Red Mandarin Dress

began to come alive.
    Then a bell sounded, possibly an indication that the market was open for business, and peddlers started appearing everywhere, all at once. Some put their products on the ground, and some moved in behind stalls rented from the state-run market. It was more and more difficult to draw the line between the socialist and capitalist.
    He saw an old man enter the market wearing a red armband.

TWENTY-SIX
    THE OLD MAN WEARING the red armband was examining vegetables here, checking fish there, yet was carrying no basket. He must be Fan.
    Not too long ago, Chen had witnessed a similar scene, that of Old Hunter patrolling another market. Fan’s function here was different, however, as “private peddlers” had become the norm in “China’s brand of socialism.” In an age of “everybody looking forward to money,” those peddlers were problematic because of their unbridled deceptive practices. It was no longer simply a matter of putting ice into fish or injecting water into chickens but of painting their product, selling spoiled meat, hawking poisonous fungus. So Fan’s responsibility consisted mainly of controlling those fakes, which were sometimes fatal.
    Chen walked up to the old man, who was questioning a shrimp peddler.
    “You must be Uncle Fan.”
    “Yes. Who are you?”
    “Can I talk to you—alone?” Chen handed over his business card. “It’s important.”
    “Sure,” Fan said, turning to the peddler. “Next time, I won’t let you get away so easily.”
    “Let’s have a pot of tea there,” Chen said, pointing to a small eatery behind the “yellow croaker” counter. “We can sit and talk.”
    “They don’t serve tea, but I’ll ask them to make a pot for us,” Fan said. “Call me Comrade Fan. It’s a form of address no longer popular, but I’ve just gotten used to it. It reminds me of the years of the socialist revolution, when everyone was equal and working toward the same goal.”
    “You are right, Comrade Fan,” Chen said, reminded that comrade was becoming a euphemism for “homosexual” among the young and fashionable in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He wondered whether Fan knew anything about the changing meaning. Linguistic evolution, like that of thirsty illness , was so very reflective of ideological change.
    There was a couplet on both sides of the eatery door, which read vertically, “Breakfast, lunch, dinner—the same. Last year, this year, next year—like that.” Above the couplet was a horizontal comment, “True in your mouth.”
    The taxi money left him by the nightclub manager would probably be enough, Chen calculated, for breakfast here. A waiter recommended the house special: Xi’an mo in mutton soup. Mo was a hard, baked cake, which people could break into small or large pieces as they preferred before having it boiled in the mutton soup. The waiter brought them a pot of hot tea for free.
    “Comrade Fan, let me toast you with tea, though tea is not enough to show my respect.”
    “People don’t burn incense to the Three Treasures Temple without a reason. You are a busy man, Chief Inspector Chen. I don’t think you came to an old retired man like me for nothing.”
    “Yes, I have some questions for you. According to the neighborhood committee here, you alone can help me.”
    “Really! Please tell me how.”
    “We’re engaged in a homicide investigation. I would like to ask you some questions about Mei, who used to live here. She was once the mistress of the Ming Mansion. At that time, you were the neighborhood cop.”
    “Mei—yes, but she died such a long time ago. How could she be involved in your investigation?”
    “At the moment, all I can say is that information about her may really help our work.”
    “Well, I came here as a neighborhood cop two or three years before the Cultural Revolution. How old were you then? Still in elementary school, weren’t you?”
    “Yes,” Chen nodded, raising his cup.
    “The job of a neighborhood cop may be nothing in the nineties,” Fan said, breaking the mo into smaller bits, as if they were parts of his memory, “but in the early sixties, with Chairman Mao’s call for class struggle resounding all over the country, the job carried a lot of responsibilities. Everyone could be a class enemy secretly bent on sabotaging our socialist society—especially so in this neighborhood. A considerable number of residents were black in their class status. After 1949, some of the families were driven out