Red Mandarin Dress

1930s movie stars on the walls. Each of them had danced here, leaving behind stories or pictures that echoed through the passage of time.
    On the second floor, he thought he caught sight of a familiar face in the hall. So he turned aside, climbing up into a small balcony with a dark alcove behind. There he stood for several minutes, looking down at the now empty ballroom where Hong had danced like a radiant cloud. He murmured her name.
    Several workers were arranging the tables and chairs for the night. The business would go on, as usual. He decided to leave.
    As he stepped out of the Joy Gate, he saw, not too far away, a magnificent Buddhist temple with its glazed tiles and tilted eaves shimmering in the sunlight. It was Jin’an Monastery, allegedly built hundreds of years earlier, and lately redecorated. In his childhood, his parents had taken him there for ancestral worship services, sometimes renting a partitioned room, bringing in a variety of special snack offerings, and engaging monks for scripture-chanting.
    On an impulse, he purchased a ticket and entered the temple he hadn’t visited in years.
    The front courtyard appeared to have changed little, though it was covered with new cobbles. He strolled on like a pilgrim, sorting through his fragmented childhood memories—the miniature room with shining religious instruments, the monks with their large floating sleeves, the vegetarian meal in imitation of various fish and meat, the flight from the imagined ghosts along the corridors, the scripture–chanting sounding like mosquitoes on a summer night.
    He felt slightly dizzy again, as if searching along a long dark corridor, expecting something ahead, but he wasn’t sure what. Sure enough, he saw a row of west-wing rooms still lining the wall. In the small rooms, people were sitting or kowtowing, their traditional offerings set out between burning candles. A file of monks moved in, beating fish-shaped wooden instruments and performing their religious service against the vanity of this mundane world. However, the resemblance to his childhood memory ended there.
    A young monk strode out toward him, wearing a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and holding a cell phone. He greeted Chen with a look of expectation shining behind his light-sensitive glasses.
    “Welcome to the temple, sir. Donate as much as you please, and your name will last forever here. We keep every offering in the computer’s record. Take a look at the billboard.”
    Chen saw a donation billboard presenting an impressive picture of a tall gold Buddha, reaching out his hand, as if urging believers to donate. For the amount of one thousand Yuan, the donor could have his name engraved as a benefactor on a marble plaque, and for a hundred, his name would be stored in the electronic record. Next to the billboard was an office with its door ajar, showing several computers that guaranteed the proper management of the donations for the gold Buddha image.
    Taking out a hundred Yuan bill, he inserted it into the donation box without signing his name in the register book.
    “Oh, here is my card. In the future, you can send checks too,” the young monk said pleasantly. “A lot of people are burning incense at the burner over there. It really works.”
    Chen took the card and headed to the huge bronze incense burner in the center of the temple courtyard. There he saw people putting afterworld paper money as well as incense into the burner.
    An old woman was pouring in a bag of afterworld paper money, each piece already folded into the shape of a silver ingot. He had had no time for the job of folding, so he simply threw his bunch of silver paper into the burner. Slowly, it started burning with a somber flame, but its ashes swirled up high in a breath of wind, like a dancing figure, before vanishing out of sight.
    “A sign,” the old woman murmured in an awe-stricken voice, alluding to the belief that the spirits take away the money in a sudden wind. “You don’t have to worry about her clothing in the winter.”
    How could the old woman know that the offering was for a woman? He did it for Hong, thinking of her in that silk red mandarin dress.
    Chen didn’t believe in the afterlife. Like a lot of Chinese, he simply felt a sort of comfort following some religious conventions. Somewhere, somehow, something possibly existed beyond human knowledge. Confucius says, “A gentleman doesn’t talk about spirits.” According to the sage, a gentleman has so many