Shanghai Redemption (2 page)

Salted fish was supposed to be a special Qingming offering. It was traditional for people to bring the once-favorite foods to the dead. Chen hadn't brought anything with him this trip, a realization that hit him hard.

“Tastes different? Little wonder,” a elderly man sitting behind her cut in. “You know how they preserve the fish? By spraying it with DDT. With my own eyes, I saw a fly land on a salt-covered belt fish. It twitched and died in two or three seconds. Poisoned instantly. No exaggeration.”

“What rotten luck!” The woman started crying. “I can't even serve a bowl of untoxic salted fish to my poor old man.”

“Don't cry your heart out here, old woman,” another man said. “In an hour, you can weep and wail as loudly as you like at his tombstone.”

Chen didn't know what he could say to comfort her, so he turned away, rolled down the window, and took out the pack of cigarettes again. A noise broke out behind him.

“No one in this bus is a Big Buck. Don't put on any damned airs. If you're a Big Buck, why are you huddled up in a stuffy, smelling bus?”

“We're all poor. But so what? You may have an iron and steel fence that lasts for thousands of years, but you'll still end up in a mound of earth.”

“Come on, it's a mound in the Eight Treasure Hills in Beijing. What feng shui! No wonder their sons and daughters are inheriting powerful positions today.”

It sounded like the onset of a squabble. People could so easily become querulous. And not without reason, including the ever-increasing gap between the rich and poor. The passengers on the bus had found themselves at the bottom of society. The myth of Maoist egalitarianism, promoted by the Party authorities for so many years, was fading into a lost dream.

His cell phone rang. It was Skinny Wang, the veteran chauffer of the police bureau.

“Where are you, Chief? It's so noisy in the background.”

“I'm on a cemetery bus to Suzhou. Qingming.”

“How can you leave without telling me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm your driver. Why are you taking the bus?”

“I no longer work for the bureau.”

Chief Inspector or not, Chen could still have arranged a bureau car and a chauffer for the trip. He hadn't cleaned out his office yet. But it wasn't a good idea to arrange a bureau car for a personal trip.

“You're the one and only police officer that makes me feel proud about my job, Chief.”

“Come on. You don't have to say such things.”

“Let me tell you a true story. I went to a class reunion last month. At such events, people like talking about their jobs and about the money they make. Those of my generation, with ten years wasted by the Cultural Revolution, consider themselves lucky to have a steady job, though a job as a driver is nothing to brag about, let alone as a driver for the police department. But I got to declare, ‘I drive for Chief Inspector Chen.' Several people stood up and came over to shake my hand. Why? Because of you. They'd heard and read about you. That you are a capable and conscientious cop—an almost endangered species nowadays.

“And then Xiahou, a multimillionaire businessman, toasted me. ‘To your extraordinary job.' Seeing that I was flabbergasted, Xiahou explained, ‘You mentioned Chief Inspector Chen. Now, you must have heard about “singing the red,” the movement to make people sing patriotic songs. I could have been thrown in jail for refusing to have my company sing these songs like rituals. It was Chen that spoke out for me. Mind you, he didn't even know about me, he was just speaking out as a honest cop. He's a qingguan—like Judge Bao or Judge Dee.'”

“Qingguan,” Chen murmured. In ancient China,
qingguan
meant incorruptible officials, those rare, practically nonexistent officials who were not the product of the system, rather an aberration of it. Consequently, they frequently got into trouble. That was probably why Skinny Wang brought this up just now. But Chen didn't remember any businessman named Xiahou.

“Anyway, you're my Chief Inspector,” Skinny Wang went on. “I don't see anything improper in asking me to drive for you.”

“But grave-sweeping is something personal. I don't think I should use the car for personal matters, even if I keep my office in the bureau.”

“If you say so. Next time, I'll drive you in my own car, but you have to let me know.”

“I will. Thank you so much, Skinny Wang.”

Closing the phone, he turned back to look out the window at the passing landscape. Suddenly the bus erupted in noise again. A loudspeaker started broadcasting a red song called “No Communist Party, No New China.”

Oh the Communist Party, it works so hard for the nation, / It wholeheartedly tries to save the country, / It points out the way of liberation for the people, / It leads China to a bright future …

It was one of those old revolutionary songs that sang the praises of the Party, though this version had a suggestion of jazz in its modified rhythm. It was surprisingly familiar yet strange. The message, however, was unmistakable. Only the Party can rule China, and whatever it does is justified and right.

For Chen, such a song brought back the memories of the Cultural Revolution, and of that morning, seeing his father standing, broken under the weight of a blackboard hung around the neck, pleading guilty repeatedly like a damaged gramophone. All the while, the Red Guards were shouting slogans and singing that song around a book-burning bonfire.… This red song, along with a number of similar ones, had disappeared after the Cultural Revolution. But now they were staging a fierce comeback.

“Turn the damned machine off!” a passenger shouted out to the driver. “Mao's dead and rotting in his grave. Go and play those red songs in the cemetery.”

“Don't drag Mao into this, you pathetic loser,” another passenger snapped back, glaring over his shoulder. “Don't forget the movie
Hibiscus Village
!”

“What about it?”

“The Cultural Revolution will come again.”

“Come on. Those were nothing but the ravings of a lunatic at the end of that movie. You must have lost your mind too.”

“Let's not fight. It's Secretary Lai's order that we play these red songs on the bus,” the driver declared.

Was another Cultural Revolution on the horizon? Chen contemplated that idea. The revival of the old revolutionary red songs was a campaign that originated under Lai, the First Secretary of the Shanghai Party Committee. A relative newcomer to the city, Lai had lost no time leaving his mark through a series of political moves, made possible by his background as a princeling—a child of a high Party member—and the fast-changing political weather. He was regarded by many as a leading figure of the left in China. It was increasingly said that Shanghai was just a stepping stone for Lai in his inevitable rise to the very top of the Party power structure.

What Lai did appealed to some of the people frustrated with the problems of modern China, because it harkened back to the days of Mao. But Chen didn't think it could work. China was still changing dramatically, despite these old red songs.

A gray-haired passenger was nodding in front, as if lost in the familiar tune. He had perhaps heard the song many times in his youth, and what the words meant hardly mattered any more.

Of course, the man in front might be napping instead, his head merely bobbing along with the bumpy ride. Still, several others in the bus seemed to be humming along, one of them even tapping his foot on the floor. At least they didn't appear to be bothered by the song.

Another argument was just beginning to rise up as the bus jerked to an unexpected stop.

“What a lousy ride!” An old man cursed. “The bag of my old bones is being shaken loose.”

“If you want to enjoy a comfortable, luxurious ride,” the driver shouted back, “take the high-speed train.”

“It's easy for you to talk. How can a retiree possibly afford the train?” the old man wailed. “Alas, why do poor people like us have to suffer like this? If he were alive today, Chairman Mao would never let it happen.”

“Your brain must be totally addled, old fool. Mao had a special train just for himself, with pretty waitresses dancing attendance on him, and, from what I hear, dancing under him, too. Use your imagination! I saw a documentary that said that one of the train girls became his personal secretary, and later became a powerful politburo member.”

“Let Mao lie in peace,” another passenger said, from across the aisle.

“Under Chairman Mao, you wouldn't have been allowed to sweep graves during Qingming. It was forbidden as a superstitious practice.”

Chen nodded along to the arguments flying back and forth, but he didn't get in the middle of it. It was then that his phone rang again. It was Detective Yu Guangming, his longtime partner at the bureau. At the same time Chen's departure had been announced, Yu had been named the head of the Special Case Squad. Chen trusted Yu, so it was a relief that Yu had succeeded him, but he tried not to put too much stock in the choice. Yu's promotion might just be another part of the reassuring show.

“Chief—”

“I'm sitting on a cemetery bus. You can hear the background noise—and the red song—can't you? It's no place to talk.” He added, “And I'm not ‘Chief.' Not anymore.”

“But I need to discuss the cases we took over just before yesterday's announcement.”

“No, you're the squad leader now, Yu. You don't need to discuss anything with me.”

“Some of the cases are ones you'd already started reviewing, and your opinion may be invaluable to the squad.”

He thought he knew why Yu had called him. A demonstration of solidarity. But that was the very reason he didn't want Yu to go on. The phone call might be tapped.

“I'll be back from Suzhou soon, Yu,” he said. “I'll call you.”

Detective Yu had a point, though. His sudden change in job duties could have something to do with one of the cases recently assigned to the Special Case Squad. The squad's cases were deemed “special” mostly because there were politically sensitive. What Chen was supposed to do with those cases was provide damage control for the Party. The problem was that he took the cases, and his role as chief inspector, too seriously. Now, he was in trouble.

But he failed to see how his current trouble was in any way related to the squad's current caseload, particularly the case he'd been handed the day before. It was about a dead tiger—a publicly disgraced official or businessman who wouldn't be able to fight back—and it was assigned to Chen's squad as a formality, because of its high-profile nature. Chen hadn't done anything with it and wasn't planning to. He left the case file unread on the bureau's computer.

He did have some other files stored on his laptop. Without going back into the bureau, he could review them again. For the time being, however, he wasn't going to contact Detective Yu.

The bus ground to another abrupt stop. The driver caught sight of several people walking along the road with their cemetery offerings. He pulled over, let them on, and charged them ten yuan each. It was his own bus, and it made sense for him to make money any way possible.

The bus started up again and then swerved onto a newly built highway. Chen didn't remember having ever seen that highway before, but the high-rises along both sides looked strangely similar. They were all almost identical, like gray concrete matchboxes precariously piled up.

The bus took another turn, rolling down narrow roads with old, ramshackle farmhouses lining both sides. Occasionally, though, there were newly constructed villas, just like those in the suburbs of Shanghai.

“Gaofeng Cemetery!” came an announcement on the bus's loudspeaker.

The cemetery bus pulled slowly into the parking lot.

 

TWO

“THE BUS BACK TO
Shanghai will arrive around 12:30,” the driver announced. “After that, there may be another one, but it's difficult to say when it will arrive. So please don't miss the one at 12:30.”

Chen looked at his watch. It was about nine thirty. Three hours. No need for him to hurry.

Following the crowd, he headed toward the cemetery entrance. Even though it was after Qingming, the number of visitors was considerable.

Chen hadn't been to the cemetery in several years, and it, like everywhere else in Suzhou, had changed. The sign at the entrance appeared to have been recently repainted, and a new arch stood over the entrance, redolent with the grandeur of a gate to an ancient palace. It added a majestic touch to the scene, standing against the verdant hills stretching to the horizon. To the left, he saw a pair of imitation bronze burners inside a red pavilion, with a sign in large characters instructing people to burn their netherworld money in the designated burners. That was surely another “improvement with time”—a political catchphrase in the
People's Daily
. In the past, visitors would burn “money” in front of the graves, which had the potential risk of setting off wildfires.

Chen carried no offering with him. At the sight of others headed toward the burners, clasping enormous red envelopes or brown paper bags, he felt another twinge of guilt.

Several guards stood by the gate, serious and motionless as ancient statues. It was possible they were there to prevent people from sneaking netherworld money into the grave sites. But Chen doubted it. More likely they were there merely to add to the pompous appearance of the cemetery in this materialistic age.

To the right of the entrance, there was a booth with tiny cans of red and black paints and worn-out brush pens for rent. He picked up a cardboard box containing two cans and an almost brush-bare pen.

Next to the booth, a silver-haired woman sat hunched over a small table, which displayed bundles and bundles of netherworld money—in denominations of millions and billions. There was more wealth there than was held by most of the world's bankers, and all in “cash” too. She sat there counting, and recounting, in dead earnest, wearing a pair of polka-dotted oversleeves for the job. A crow flapped overhead, cawing. She looked up, gazing ahead at things unseeable to others, her elbows ceaselessly rubbing against the table edge, still counting. Behind her, shadows and memories appeared to be lurking.