Red Mandarin Dress

believe in it, but his mother did, burning it now and then for the benefit of his late father, particularly during such festivals as Dongzhi or Qingming.
    Back in his hotel room, he picked up the books he’d brought and went to the indoor swimming pool.
    The pool room had a wall set in one-way glass, so the swimmers could enjoy the warm, luxurious privacy while looking out to the view of the lake and hills in the winter. After a vigorous swim, he sat in a reclining chair at poolside and started reading.
    Perhaps because of his English studies at Bund Park, he’d developed the ability to read and concentrate while outside. At that time, there was the ever-changing background of the Bund to distract him. Here, in addition to the view outside, he was enjoying the sight of young girls frolicking in the pool, their luscious bodies flashing in the blue water whenever he looked up from the ancient Confucian classics. It was ironic, for Confucius says, “A gentleman should not look if not in accordance to the rites.”
    In accordance to the rites or not, the background made the reading less boring for him. His late father having been a neo-Confucian scholar, and Confucian maxims still part of Chinese daily life, as at the bu banquet, “Confucius says” wasn’t unfamiliar to him. But he had never systematically studied Confucianism, which had been banished from the classroom during his school years. He wished he had talked more to his father, whose early death had cut short the older man’s plan to instill the tradition into his son.
    Chen took out his notebook. Some of his earlier research notes seemed related to Confucian rites. For Confucius, rites are everywhere and ever present. As long as people behave in accordance with the ancient rites, everything will be right, as they had supposedly been in the golden old times. While there appeared to be so many rites regarding so many things, Chen had never learned or heard about any regarding romantic love.
    That morning, checking through the books he had carried there, he failed to find anything. Confucian masters neglected romantic passion, as if it were nonexistent.
    Then Chen extended his search to marriage— hunli literally meant marriage rites in Chinese. Sure enough, he found several paragraphs on the marriage rites, though not a single word touching on passion among young people. To the contrary, young people were not supposed to meet before the wedding, let alone have feelings for each other. Marriage was to be arranged entirely by the parents.
    In the Book of Rites , one of the Confucian canons, there was a straightforward statement on the nature of marriage.
    [The rites of] marriage exist to make a happy connection between two [families of different] names, with a view, in its retrospective character, to secure the services in the ancestral temple, and in its prospective character, to secure the continuance of the family line. Therefore the gentleman sets great store by it. . . .
    The marriage rites consist of six consecutive ritual steps, which are the matchmaker’s visit, inquiries about the girl’s name and birth date, a horoscope for the couple, betrothal gifts, choosing a marriage date, and the bridegroom’s welcoming the bride home on the day of the wedding.
    Throughout these activities, Chen read, the man and woman did not have a chance to meet until the very day of their wedding. Marriage, conducted in the name of the parents, for the sake of continuing the family line, had nothing to do with romantic love.
    In his copy of the Mencius , Chen underlined a passage condemning young people who fall in love and act for themselves in disregard of an arranged marriage.
    When a son is born, what is desired for him is that he may have a wife; when a daughter is born, what is desired for her is that she may have a husband. This feeling of the parents is possessed by all men. If the young people, without waiting for the order of their parents and the arrangement of the go-betweens, shall bore holes to steal a sight of each other or climb over the wall to be with each other, then their parents and all other people will despise them.
    What the philosopher Mencius described as hole-boring and wall-climbing, Chen knew, became standard metaphors for rendezvous between young lovers.
    Closing the book, he tried to sort out what he had just read. In a family-centered social structure, arranged marriage was in its interest, for romantic love could transfer the