When Red is Black

grudging way.”
     
    “So he protested?”
     
    “He did not know anything about the publishing business, but he didn’t trust her. Obviously, he didn’t think it was fair. That’s why she wanted us to explain, I think. She was a very shrewd woman. There was nothing he could do. In those years, people did not sue each other over things like that.”
     
    “Do you think he hated her?”
     
    “That’s difficult for me to say. Nobody was happy. She even asked us to draft an agreement that he had to sign, specifying that he would never bother her again, before he received the money.”
     
    “So she ended up not paying a single penny to him?”
     
    “Not a single penny came from her pocket.”
     
    “Did he come back to you?”
     
    “No. He’s not in Shanghai. There will be no more money, he understands, until the book runs into a second edition. If it ever does.”
     
    “Will it?”
     
    “Well, we did a large printing for the first edition, which sold out. We thought about doing a second. Then her novel was published. Her name appeared on the government inside control list. We decided not to print a second edition.”
     
    “I’m confused, Comrade Jia. The poetry volume is not her book, is it?”
     
    “But her name’s also on the cover—as a special editor. Whether we remove her name or not, when people read the poems, they may think of the novel. My boss said it was not worth it.”
     
    “Do you have any other information about him—I mean the youth, Bao?”
     
    “No, nothing,” Jia said as he stood up. “Oh, he stayed with her for a few days, I remember. He had no relatives left in the city. She told me about it. But after the meeting, he must have gone back to Jiangxi immediately.”
     
    “I see. Thank you so much, Comrade Jia. Your information may be extremely important to our work.”
     
    It was like a missing piece of a puzzle that unexpectedly popped up at the last minute, Detective Yu thought, as he stepped out of the publishing house.
     
    Outside, it was a sunny, yet cold, day. A middle-aged, scantily clad idiot was searching in a trashcan not too far away, singing a doggerel verse:
     
    When red is black,
    Old time comes back.
    Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh,
    You’ve got to pack
    A Big Mac, a Big Mac!
     
    Behind Detective Yu, from the cafe, came a line from a Revolutionary Modern Model Beijing Opera, “Chairman Mao’s teaching thaws the ice in the dead of winter.” A contrast in cacophony.
     
    Yu had to find Bao, now perhaps a young man, he decided. From a pay phone at the end of Shaoxing Road, he called Chief Inspector Chen about the new lead.
     
    “I have contacted the Shanghai Archives Bureau again,” Chen said. “They have faxed me a list that contains some basic information about Hong and her son, Bao, and several pictures. I’ll fax it to you. It may help.”
     
    It would be difficult for Yu to find these people in just a few days. He started by contacting Hong’s middle school. According to the dean, there had been a class reunion the previous year. Hong had not attended, but one of her former classmates still had her address. With the address he obtained from her, Yu dialed the number of the Jiangxi Police Bureau.
     
    Their reply came in the late afternoon. Hong was there, still in the village where she had already spent more than twenty years. A poor lower-middle-class peasant’s wife, she had become just such a peasant herself. Chairman Mao’s theory of the transformation of educated youths still applied. Hong did not want to come back to Shanghai, not because of her continuous belief in Mao, but because of her successful transformation. A poor lower-middle-class peasant would be a laughingstock in Shanghai today.
     
    Bao was not there. He had left the village again for Shanghai about a year ago. In the nineties, millions of farmers found it impossible to stay on in their backward villages as they watched TV and saw how the fashionable, free-spending middle class lived in the coastal cities. In spite of the government’s efforts to balance the development of the city and the countryside, an alarming divide between rich and poor, urban and rural, coastal and inland had appeared—these were the differences that the economic reforms Deng had launched a decade ago had helped create.
     
    Like so many others, Bao had left home to seek his fortune. The first few months, he occasionally wrote home, and once even mailed fifty Yuan to his mother but the correspondence