Don't Cry Tai Lake (2 page)

Life could be more absurd than fiction. In college, he had majored in English, but upon graduation he was state-assigned to a job in the Shanghai Police Bureau, where, to the puzzlement of others as well as himself, he had been rising steadily through the ranks. At the Zhenjiang Party School, some predicted that Chen had a most promising official career ahead of him, that he was capable of moving much further than his current job as chief inspector.

But here, he was quite content to be a nameless tourist on vacation, with a bottle of beer and a mystery novel. Su Shi, one of his favorite Song dynasty poets, had once declared it regrettable to “have no self to claim,” but at the moment, at least, Chen did not find it so.

The old man was bringing the dishes Chen had ordered.

“Thank you,” Chen said, looking up. “How is business?”

“Not too good. People are telling stories, but it's really the same everywhere.”

What stories? Chen wondered. Presumably about the poor quality of the food. That wasn't uncommon for a tourist city, where customers seldom go to a restaurant a second time, stories or not. But the ribs were delicious, done nicely with plenty of mixed sauce, rich in color and taste. The sliced lotus root, too, proved to be crisp, fresh, yet surprisingly compatible with the sweet sticky rice filling.

It was a rare privilege to be the only customer in a place, he thought, crunching another slice of the pinkish lotus root. Soon, he had a second beer, without having opened the book yet, and his mind began wandering.

So many days, where have you been—/ like a traveling cloud / that forgets to come back / unaware of the spring drawing to an end?

Shaking his head, he pulled himself out of the unexpected wave of self-pity, and took out his cell phone. He dialed Detective Yu back in Shanghai.

“Sorry, Yu, that I didn't come back to Shanghai before leaving on vacation. Zhengjiang was simply closer to Wuxi.”

“Don't worry about it, Chief. There are nothing but small cases here, and none of them special, either. There's nothing for our Special Case Squad.”

“Was there any reaction to my extended absence in the bureau?”

“With your vacation having been arranged by Comrade Secretary Zhao, what could Party Secretary Li say?”

Party Secretary Li had become increasingly wary of Chen, whom he was beginning to see as a threat to Li's position as the top Party official in the bureau. Li was headed to retirement, but—if things worked out his way—not that soon.

“Keep me posted, Yu. Call me anytime you like. I don't think there is anything for me to do here.”

“Are you so sure?”

Chen knew the reason for his partner's skepticism. Chen had had vacations before—unplanned, unexplained vacations—that turned out to be nothing more than a pretext for an investigation. What's more, Chen had once investigated a highly sensitive case under Zhao's supervision.

“Zhao didn't mention anything to me,” Chen said. “Remember the anticorruption case? He promised me a vacation then, and I think that's what this is about.”

“That's good, boss. Enjoy your vacation. I won't bother you unless it's an emergency,” Yu said, then added, “Oh, you know what? You have a fan in Wuxi. I met a recent graduate from the Police Academy in a meeting two or three months ago. Sergeant Huang Kang. He bugged me for stories about you.”

“Really!”

“He'll never forgive me if I don't tell him that you are vacationing in Wuxi.”

“Let me enjoy myself in peace for a couple of days first. Once Huang knows, he, as well as others, may come over, bringing with them cases they want to discuss. My vacation would become anything but a quiet one,” Chen said. “But what's his number? I'll call him later, and say that you insisted on it.”

Chen copied the number into his notebook. There was no hurry. He would wait until a day or two before the end of his vacation to call.

Chen put away his cell phone and turned his attention to the book he'd brought with him. It was a novel with an interesting title:
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman,
and a Guangxi publisher had been pushing him to translate it. Mysteries had begun to sell well, and the contract they were offering for the translation wasn't bad. However, in comparison to the occasional business translations that he did for his Big Buck businessmen acquaintances, it was nothing.

Chen had read only two or three pages when he noticed someone approaching the eatery. Looking up, he glimpsed a young, slender woman, who glanced in his direction, dipping her head like a shy lotus flower in a cool breeze.

She appeared to be in her mid-twenties. She was wearing a black fitted blazer, a white blouse, jeans, and black pumps, and she carried a satchel slung over her shoulder. She moved to the other outside table. She had a bottle of water in her hand, ignoring the proprietor's sign objecting to customers bringing in their own drinks. Instead of calling for a menu, she shouted, “I'm here, Uncle Wang.”

“One minute,” the old man said, sticking his head out. “Do you have to work this weekend, Shanshan?”

“I'm just checking a new test at the office, but it's getting more complicated. Don't worry. At most it will be a couple of hours in the afternoon.”

Apparently she was no stranger here. The old man, surnamed Wang, was probably not a relative, or she would not have prefixed Wang with Uncle.

The old man shuffled out with a steaming plastic container, which must have been microwave-warmed. She had probably left her lunch here earlier in the day, and it might have been a common arrangement. In the course of the economic reform, state-run companies had been shutting down their employee canteens as a money-losing business practice. So she probably had to find a way of eating somewhere else.

She opened the plastic container and inside, on top of white rice, lay an omelet with lots of chopped green onion. She pulled a pair of bamboo chopsticks out of her satchel.

“The green onion is fresh from my own garden,” Uncle Wang said with a toothless grin. “I picked it this morning. Totally organic.”

Organic
—an interesting word to say here, Chen thought as he sipped his beer in silence.

“That's so thoughtful of you, Uncle Wang.”

Uncle Wang went back into the kitchen. The two of them were left alone.

She started eating in a leisurely manner, adding a small spoon of hot sauce to the rice. She pulled a crumpled newspaper out of her jean pocket and began reading. A frown started to form in her delicate eyebrows. Chen caught himself studying her with interest.

She was attractive, her oval face framed by long black hair and animated with a youthful glow. Her mouth subtly curved under her delicate nose, and there was a wistful look in her clear, large eyes.

The characters printed on the satchel said: Wuxi Number One Chemical Company. Perhaps she worked there.

Occasionally, Chen liked to consider himself a detached aesthetic, like the persona in those lines by Bian Zhilin:
You are looking at the scene, / and the scene watcher is looking at you.
It was an ingenious way to describe one's scene-eclipsing beauty. Bian was a contemporary poet he had studied in college, but was something of a Prufrock in real life. Chen considered himself different from that. Still, there was nothing improper, he reassured himself, in a poet watching in detachment. Not to mention that, as a detective, he was in a natural position to observe.

Chen laughed at himself. A worn-out cop on his first day of vacation couldn't automatically switch back into being a vigorous poet.

He was in no hurry to leave. Having finished the ribs and lotus root, however, he thought it might not appear proper for him to sit too long with nothing left on the table. So he rose and went over to the rice paddy eels squirming in the plastic basin close to her table. As he squatted down, examining, touching the slippery eels with a finger, he couldn't help taking in her shapely ankle flashing in the background above the somber water in the basin.

“Are the eels good?” he asked loudly, still squatting, turning over his shoulder to direct his voice toward the kitchen.

The young woman unexpectedly leaned over, whispering to him, her hair nearly touching his face. “Ask him why he keeps the eels in water.”

Chen took her suggestion.

“Why do you keep the rice paddy eels in water?” he called toward the kitchen.

“Oh, don't worry. It's for the benefit of our customers,” Uncle Wang said, emerging from the kitchen. “Nowadays people feed eels hormones and whatnot. So I keep them in water for a day after they're caught, to wash out any remaining drugs.”

But could drugs really be washed out of their systems that easily? Chen doubted it, and his appetite for eels was instantly lost.

“Well, give me a portion of stinking tofu,” Chen said. “And a lot of red pepper sauce.”

Presumably, stinking tofu was a safe bet. Chen looked up only to see the young woman shaking her head with a sly smile.

He restrained himself from asking her to explain. It wouldn't be so easy to talk across the table with the old man going in and out of the kitchen. There was something intriguing about her. She knew the proprietor well, yet she didn't hesitate to speak against the food here.

Soon, Uncle Wang placed a platter of golden fried tofu on the table along with a saucer of red pepper sauce.

“The local tofu,” he said simply, heading back the kitchen.

“The tofu is hot. Would you like to join me?” Chen turned to the young woman, raising the chopsticks in a gesture of invitation.

“Sure,” she said, standing up, still holding the water bottle in her hand. “But I have to say no to your stinking tofu.”

“Don't worry,” he said, signaling the bench opposite and pulling out another pair of chopsticks for her. “Some people can't stand the smell, I know, but once you try it, you may not want to stop. How about a beer?”

“No thanks,” she said. “The local farmers use chemicals to make that tofu, though perhaps it's a common practice now. But what about the water they use to make it—and to make the beer? You should take a look at the lake. It is so polluted, it's undrinkable.”

“Unimaginable!” he said.

“According to Nietzsche: God is dead. What does that mean? It means that people are capable of doing anything. There is nothing that is unimaginable.”

“Oh, you're reading Nietzsche,” he said, impressed.

“What are you reading?”

“A mystery novel. By the way, my name is Chen Cao. It's nice to meet you,” he said, then added with a touch of exaggeration, in spite of himself, “As in the old proverb, it's more beneficial to listen to your talk for one day than to read for ten years.”

“I'm simply talking shop. My name is Shanshan. Where are you from?”

“Shanghai,” he said, wondering what kind of work she did.

“So you're on vacation here. A hard-working intellectual, reading English in a Wuxi eatery,” she said teasingly. “Are you an English teacher?”

“Well, what else can I do?” he said, reluctant to reveal that he was a cop. Teaching was a career he had, in his college days, imagined for himself. And he felt an urge, at least for a while, to not be a cop. Or not be treated as a cop. Police work had become a bigger and bigger part of his identity, whether he liked it or not. So it was tantalizing to imagine a different self, one that wasn't a chief inspector—like a snail that didn't carry its shell.

“Schoolteachers earn quite a lot, especially with the demand for private tutoring,” she said, casting a glance at the dishes on the table.

He knew what she was driving at. Chinese parents spared no expense for their children's education, since that education could make a huge difference in an increasingly competitive society. Detective Yu and his wife Peiqin, for instance, spent the bulk of their income on private lessons for their son. A schoolteacher could make a small fortune by giving private lessons after hours, sometimes squeezing ten students or more into a small living room.

“No, not me. Instead, I'm debating whether or not to translate this book for a small sum.”

“A mystery,” she said, glancing at the book cover in English.

“Occasionally, I write poems too,” he responded impulsively. “But there is no audience for poetry today.”

“I used to like poetry too—in middle school,” she commented. “In a polluted age like ours, poetry is too much of a luxury, like a breath of pure air or a drop of clear water. Poetry can't make anything happen except in one's self-indulgent imagination.”

“No, I don't—”

Chen's response was interrupted by the shrill ringing of a cell phone in her satchel.

Taking out a pink phone and putting it to her ear, she listened for a moment. Then she stood up, her face quickly bleaching of color in the afternoon light.

“Something wrong?” he said.

“No, it was just a nasty message,” she said, turning off the phone.

“What was the message?”

“‘Say what you're supposed to say, or you'll pay a terrible price.'”

“Oh, maybe it was a prank call. I get those calls too,” he said.
But usually nothing that specific,
he didn't add.

Her brows knitted again. She seemed to know the call was more than a practical joke. She looked at her watch.

“I've got to go back to work,” she said. “It's nice to have met you, Mr. Chen. I hope you will enjoy a wonderful vacation here.”

“You have a good weekend—”

He thought about asking for her phone number, but she was already walking away, her long hair swaying across her back.

It was probably just as well. It was only a chance meeting, like two nameless clouds crossing each other in the sky, then continuing on with their respective journeys. That was probably not a metaphor of his invention, but he couldn't recall where he'd read it, Chen mused as he watched her walk.