When Red is Black

the tingzijian room, licking her wounds in secret.”
     
    “I would say that’s understandable. Her woes were personal, and perhaps too painful for her to talk about.”
     
    “Yet what is special about living in a shikumen house is the constant contact with your neighbors, every hour, every day,” Old Liang said, taking a sip of his tea. “Some describe Shanghainese as born wheelers and dealers. That’s not true, but people here have always lived in such miniature societies, and learned from this ongoing education in relationship management. As an old saying goes, Close neighbors are more important than distant relatives. But Yin seemed to have purposely distanced herself from her neighbors. As a result, they resented her and treated her as an outsider. Lanlan, one of her neighbors, said something to the point: ‘Her world’s not here.’”
     
    “Perhaps she was too busy writing to make friends,” Yu said, stealing a glance at his watch. Old Liang resembled his father, Old Hunter, in one aspect: both of them were tireless talkers, and at times wandered from the point. “Did you have any direct contact with her?”
     
    “Well, I did when she came to register her residence. She was rather unfriendly, even a little hostile, as if I were one of those who had beaten up Yang in those days.”
     
    “Have you read her novel?”
     
    “Not the whole book by any means, only some paragraphs quoted in the newspapers and magazines. You know what?” Old Liang went on without waiting for an answer. “Some readers were really pissed off by what she wrote about having been a Red Guard out of proletarian fervor, and doing what she referred to only as ‘some too passionate deeds’ in the name of the revolution.”
     
    “Was that the reaction of her neighbors too?”
     
    “Oh, no. I don’t think too many here have read her book. They may have heard of the book. What I know is from the research I have done.”
     
    “You have done a lot of work, Old Liang,” Yu said. “Let’s go to her place now.”
     
    * * * *
     

Chapter 4
     
     
    D
    etective Yu stood before the black-painted front door of solid oak and touched the shining brass knocker, which must have been there since the shikumen house had been built.
     
    “There are two entrances to the house,” Old Liang explained. “The front door can be latched from inside. Normally, it is closed after nine o’clock. There is also a back door opening to the little back lane.”
     
    The explanation was hardly necessary for Detective Yu, who had not mentioned the fact that he had lived in a similar building for many years, but he was willing to listen. Crossing the courtyard, he stepped into the common kitchen area. Squeezed into that space were the coal stoves of a dozen or more families, as well as their pots and pans, rows of coal briquettes, and pigeonhole cabinets hung on the wall. Yu counted fifteen stoves in all. At the end of the kitchen area was the staircase, which differed from the one in his own house, as an additional room had been partitioned off at the curve in the staircase. A tingzijian, at the landing above the kitchen, between the first and second floors, was commonly regarded as one of the worst rooms in a shikumen building.
     
    “Let’s climb up to Yin’s room. Be careful, Detective Yu, the steps are very narrow here. Isn’t it a coincidence,” Old Liang continued, “that a number of writers lived in tingzijians in the thirties? ‘Tingzijian literature,’ I remember, referred to the writers working in poverty. There was a well-known ‘tingzijian writer’ in this area before 1949, but I cannot recall his name.”
     
    Yu, too, failed to recall the name, although he believed he had heard the term. How could those writers have concentrated with people moving up and down all the time, he wondered.
     
    “You have read quite a lot,” Yu said, convinced the elderly residence cop was not only an energetic talker, but also a digressive one.
     
    There was a seal on the door. Old Liang was going to tear the paper off when one of the residents called in a wailing voice, “Comrade Old Liang, you have to come and help us. That heartless man has not given a single penny to his family for more than two months.”
     
    It was a family squabble, Yu guessed. It would furnish him with a timely excuse. “You don’t have to accompany me, Old Liang,” Yu said. “You have so many things to deal with. It may take me some time here.