When Red is Black

birth to a daughter, Hong, in the late fifties, shortly after the commencement of the Anti-Rightist movement. When Hong was born, Yang had mailed a money order of fifty Yuan to Hong, but the money was returned to him. And that was that. Jie also got into trouble during the Cultural Revolution, and Hong went to the countryside as an educated youth, married a local peasant, had a son, and seemed to have settled down there.
     
    When Yu had finished making the list, Old Liang, who lived only about five minutes away from the lane and spent more time in the office than at home, had still not shown up. Zhong, the security director of the neighborhood committee, was devouring a hot, oily green-onion cake. He poured a cup of wulong tea for Yu.
     
    “Comrade Old Liang is investigating somewhere else this morning,” Zhong said, taking a seat opposite Yu at the desk. “Do you need any help from us, Comrade Detective Yu?”
     
    “Are you familiar with the background of the shrimp woman? Her surname is Peng.”
     
    “Oh, the shrimp woman! You have come to the right man,” Zhong said. “She’s been my next-door neighbor for years. A good, honest, timid woman, without even the nerve to kill a fly. She worked in a silk factory for more than twenty years, never having the guts to say no to her boss, never once. And then what? She was among the first laid off, and she ended up peeling shrimp in the lane early every morning.”
     
    “She has an arrangement with the food market, I’ve heard.”
     
    “Yes, it’s part of a government effort to help those sinking beneath the poverty line. Some of the shrimp in the market do not look fresh. In order to sell them for a better price, the market has the shrimp peeled early in the morning. A lot of Shanghai wives shop there before they go to work. So the market makes a point of having the peeled shrimp on sale before seven thirty.”
     
    “So she has to start working at around six every morning?”
     
    “She has no choice. Her family depends on what she earns from the food market,” Zhong said. “Is she in any trouble?”
     
    “No. I just have a few questions for her.”
     
    “I’ll send for her.”
     
    “No, thanks. I am going to the shikumen house. She is probably sitting in the lane.”
     
    Sure enough, the shrimp woman was there, sitting on her bamboo stool, opposite the back door of the shikumen house, busy working, with a basket of frozen shrimp at her feet. She was in her late forties or early fifties, her face as thin as one of the brown sugar cakes of his childhood. She wore a pair of old-fashioned glasses smeared with broken pieces of shrimp shells.
     
    Peng smiled nervously as Yu stopped beside her. He squatted down and lit a cigarette without speaking. It was cold; he kept one of his hands in his pants pocket.
     
    “Comrade—Comrade Detective,” she stuttered.
     
    “You surely know why I’ve come to you today, don’t you?”
     
    “I don’t know, Comrade Detective,” she said. “Well, I suppose it’s about Yin Lige. Poor woman. Old Heaven is blind, truly. She did not deserve it.”
     
    “Poor woman?” He was rather surprised by her sympathetic tone. The shrimp peeler was wrapped in an ancient imitation army overcoat, its collar raised against the cold wind, and her fingers were swollen, cracked, covered with the shrimp slime. Surely she, not Yin, was to be pitied.
     
    “She was good-hearted. Life is not fair. She suffered such a lot during the Cultural Revolution,” she explained.
     
    “Can you tell me something more about her?” Yu asked. It was strange, he reflected: her attitude toward Yin was quite different from that of her other neighbors. “About what you call her good-heartedness. Give me one or two examples.”
     
    “A lot of people in the lane treat me like trash, complaining about the smell of the shrimp. I understand. But I have no choice. I cannot prepare them in the courtyard, or the other residents would have kicked me out of the house.
     
    “Yin alone was really compassionate. After her piece in Wenhui Daily, the neighborhood committee came to her, asking whether she had some other suggestions for lane work. She put in a good word for me as well. Afterward, the neighborhood committee gave me a special permit allowing me to work in the lane.”
     
    “It sounds like she could be quite helpful to people in need.”
     
    “She was. She gave several textbooks to my daughter. And a new plastic folding chair, a