Red Mandarin Dress

Thought Worker Propaganda Teams and what they did at colleges and universities, haven’t you?” Xiang went on without waiting for a response. “They stood for political correctness during those years in the Cultural Revolution. A team arrived at our school too, bullying in the name of reeducating the intellectuals. The head of the team soon had a nickname whispered among us—Comrade Revolutionary Activity. It was because he talked all the time about his ‘revolutionary activity’—beating, criticizing, cursing us, the so-called ‘class enemies.’ What could we do except give him a nickname behind his back?”
    “Was she the target of any of his ‘revolutionary activity?’ ”
    “Well, he kept giving ‘political talks’ to her. There were stories about those talks behind closed doors, but to be fair to him, I didn’t notice anything really suspicious. Their talks weren’t too long. Nor was the door closed—not all the time. Still, she cringed like a mouse in front of a cat. I mean, in his company, which she tried her best to avoid.”
    “Did you tell her about your concerns?”
    “No. It would have been a crime to suspect a Mao member like that,” Xiang said with a bitter smile. “Then something happened. Not at the school, but at her home. A chalk-written counterrevolutionary slogan was found on their garden wall. By that time, there were more than ten families living in the house, but the neighborhood committee saw it as an anti-Party attack by another counterrevolutionary in her family. One of her neighbors claimed to have seen her son holding a piece of chalk, and another declared that she was there behind the scenes. So the committee came to our institute. Comrade Revolutionary Activity met them, and they formed a joint investigation group and put the boy into an isolation investigation—they locked him up in the back room of the neighborhood committee until he was ready to confess his crime.”
    “That’s too much,” Chen said. “Did they torture him during the isolation investigation?”
    “What exactly the joint group did there, I don’t know. Comrade Revolutionary Activity spent a lot of his time in her neighborhood—every day. She wasn’t put into isolation interrogation, however, like her late husband had been earlier, and like her son was then. She still came to the institute, looking deeply troubled. Then one afternoon, out of the blue, she ran out of the attic, unclothed, fell stumbling down the staircase, and died then and there. Some said she must have lost her mind. Some said she was taking a bath, jumping out upon the unexpected return of her son.”
    “Was her son released that day?”
    “Yes, he returned that afternoon, but when he reached the door of their attic room, he turned back and rushed down the staircase. According to one of her neighbors, she fell running out after him.”
    “That’s strange. Even if he stumbled upon her in a bath, he didn’t have to run away at that, nor did she have to rush out naked.”
    “She was so attached to her son. She could have forgotten herself in the overwhelming joy.”
    “What did the Mao team member say about her death?”
    “He said that her death was an accident. That’s about it.”
    “Did anyone raise questions about the circumstances of her death?”
    “No, not at the time. I was in trouble for ‘poisoning the students with decadent Western classics.’ Like a clay image crossing the river, I could hardly protect myself,” Xiang said. “After the Cultural Revolution, I thought about approaching the factory where Comrade Revolutionary Activity had come from. He had never explained his activity in her neighborhood. As the head of the Mao team, he was supposed to stay at our school, not her neighborhood. So why was he there? But I hesitated because I didn’t have anything substantial, and because it could drag her memory through the mire again. Also, I heard he had also fallen on hard times, wrecked through a series of mishaps, fired and punished.”
    “Hold on—Comrade Revolutionary Activity. Do you remember his name?”
    “No, but I can find out,” Xiang said. “Are you going to investigate him?”
    “Was there anything else unusual about him?”
    “Yes, there’s one more thing I noticed. Usually, for one school, the Mao team was made of workers from one factory, but for ours, Comrade Revolutionary Activity, the head of the team, actually came from a different factory.”
    “Yes, that’s