Red Mandarin Dress

because of their connection to the Nationalists, and working-class families moved in. Still, there were families with ties both to the old and new regimes, so they kept their mansions here. Like the Mings.”
    “What about the Mings?”
    “They kept theirs because the old man, an influential investment banker, had denounced Chiang Kai-shek in the late forties. So the Communists declared him to be a ‘patriotic democratic personage,’ leaving his fortune untouched. His son was a teacher at the Shanghai Music Institute who married Mei, a violinist who also taught there. They had a son, Xiaozheng. Inside the mansion, they lived in affluence, for which their working-class neighbors grumbled a lot. As a neighborhood cop, I had to pay extra attention to them.
    “Things changed dramatically with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. The old man died of a heart attack, which actually spared him all the humiliations. But his family was not so fortunate. Mei’s husband was put into isolation interrogation as a British secret agent for the crime of having listened to the BBC. He hung himself.
    “Then their house fell too. People came and took over rooms as their own. The Mings—now only Mei and her son—were pushed out into an attic room above the garage, originally the servants’ quarters.”
    “No one did anything about it?” Chen said, but he immediately realized the ridiculousness of his question. His family, too, had been driven out of their three-bedroom apartment at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
    “Don’t you remember a popular quote from Chairman Mao? ‘There are thousands of arguments for revolution, but the principal one is: it is justified to rise in rebellion.’ It was considered a revolutionary activity to take away property from the rich.”
    “Yes, I remember. Red Guards came to my family too. Sorry for the interruption, Comrade Fan. Please go on.”
    “In the third year of the Cultural Revolution, there appeared on their garden wall a counterrevolutionary slogan—or something that resembled one, consisting of two short phrases. One was ‘Down With,’ and the other was ‘Chairman Mao.’ They were possibly put there by two kids, at different times. They just happened to appear close together on the wall. But something like that was enough to turn the people in the mansion into possible suspects. Because of the class struggle, focus naturally fell on the Ming family, the only one of black class status. And especially on the boy. No one could prove he did it, but no one could prove that he didn’t do it, either.
    “So a joint investigation group was formed, with members from the neighborhood committee and from the Mao Team at Mei’s institute. The boy was locked up in the back room of the neighborhood committee—alone, in so-called isolation interrogation, which was known to be effective in breaking the resistance of a class enemy. In fact, Mei’s husband had committed suicide after a week in isolation interrogation.
    “She was terrified that the son would follow in the footsteps of the father. For days she was begging around like a headless fly. She even came to me. I was helpless. In those years, the local district police station was practically taken over by those rebels. So what could a neighborhood cop do?
    “Then one early afternoon the boy was suddenly released. No real evidence or witness was found against him, it was said. Besides, he had caught a high fever in the back room, and the guard on duty there didn’t want to keep him. So he went straight home, but upon pushing open the door, it looked as if he had seen a ghost. He turned around, fleeing and screaming. His mother rushed out after him—stark naked. She stumbled on the stairs and fell all the way down.
    “He might or might not have heard her fall, but he didn’t go back. He kept running like mad. Out of the house, along the street, all the way back to that back-room office—”
    “That’s strange,” Chen said. “Did you talk to her neighbors about what happened that afternoon?”
    “I did, to several of them,” Fan said. “Particularly to Tofu Zhang, a neighbor in the building, who happened to be home that afternoon. He was still sleeping after working the night shift, when he heard the eerie sound. So he jumped out of bed and saw her running out naked, calling after her son. He didn’t see the boy and guessed that she must have had a nightmare. But then she fell, tumbling, hitting her head