Red Mandarin Dress

then and there —in the sixties, against a background of red flags of the Socialist Education Movement, and himself wearing a Red Scarf, shouting revolutionary slogans with the “revolutionary masses.” It came to him that such a mandarin dress, whether in a movie or in real life, could have been controversial at the time, even though conservative by today’s standards.
    He took out his cell phone and called Chairman Wang of the Chinese Writers Association. Wang didn’t pick up, so he left a message, emphasizing that, in addition to what they had already discussed, the image of the red mandarin dress could have been controversial in the early sixties.
    Encouraged, Chen tried to repeat his experiment, but nothing came of it. He further modified it by lowering himself to the courtyard, where he sat in a lotus position with his legs crossed, reviewing the case from the very beginning—not like a cop, but like a man whose mind was not clogged by police training. Still nothing, though his mind seemed to obtain an intense clarity. He took a case folder out of the briefcase and began reading there, like a monk, as the temple bell began tolling.
    Turning over a page, he lit upon something. Jasmine’s bad luck. Buddhists talk about retribution. “Retribution comes, but in time.” In a sort of secular Buddhist version, Chinese believe that people are punished or rewarded for what they do in this life—or even in the previous life.
    Tian’s horrible luck might be so accounted for. It was too much, however, with Jasmine. Chen didn’t believe in punishment for a previous life. Nor did he see it as coincidence—that both father and daughter had such bad luck.
    He thought of a novel he had read in his middle school years: The Count of Monte Cristo. Behind a series of inexplicable disasters was the mastermind Monte Cristo, working for his relentless revenge.
    Was this possible in the case of Jasmine?
    With her, and with her father too. A Mao Team member in those years, Tian could have persecuted or hurt someone who later carried out his or her revenge. If so, the style as well as the material of the dress would be accounted for.
    But why the long wait—if done out of revenge for something that happened during the Cultural Revolution?
    And what about the other girls?
    He didn’t have immediate answers. Still, the last question let him see the difference between Jasmine and the other girls in a new light.
    Those girls might not have been related to Jasmine at all.
    The sound of the bell came again in the wind. He shivered with a vague possibility.
    It was time for him to go to the bureau. He would talk to Detective Yu, whose frustration with his unannounced vacation was evident in the messages left on his phone. Whether he would be able to make a satisfactory explanation to his partner, he didn’t know. It didn’t seem a good idea to talk about his nervous breakdown, not even to Yu.
    At the temple exit, he got a call from Chairman Wang in response to his message.
    “Sorry I didn’t pick up in time, Chief Inspector Chen. I was in the bathroom, but I got your message about the possible controversy. It reminded me of something. Xiong Ming, a retired journalist in Tianjin, has been compiling a dictionary of controversies concerning literature and arts. He’s an old friend of mine, so I contacted him at once. According to him, there was a prize-winning picture of a young woman wearing a mandarin dress and the picture later became controversial. This is his phone number, 02-8625252.”
    “Thank you, Chairman Wang. That really helps.”
    Chen put another bill into the shining donation box at the exit and dialed Xiong’s number.
    After introducing himself, Chen came to the point: “Chairman Wang told me that you have some information about a controversial picture of a woman in a red mandarin dress. You have been working on a dictionary of controversies, haven’t you?”
    “Yes, I have,” Xiong said from the other end of the line, in Tianjin. “Nowadays people hardly remember or understand the absurd controversies during those years when everything could be distorted through political interpretations. Do you remember the movie Early Spring in February ?”
    “Yes, I do. The movie was banned in the early sixties. I was still an elementary school student then, hiding a picture of that beautiful heroine in my drawer.”
    “It was controversial because of the so-called bourgeois elegance of the heroine,” Xiong said.