Red Mandarin Dress

center of affection, loyalty, and authority from the parents.
    “Excuse me, may I sit here?”
    “Oh,” he said, looking up to see a young woman, pulling over a recliner to his side. “Yes, please.”
    She stretched herself out on the recliner beside him. An attractive woman in her early thirties, she had clear features with a straight mouth, her hair framing her face in delicate curls. Over her swimming suit, she wore a white wrapper or sari of light material, probably a white caftan, which floated around her long legs. She also had a book in her hand.
    “It’s so lovely to read here.” She crossed her legs and lit a cigarette.
    He was not in the mood for talk, but he didn’t see it as a bad thing to have a pretty woman reading alongside him. He smiled without saying anything.
    “I saw you at the restaurant a couple of days ago,” she said. “What a banquet!”
    “Sorry, I don’t remember seeing you there.”
    “I was sitting outside at a table in the dining hall, looking in through the windows. Everybody was busy making toasts to you there. You must be a successful man.”
    “No, not really.”
    “A Big Buck?”
    Again he smiled. She wouldn’t have believed him to be a cop—alone, trying to finish a literature paper. Nor was there any point in revealing his identity here.
    But what could be hers? An attractive woman all by herself in an expensive vacation village. He checked himself from thinking like an investigator. A nameless tourist on vacation, he was under no obligation to pry into other people’s lives.
    “What are you reading?” she asked.
    “A Confucian classic,” he said.
    “That’s interesting,” she said, casting a glance toward the young girls in the pool. “Reading Confucius by the poolside.”
    He was aware of the subtle irony in her comment. Confucius was right about one thing: I have never seen one who likes studies as much as beauties.
    She, too, started reading her book, her hair jet-black in the sunlight, her eyes shining with “autumn waves”—possibly an expression from those love stories. He felt her closeness, noticing her unshaven armpit as she stretched one arm behind her head. She wore a bangle of a red silk string, which accentuated her shapely ankle. And he remembered some lines about a man’s mind digressing at the sight of a woman’s legs, white and bare, but in the sunlight, with a down of light black hair.
    He chided himself and began questioning the necessity of the vacation. The scary experience he had had at home was perhaps an attack of coffee sickness. He might have been too panicky. Now he felt his normal self again. So why go on with the vacation here? A serial murderer was at large in Shanghai, but he was reading by the poolside, in a vacation village hundreds of miles away, thinking of amorous poetic images.
    At least he should try to make some progress on the paper. So he opened his notebook and started to put something down for the conclusion.
    In traditional Chinese society, the institution of arranged marriage implied hostility toward romantic love. But then how did there come to be all these love stories? Though he had analyzed only three, there were a large number of them. The publication and circulation of them, against the social norm of arranged marriage, should have been impossible—
    An interruption arrived in the form of a waiter who recognized Chen as the “distinguished guest” at the banquet dining room and came over with a bottle of wine in an ice bucket.
    Perhaps it was part of the routine service here, Chen thought, saying, “Sorry, I don’t have the coupon with me.”
    “Don’t worry, sir,” the waiter said, putting the bucket on a small table beside his recliner. “It’s on the village.”
    Chen gestured him to pour out a glass for the woman on the recliner next to him first.
    “You’re somebody,” she said, taking a small sip, nodding her approval, before she set the glass back on the table.
    “ A lone stranger, far away from home ,” he said, quoting a line from a Tang dynasty poem.
    “Well, my other half went away for a business meeting,” she said, leaning over the table toward him, accentuating the swell of her breasts. “So I am left here, all by myself. The tide always keeps / its word to come. / Had I known that, / I would have married a young tide-rider .”
    It was a quote from another Tang poem, the first half of which read: How many times / I have been let down / by this busy merchant of