Red Mandarin Dress

of time.
    There was also something else in it for Chen. By all appearances, he had been sailing smoothly in his career. He was one of the youngest chief inspectors on the force and the most likely candidate to succeed Party Secretary Li Guohua as the number one Party official at the Shanghai Police Bureau. Still, such a career had not been his choice, not back in his college years. In spite of his success as a police officer—no less surprising to himself than to others—and despite having several “politically important cases” to his credit, he felt increasingly frustrated with his job. A number of the cases had had results contrary to a cop’s expectations.
    Confucius says, There are things a man will do, and things a man will not do . Only there was no easy guideline for him in such a transitional, topsy-turvy age. The program might enable him, he reflected, to think from a different perspective.
    So that morning he decided to visit Professor Bian Longhua of Shanghai University. The program had been an improvised excuse in his talk with Zhong, but it did not have to be so.
    On the way there, he bought a Jinhua ham wrapped in the special tung paper, following a tradition as early as Confucius’s time. The sage would not have taken money from his students, but he showed no objection to their gifts, such as hams and chickens. Only the ham proved to be too cumbersome for Chen to carry onto a bus, so he was obliged to call for a bureau car. Waiting in the ham store, he made several more phone calls about the housing development case, and the calls made him even more determined to avoid getting involved.
    Little Zhou drove up sooner than Chen expected. A bureau driver who declared himself “Chief Inspector Chen’s man,” Little Zhou would spread the news of Chen’s visit to Bian around. It might be just as well, Chen thought, beginning to mentally rehearse his talk with the professor.
    Bian lived in a three-bedroom apartment in a new complex. It was an expensive location, unusual for an intellectual. Bian himself opened the door for Chen. A medium-built man in his mid-seventies, with silver hair shining against a ruddy complexion, Bian looked quite spirited for his age, and for his life experience. A young “rightist” in the fifties, a middle-aged “historical counterrevolutionary” during the Cultural Revolution, and an old “intellectual model” in the nineties, Bian had clung to his literature studies like a life vest all those years.
    “This is far from enough to show my respect to you, Professor Bian,” Chen said, holding up the ham. He then tried to find a place to put it down, but the new expensive furniture appeared too good for the ham wrapped in the oily tung paper.
    “Thank you, Chief Inspector Chen,” Bian said. “Our dean has talked to me about you. Considering your workload, we have just decided that you don’t have to sit in the classroom like other students, but you still have to turn in your papers on time.”
    “I appreciate the arrangement. Of course I’ll hand in papers like other students.”
    A young woman walked light-footed into the living room. She looked to be in her early thirties, dressed in a black mandarin dress and high-heeled sandals. She relieved Chen of the ham and put it on the coffee table.
    “Fengfeng, my most capable daughter,” Bian said. “A CEO of an American-Chinese joint venture.”
    “A most unfilial daughter,” she said. “I studied business administration instead of Chinese literature. Thank you for choosing him, Chief Inspector Chen. It’s a boost to his ego to have a celebrity student.”
    “No, it’s an honor for me.”
    “You’re doing great on the police force, Chief Inspector Chen. Why do you want to study in the program?” she wanted to know.
    “Literature makes nothing happen,” the old man joined in with a self-depreciating smile. “She, in contrast, bought the apartment, which was way beyond my means. So we live here—one country with two systems.”
    One country with two systems —a political catch phrase invented by Comrade Deng Xiaoping to describe socialist mainland China’s coexistence with the capitalist Hong Kong after 1997. Here, it described a family whose members earned money from two different systems. Chen understood that people questioned his decision, but he tried not to care too much.
    “It’s like a road not taken, always so tempting to think about on a snowy night,” he said, “and also a boost to