Red Mandarin Dress

elite, and the atmosphere there was supposedly quiet and peaceful. At the café, where he was nobody, he could have an undisturbed morning and concentrate on the paper.
    Choosing a corner table, he took out his books. He had gathered five or six stories, but three might be enough for the paper. The third one, “Artisan Cui and His Ghost Wife,” was originally narrated by Song dynasty professional storytellers in marketplaces or tea houses where old people sat talking loudly, cracking watermelon seeds, playing mahjong, and spitting to their hearts’ content.
    Sipping at his coffee, he started reading. In the tale, Xiuxiu, a pretty girl in Lin’an, was purchased as an embroidery maid by Prince Xian’an, the military leader of three commanderies. In his household worked a young jade carver named Cui, who gained the prince’s favor for having carved a marvelous jade Avalokitesvara for the emperor. So the prince promised to marry Xiuxiu to Cui in the future. One night, fleeing from a fire at the prince’s mansion, Xiuxiu suggested to Cui that, instead of waiting, they become husband and wife there and then. So that night, the two left for Tanzhou as a couple. After a year, they ran into Guo, a guard for the prince. Guo reported the whereabouts of the fugitives to the prince, who had them brought back. At the local court, Cui was punished and banished to Jiankang. Xiuxiu overtook him on the way there, telling him that after getting her punishment in the back garden, she was set free. As it happened, the imperial jade Avalokitesvara needed repairing, so the Cuis moved back to the capital, where they again ran across Guo. Once more the prince sent for Xiuxiu, but when the sedan chair supposedly carrying her arrived, there was no one inside. Guo then got a severe beating for his false information. Next, Cui, too, was brought to the prince, at which point Cui learned that Xiuxiu had been beaten to death in the back garden. So it was Xiuxiu’s ghost who had been with him all this time. When Cui returned home, he begged her to spare him, but she took away his life so he could keep her company in the next world.
    As with earlier stories, Chen soon detected suspicious ambiguities in the text. An implied critique was discernable even in an alternative title of the story: “A Curse in Life and Death for Attendant Cui.” There was no mistaking the message about Xiuxiu being a curse. Cui was doomed because she, in the name of love, never let him get away—doomed to the loss of his position, the punishment at court, and eventually the loss of his life. Xiuxiu embodied the contradiction: a pretty girl who loves Cui with a courageous passion rarely seen in classical Chinese literature also deliberately destroys Cui with her own hands. Attraction and repulsion were like two sides of a coin.
    For the merging of the two sides, Chen found an explanation in the contemporary generic classification. The story belonged to the category of yanfen / linggaui . Yanfen referred to tales of beautiful women in amorous affairs and linggui , to tales of women identified as demons and ghosts.
    There was a similar term in western literature— femme fatale .
    In “Artisan Cui and His Ghost Wife,” Xiuxiu was exactly such a curse. Chen took out a pen to underline the paragraphs at the end of the story.
    Cui returned home in a depression. He stepped into his room only to see his wife sitting on the bed. Cui Ning said, “Please spare me, my wife.”
    “I was beaten to death by the prince because of you and was buried in the back garden,” Xiuxiu said. “How I hate that Private Guo for talking so much! I have finally avenged myself—the prince has beaten him fifty times on the back with a stick. Now that everybody knows me as a ghost, I cannot stay here anymore.”
    With that, she sprang up and grabbed Cui Ning with both hands. He screamed and fell to the ground.
    At that moment, there happened to be something falling to the floor in the café. Chen turned to see a girl slipping from a bar stool. She had overreached to kiss a young man across the bar, her foot stretching to the floor for balance, and her high-heeled sandal flew off into a corner.
    The café was not as quiet as expected. Customers came pouring in, most of them young, fashionable, and spirited. One brought in a laptop and started playing a game, her fingers pecking and chirping like noisy sparrows on a spring morning. Several had cell phones in their hands, talking as if there