Red Mandarin Dress

garden.
    Time flows like water. He gulped down the strong coffee. Black and bitter, perhaps he should have declined. Susu didn’t know about his recent problem.
    He began studying the file. Kong had worked as a photographer at Wangkai, one of the well-known state-run studios in Shanghai. He was also a member of the Artists Association, with several awards to his credit. He passed away shortly after the Cultural Revolution. His wife was still alive, alone and living in the Yangpu district. As for Kong’s trouble in connection to the picture, there was no mention of it at all. Like other “bourgeois artists,” he suffered mass-criticism during the Cultural Revolution.
    There wasn’t any mention of the prize-winning picture of the woman in her mandarin dress, either.
    Getting up from the desk, he fought down the temptation to have another cup of coffee.

TWENTY-TWO
    IT WAS CLOSE TO one thirty when Chen arrived at Kong’s house on Jungong Road.
    From the discolored wood mailboxes at the foot of the cracked concrete staircase, he supposed that it was one of the “new homes for workers” built in the sixties. It now looked old, shabby, and overcrowded. He found her name on one of the mailboxes.
    He went up and pushed open a door. It turned out to be a three-bedroom apartment shared by three families. What he saw there first was a common kitchen crammed with stoves, which supported his hypothesis. She lived in a single room of the unit.
    He knocked on the door marked 203. A white-haired woman opened the door, staring out through her silver-rimmed glasses.
    “Are you Mrs. Kong?”
    “Everybody calls me Auntie Kong here,” the old woman said, letting him in.
    She wore a cotton-padded coat, cotton-padded pants, and a pair of scarlet jasmine-embroidered slippers. The room was as small as a piece of tofu, stuffed with all sorts of nondescript items. A lone chair, three-legged, leaned against the wall. At the foot of the chair was an old-fashioned rice-pot warmer made of straw, which might serve her as an ottoman. It was cold in the room, in spite of the windows’ being paper-sealed.
    “You may sit on the chair,” she said.
    “Thank you,” he said, perching on the edge of the chair gingerly. “Sorry to bother you like this, Auntie Kong.”
    He explained the purpose of his visit, taking out his business card and the magazine.
    She studied the picture in the magazine. The expression on her face was inscrutable. For two or three minutes she didn’t say a word.
    Chen waited, becoming aware of a smell that permeated the room. He noticed a small can boiling above the gas tank in the corner. Possibly the cat’s meal. For most Shanghainese, cats were kept for the purpose of catching rats, as in the classic statement made by Comrade Deng Xiaoping: “It does not matter whether it’s a black or white cat; as long as it catches rats, it’s a good cat.” While the young and fashionable had started introducing the concept of “pet” into the city, in such an old building, a cat still functioned above all else as a rat-catcher. For Auntie Kong, the can of leftover rice flavored with fish bones was perhaps the only cat food she could afford. But cooking in the room could be hazardous for an old woman who lived by herself. The gas tank stood by a tiny wood table with a plastic basin that contained moldering bowls and cups.
    “Yes, that’s a picture my old man took. In the sixties,” she said in a slightly tremulous voice, “but he passed away such a long time ago. How could I remember anything about it?”
    “The picture won him a national award. He must have talked to you about it. Try to recall, Auntie Kong. Anything you can think of may be important to our work.”
    “A national award! It brought him nothing but bad luck. That picture was a curse.”
    “A curse,” Chen echoed. A weird word indeed. And yet a familiar word in the investigation. She must remember something about it. Something ominous. “Please tell me what kind of a curse it was.”
    “Who really wants to talk about those things from the Cultural Revolution?”
    The memories of those years might still be too painful, he understood. Nor was it easy for her to open up to a stranger. But he was determined to be patient.
    “Do you mean the people connected to the picture were cursed, Auntie Kong?”
    “He was criticized because of the picture—for the crime of ‘advocating the bourgeois lifestyle.’ Now, after so many years, please leave him in