The Mao Case

Mao, not historically, but what about personally, from the perspective of one whose
     life had been so affected by those political movements under Mao?
    Her personal factors aside, there was no forgiving Mao for what she had just learned from Old Hunter — for what Mao had done
     to Kaihui.

    As a young girl, she had read Mao’s poem to Kaihui, cherishing it as a moving revolutionary love poem. She had also read an
     earlier one on parting with Kaihui, even more sentimental and touching in her imagination.
    Now, what a shock when she learned the truth behind the poems! It wasn’t simply a brazen betrayal by Mao; it was practically
     cold-blooded murder. Mao must have seen Kaihui as an obstacle to his affair with Zizhen, so he had let Kaihui stay where she
     was, to fall prey to the nationalists’ retaliation. Did Kaihui know it in her last days? Peiqin’s eyes watered at the thought
     of Kaihui being dragged to the execution ground, her bare feet bleeding all the way — following the local superstition that
     the executed couldn’t find her way back home without her shoes.
    And Peiqin had no doubt about Mao’s desertion of Shang. After rereading
Cloud and Rain in Shanghai
, Peiqin lay awake for the night. It was nothing, historically, for someone like Mao to have used and discarded a woman like
     a worn-out mop. But what about Shang, an equal human being?
    Standing up, Peiqin went into the bedroom again. Gazing at Mao’s picture above the bed, she realized that it was a portrait
     not so commonly seen, not now, not since the days of the Cultural Revolution. Mao was sitting in a rattan chair, wearing a
     blue-and-white-striped terrycloth robe, smoking a cigarette, and smiling toward the distant horizon, the immediate background
     of the picture suggestive of a riverboat. Presumably it was a picture taken after a swim in the Yangtze River.
    Was it possible that Jiao, after the fashion of recent years, had “re-discovered” Mao? Chinese people had always been interested
     in emperors — for thousands of years. There was a “royal revival” going on in movies and on TV, and the Qing emperors and empresses
     abounded in current bestsellers.
    But how could Jiao, of all people, have entertained any fond fantasies of Mao — since Mao was responsible for the tragedies
     of her family?

    And the Mao mystery aside, how could a young girl like Jiao afford to live like this without a job?
    It was possible that Jiao was a kept woman, or “little concubine”—
ernai
, a new term that was gaining currency quickly in the contemporary Chinese vocabulary.
    But Internal Security hadn’t found a “keeper” in the background, though somebody had been seen in her company, at least once,
     in the apartment here. For a young woman like Jiao, there was nothing surprising about an occasional visitor or two.
    Peiqin pulled out of her thoughts. She hardly knew anything about Jiao, a girl from a different generation and of a different
     family background. There was no point in speculating too much.
    Nor did she have any idea what Chen was really after. As a cop’s wife, she had no objection to snooping around for her husband’s
     sake, or that of his boss, but she would have liked more clues about what she was looking for.
    Again, she glanced at her watch. Jiao wouldn’t come back this early. Peiqin decided to start her “search proper.”
    She proceeded cautiously, pulling out the drawers, looking under the bed, examining the closet, rummaging through the boxes…
     From a mystery she had read, she learned that people could purposely hide things in the most obvious places, to which she
     also paid close attention. After spending nearly an hour going through every nook and cranny, she found little except things
     that further reinforced her earlier impression of Jiao’s being obsessed with Mao.
    In a drawer, Peiqin found several tapes of documentaries showing Mao receiving foreign visitors in the Forbidden City. Some
     of them she might have seen in Yunnan in the early seventies; it was during a time when hardly any movies were shown except
     the eight modern revolutionary model plays and documentaries of Mao. Peiqin and Yu would joke that Mao was the biggest movie
     star.
    How could Jiao have gotten hold of these? Peiqin was tempted to put a tape into the player, but she decided against it. Jiao
     might notice it had been played.

    Instead, Peiqin started to make a list of what seemed unusual, puzzling,