not a nice gentleman, to be sure. He was punished—sentenced to two to three years. He deserved that, but after his release, horrible luck dogged him like his shadow.
    YU : Karma, as his neighbors have put it.
    WENG : Karma, perhaps, but there were so many Red Guards and Worker Rebels in those years. Who was really punished? Tian alone, as far as I know. His divorce, his loss of his job, his years in prison, his failure in the restaurant business, and finally his paralys. . . .
    YU : Slow down, Weng. Details.
    WENG : After the Cultural Revolution, his wife received anonymous phone calls about his affairs with other women. That was the last straw for their marriage. She divorced him. Surely not a model husband, but his affairs were never proven, and no one knew who made the phone calls. Then his factory came under pressure from above and he was fired and sentenced too. What happened to his ex-wife then was even more unbelievable. Divorced, only in her early thirties, she started dating another man. Soon, pictures of her sleeping with him appeared. In the early eighties, it was a huge scandal and she committed suicide. Jasmine moved back in with Tian. He borrowed money to start a small restaurant, but in less than a month, several customers suffered food poisoning there. They sued him with the help of an attorney, and Tian went bankrupt.
    YU : That’s strange. At that time, few would have sued for something like that.
    WENG : Do you know how he was paralyzed?
    YU : A stroke, right?
    WENG : He was so desperate that he tried to reverse his luck on a mahjong table. And he was caught by the neighborhood cop the second time he sat down at the table. A heavy fine and a lecture. He suffered a stroke right there and then.
    LIAO : Karma indeed. Now, what about Jasmine’s bad luck?
    WENG : It was hard for a little girl, but she turned out to be a good student. On the day of the college entrance examination, however, she was knocked down by a bike. Not badly hurt, she told the biker not to worry, but he insisted on having her checked at a hospital. When everything was finished, she had missed the examination.
    YU : It was an accident. A responsible biker could have done that.
    WENG : Perhaps. But what about her first job?
    YU : What about it?
    WENG : She couldn’t afford to wait for the examination the next year. So she started working as a salesgirl for an insurance company. Not a bad job, with a sizable bonus for her. Insurance was then new in the city. During her third or fourth month on the job, however, someone sent a letter to her boss, complaining about her “promiscuous lifestyle and shameless tricks” in selling policies. Her boss didn’t want the company’s image affected by a scandal and fired her.
    YU : Well, that’s the version from her perspective.
    WENG : There’s no point in making up things like that. I never raised a question about her past.
    YU : Did she herself make any comment about her