Red Mandarin Dress

here!” Giving him a handful of coins, Yu grabbed several of them.
    It turned out that the man who patrolled the cemetery was a superstitious and garrulous man. While he had lost no time informing the police, he was also spreading the news around. The mention of the red mandarin dress was like a loud siren cracking the night sky, and people shivered.
    As Yu dreaded, the newspapers were full of the latest victim in the red mandarin dress case. These reporters hadn’t yet discovered her identity, but some of them had already sensed something unusual about the commotion at the Joy Gate last night. One reporter even hinted at a connection between the dance hall and the cemetery.
    In the newspapers, Yu read a number of superstitious interpretations about the latest twist in the case.
    Wenhui , for instance, had a special report titled “Lianyi Cemetery!” Narrated from the collective perspective of local residents, the reporter launched into a lurid, superstitious interpretation.
    It used to be an expensive cemetery in the fifties and sixties, well-maintained and well-guarded. It was regarded as a propitious site with the dragon-shaped hill in the background, in accordance to a popular belief that a burial ground with such excellent feng shui would bring good luck to the offspring. At that time, only the wealthy Shanghainese could obtain a resting place here, lying at peace in expensive coffins, surrounded with luxurious clothes, quilts, silver and gold jewelry—supposedly for their benefit in the underworld.
    In spite of its feng shui, the cemetery bore the brunt of the Cultural Revolution like anywhere else. The practice of burial in a coffin was declared feudalistic, and overnight most of the people buried here became “black” in their class status. To denounce the “black spirits and monsters,” the Red Guards had their tombs demolished and their bodies dug out, as in a Beijing opera, “to be whipped three hundred times.” Some coffins were opened to search for so-called criminal evidence as part and parcel of the Campaign of Sweeping
    Away the Four Olds—old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. The cemetery was practically destroyed.
    After the Cultural Revolution, the political statuses of some of the dead were rehabilitated, but not their tombs. Their families were too brokenhearted to come back there for ancestral worship services. Some families removed the existing remains, if any, to other places. So the cemetery lay in ruins, with stray dogs sulking around, digging up white bones from time to time. Some local residents reported scenes of ghosts walking around at night, but according to a police report, the rumors originally started among the superstitious grave robbers.
    That gave an insightful property developer an excuse. No longer a cemetery in use, nor a good image for the city, the land might well be used for new commercial construction. The developer bought the cemetery from the city government, planning to convert it into a golf course.
    In spite of all the new science and technology of our time, people can still be superstitious. The commercial transformation of a cemetery was considered an unpardonable disturbance of the dead. Some old residents nearby were worried that the dead would rise to haunt the living. To reassure them, the developer lit tons of firecrackers and had a feng shui master write an article saying that after the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, the feng shui was restored, and with a new subway to be built nearby, “the energy of the dragon” would make the area really valuable.
    Now the body in the red mandarin dress found in the cemetery has reminded people of all the superstitious stories. As an old scholar of local history argues that the red mandarin dress murder has originated from the disturbed cemetery. Several months earlier, people saw a woman in a red mandarin dress walking in the midst of the tombs at night. According to his research, there was a movie star so attired buried there, though he chose not to reveal her identity. She was terribly wronged in life, and even more terribly after death—with her body tossed out of the coffin, and her red mandarin dress stripped by a group of Red Guards. That’s why the dead appears in an old-fashioned mandarin dress.
    It was a long article, and Yu didn’t have the patience to go through any more of it. It was potentially an additional headache to the bureau and the city government. As long as the