Red Mandarin Dress

bad luck?
    WENG : She seemed to have always lived in the shadow of it. So she came to believe that she was born under an unlucky star. She applied for other jobs, but she had no success until she came to this shabby hotel, taking a dead-end job.
    YU : How did she come to tell you all this?
    WENG : She suffered from a sort of inferiority complex. When we first started going out, and I talked about our future, she could hardly believe the change in her life. But for the incident in the elevator, she would never have agreed to go out with me. She was a little superstitious, taking the incident as a sign. With so much bad luck in her young life, you understand.
    YU : One more question: when did you plan to marry her?
    WENG : We did not have an exact date, but we agreed that it should be as soon as possible—after the divorce. . . .
    Chen fast-forwarded the tape toward the end, but Yu didn’t make any comments, as he had sometimes did. There were no comments on the written report, either.
    Chen rose to make a cup of coffee. A cold morning. Outside the window, a yellow leaf finally tore itself from the twig, trembling, as in a story he had read a long time ago.
    He moved back to bed, putting the coffee mug on the nightstand, tapping his finger on the cassette player.
    Chen could see Yu tapping his finger on a go chessboard, grappling with a possible opening, not exactly identified—not yet.
    It was Weng’s statement about Jasmine’s curse.
    While Tian deserved the punishment, most of the people like Tian remained unpunished after the Cultural Revolution, with Chairman Mao’s portrait still hanging on the Tiananmen Gate. As a Chinese proverb goes, to kill a monkey is to scare the chickens, and Tian happened to be the monkey, that was perhaps just his luck.
    But what about Jasmine? The bike incident might have been an accident. The anonymous letters, however, went too far. She was only seventeen or eighteen. How could anyone have hated her that much?
    The cell phone rang, breaking into the gloomy thoughtful morning.
    “Let’s have brunch at the Old City God’s Temple Market,” White Cloud said, her voice sounding close by. “You like the mini soup bun there, I know.”
    Probably a good idea to take a break. Talk with her might help—about the paper, and about the case too.
    “There are several boutiques selling mandarin dresses there,” she went on before he responded. “Quite a variety of them—not good quality, but fashionable, and some of them nostalgically fashionable.”
    That clinched it for him.
    “Let’s meet at Nanxiang Soup Bun Restaurant.”
    It was for the sake of the investigation, he told himself. She might serve as a fashion consultant in a field study, though he was slightly uneasy about it.
    Was it because of something he had been studying for the paper—a femme fatale? There seemed to be a weird echo from the story he had just read. According to one critic, Yingying, in “The Story of Yingying,” was actually someone of dubious background, like a K girl in today’s society.
    Chen started dressing for brunch.
    About twenty minutes later, he found himself walking in under the familiar entrance arch of the Old City God’s Temple Market.
    For most Shanghainese, the temple represented not so much of an attraction in itself, but simply a name for the surrounding market of local snacks and products—originally booths and stalls for the temple festivals. For Chen, the attraction came from those eateries, whose offerings were inexpensive yet unique in their flavors, such as chicken and duck blood soup, soup buns in small steamers, radish-shred cakes, shrimp and meat dumplings, beef soup noodles, fried tofu and vermicelli. . . . All these he had liked so much, in the days when society was still an egalitarian one, in which everyone made little money and enjoyed simple meals.
    Things were also changing here. There was a new tall building rising behind the Yu Garden, which had originally been the back garden of the Shanghai mayor in the late Qing dynasty and was built in the traditional southern architecture style of ancient pavilions and grottos. In Chen’s childhood, his parents, unable to afford the trip to Suzhou and Hangzhou, had taken their son to the garden instead.
    Moving past the garden, he stepped up onto the Nine Turn Bridge—allegedly with nine turns so that the evil spirits wouldn’t be able to find their way around. An old couple stood on the bridge, throwing breadcrumbs