The Mao Case

excuse. Yong had played a similar trick once
before. The memories of a similar occasion were all coming back to him.
    Yong left promptly, as years earlier, closing the door after her, leaving the two of them alone in the room.
    But things were not as before, not anymore for the two of them. He found himself at a loss for words. The silence seemed to
     wrap them up in a silk cocoon.
    “Yong is a busybody,” Ling said finally. “She dragged me over without telling me why, and insisted on my waiting here.”
    “A well-meant busybody,” he said, his glance sweeping over the room, which appeared little changed. There was still a basin
     of water in the steel-wire basin holder near the door. The large bed at the other side of the room was covered with a dragon-and-phoenix-embroidered
     sheet, identical to the one in his memory. And they were sitting at the same red-painted wooden table by the paper windows,
     against which the old lamp cast a lambent light.
    That might be the very effect Yong had intended. The past in the present. Like the last time they were here — Ling, a librarian,
     and he, a college student. In those days, she still lived with her parents, and he, in a crowded dorm room with five other
     students. It was difficult for them to find a quiet place to themselves. So Yong invited them to her place, and as soon as
     they were here, she left them alone with an excuse.
    That evening was like this evening. But to night, as in a couplet by Li Shangyin,
“Oh the feeling, to be collected later /
     in memories, was already confused.”
    “I received the book you sent from London,” he said. “Thank you so much, Ling.”
    “Oh, I happened to see it in a bookstore there.”
    “So you are back from the trip.” It was idiotic to say that, he knew. She thought of him on her honeymoon trip, but what else
     could he say to her? “When?”
    “Last week.”
    “You could have told me earlier.”
    “Why?”

    “I would have been able —” He left the sentence unfinished —
to buy a wedding present for you
.
    There ensued another short spell of silence, like in a scroll of traditional Chinese painting, in which the blank space contains
     more than what was painted.
There is always a loss of meaning / in what we say or do not say, / but also a meaning / in the
     loss of the meaning.
    “Oh, did you visit the Sherlock Holmes Museum?” he said, trying to change the topic.
    “Now you are really a chief inspector,” she said, eyeing the cold tea. “A cop above everything.”
    That was another blunder on his part. She had a point. He was tongue-tied, as a cop or not, thinking that her response might
     have also referred to his role in another case, one that had exasperated her father because of its political repercussions.
     A case Chen didn’t have to take, yet he did. The outcome of it had strained their relationship.
    “You must have done well on the force,” she went on. “My father, too, mentioned you the other day.”
    “As a monk, you have to strike the bell in the temple, day after day.” He was deeply perturbed by the comment about her father,
     a powerful politburo member in the Forbidden City.
    “So it has become your lifelong career?”
    “Perhaps it’s too late for me to try anything new,” he said, not wanting to continue like this, but not knowing how to shift
     the topic.
    “I tried to write you,” she said, taking the initiative, her head slightly tilted in the faltering lamplight, “but there’s
     not much to be said. After all, the tide does not wait.”
    He wondered at her choice of the words — “the tide does not wait.” Did it mean she couldn’t wait any longer? He wondered whether
     it was about her marriage choice or career choice. To start a business was nowadays described as “to jump into the sea” — tides
     of money-making opportunities. She was a successful businesswoman, and her husband, for that matter, was another tide-riding
     businessman.
    Or were they a reference to the
Spring Tide?
That was the title of a Russian novel that they had read together in North Sea
     Park.

    But he was supposed to say something more relevant to the occasion. It was an opportunity not to be missed, as Yong would
     have urged, a chance for the “salvation mission.” Ling was staying with her parents at the moment.
    He took a sip of his tea. Jasmine flower tea. Another surprising strike of déjà vu. That evening, so many years ago, she brewed
     a pot of hot tea for him,