When Red is Black

cut,
    nor raveled,
    is the sorrow of separation:
    Nothing tastes like that to the heart. . . .
     
    These lines were from a poem Yang had included in his translation manuscript. Some night, when all the other families in the shikumen were asleep, Yin, a lonely, heart-broken woman, could have stepped into this very courtyard and read it to herself.
     
    Chen stubbed out his cigarette and walked across the hall and out the back door. He stopped to open and close the door a couple of times. Someone could have hidden behind the door, which was angled toward the staircase when it was open, but he would have been seen easily by people descending the stairs.
     
    Outside, the shrimp woman was nowhere in sight, but a bamboo stool indicated her post in the lane, just three or four steps away. It was cold out there. It could not be easy for a woman to sit there working, morning after morning, her fingers numbed by the frozen shrimp, for the unprincely wage of two or three Yuan per hour. Her monthly income would be far less than an hour’s translation earned him, he calculated.
     
    He suddenly thought of two celebrated lines by Baijuyi, a Tang dynasty poet. Now what merit do I have — / with my annual salary at three thousand kilos of rice? At that time, when a lot of people could not fill their bellies, this salary was considered princely.
     
    A recurring theme among Chinese intellectuals was a concern for the unfair distribution of wealth in society— huibujun. But Comrade Deng Xiaoping must also have been right when he declared that some Chinese people should be allowed to get rich first in their socialist society, that the wealth they accumulated would “trickle down” to the masses.
     
    As for the money those upstarts like Gu were making, God alone knew where it would lead. Though China in the nineties was still socialist in name, with a time-honored emphasis on egalitarianism for the entire society, the gap between the rich and the poor was quickly—alarmingly—widening.
     
    Chen started climbing the stairs. It was dark; finding each step was difficult. It would not be easy for a stranger to climb these stairs without stumbling. There should have been a light, even in the middle of the day. In such a building, however, with so many families, each one’s share of the electricity bill would be a headache to calculate.
     
    Some of the rooms on each floor were obviously makeshift subdivisions of space, Chen thought. There were sixteen families in the two-story building, about one hundred residents in all. Yu had his job cut out for him if each resident was a potential suspect.
     
    Chen could not help stepping inside Yin’s room, though he had not intended to examine it. Yu would have done a thorough job already.
     
    He felt melancholy as he stood there, alone, thinking about a solitary woman whose death he should have more actively investigated. The furniture was already covered in a thin layer of dust, which somehow made the scene familiar. There was a pile of old magazines in which bookmarks had been placed. He thumbed through them; in each case, the marked page contained a poem of Yang’s which had later appeared in the collection edited by Yin. A traditional Chinese painting of two canaries still hung high on the time-yellowed wall. There was nothing else left that was really personal to Yin.
     
    Chen’s interest in the room was also piqued by the term tingzijian writer. There were poverty-stricken writers, unable to rent better rooms, in the thirties, and then in the nineties, too. The marginal status of a tingzijian room, something barely inhabitable between two floors, appeared symbolic. He wondered how such a room—or the attempt to write in such a room—could have been romanticized in fiction. Not everything could have been glamorous in times past, but nostalgia made it seem so. Things are miraculously mellowed in memories. That was a line from a Russian poem he had read, but failed to understand, in his high-school years. A subtle transformation in comprehension had occurred with the lapse of years.
     
    Chen started pacing around in the tingzijian, though there was not much room for him to do so. He wanted to concentrate.
     
    It could not have been easy for Yin to write here; it could not have been easy to do anything, for that matter, with people going up and down the stairs, with noise coming from various directions, and with all the various smells wafting about. An unpleasant tang like that