When Red is Black

typing on his electric typewriter. The project was ambitious. The document was not easy to translate, as it contained many architectural terms interspersed throughout the text. He had done a few technical translations for money, although none had been as lucrative as this one. Normally it took him hours to become familiar with the relevant technical terms before the translation could even begin.
     
    Chen had obtained two weeks’ leave from the Shanghai Police Bureau. Party Secretary Li had agreed, although reluctantly. The Party boss had been promising Chen a vacation for quite a long time, but, for one reason or another, his vacation had never come through. Li was hardly in a position to say no to Chen’s request now, in spite of the urgency of the Yin case.
     
    Chen had not mentioned the translation when he requested leave. There had been other reasons for him to seek time off. He had been quite upset with the way a recent case had been concluded. He had done what he could as a cop, but all his efforts, while “in the interests of the Party,” seemed to have plunged a poor woman further into misery. Public Security Minister Huang had made a long-distance phone call to him, praising his “excellent work under the leadership of the ministry,” and encouraging him to “make larger strides as an emerging cadre of the new Chinese police force.” Party Secretary Li had not been pleased at this praise for his protégé. Minister Huang’s call to Chen, rather than to Li, might have signified something. Li was quick to read the possible message. The too-swift rise of Chen—at Li’s expense—was unacceptable. Tension rose between the two men.
     
    There were other things in the bureau that were irritants to Chen. Mountains of political meetings and seas of Party documents. Several cops, including one in his special case squad, had been suspended because of their involvement in a smuggling case. An old Party cadre had raised issues about Chen’s poetry writing once again. It was ironic, as his literary inspiration had almost run dry over the last few months. He’d had neither the time nor the energy. All he had produced were some fragmentary lines. He did not know when he would ever be able to put them together.
     
    On top of all that, after a long process of meetings and negotiations, had come the withdrawal of the offer to Yu of a modern apartment. Chen took the blow personally. He, too, suspected that the reneging on what had been agreed might have been more complicated than it appeared on the surface. Everybody knew that Detective Yu was Chief Inspector Chen’s man. This was a terrible loss of face for Chen. As the proverb said, You have to think about its master’s face before you kick a dog. It was Chen who had handed the apartment key over to Yu. Party Secretary Li might have been at work behind the scenes, to get back at Chen. Whatever the correct interpretation of these events might be, Chen had concluded that he did not have sufficient authority at the Shanghai Police Bureau yet.
     
    To take his mind off police work, it would be best to do something different. He was not a man who could relax by doing nothing, as in Laozi’s Tao Te Ching. In a way, Gu’s translation job offered just what he needed, not to mention the monetary incentive.
     
    The New World project proposal on his desk started with an introduction detailing Shanghai’s architectural history from the beginning of the century. It did not take him long to realize that the success of the project would depend on a myth—on nostalgia for the glitter and glamour of the thirties, or, to be exact, on the recreation of that myth—blending the past into a delicious brew, a cup of cappuccino, to delight customers in the nineties.
     
    But then, much about business success had proven mysterious to him. When Kentucky Fried Chicken had first come to Shanghai, he had laughed at the idea. The prices alone would scare away most Shanghainese, he believed, but he had been wrong. Kentucky Fried Chicken enjoyed a huge success. Several branch stores had opened in the city. Last summer, he had wanted to talk with his cousin Shan about his mother’s health problems, and Shan suggested that they meet in “Kentucky”: “It’s cool there. So clean and air-conditioned.”
     
    An advantage of translating rather than writing was that he could keep working on a text mechanically even if its meaning was beyond him, putting words together, like pieces of