But in a go chess game, an experienced player is capable of instinctively grasping an opportunity on the chessboard. One small white or black piece, in a marginal position, hardly of any significance in itself, can contain the possibility of turning the table. Yu was good with his hunches on a go chessboard. And in his investigations too.

After the first interview with Weng in the hotel, Yu had continued exploring along that direction. He checked Weng’s records elsewhere, including at the airport. There was nothing wrong with the entry date, but Yu had an unexpected discovery in Weng’s custom declaration. On the slip, Weng had checked the “married” box on his marriage status. That necessitated a second interview.

Chen put the second interview tape into the cassette player, skipping the preliminary part, going to where Yu questioned Weng about his relation with Jasmine in the context of his marital status.

WENG: When I first met her, I was still married, but already separated from my wife. I was just waiting for the divorce to be final. Jasmine knew that too, though perhaps not at first.

YU: Was she upset with the discovery?

WENG: I think so, but she was also relieved.

YU: Why?

WENG: I tried to start up an antique business of my own. With my anthropology background, I thought I could do much better than those quack dealers, especially with a huge market in China nowadays. So I wanted her to move to the States, where she might help run a store. I looked into the possibility of putting her father up at a nursing home here. But she was not too anxious to leave, worrying about him. In fact, everything could have been taken care of in a couple of weeks. It’s just her luck. She was really cursed!

YU: You’ve mentioned her bad luck. Can you give me some examples?

WENG: A lot of ill-fated things happened to her. So inexplicable. Not to mention what happened to her father-

YU: Well, let’s start with her father. So we’ll have a complete story, starting with her childhood.

WENG: Tian was a Worker Rebel during the Cultural Revolution. Not a nice gentleman, to be sure. He was punished-sentenced to two to three years. He deserved that, but after his release, horrible luck dogged him like his shadow.

YU: Karma, as his neighbors have put it.

WENG: Karma, perhaps, but there were so many Red Guards and Worker Rebels in those years. Who was really punished? Tian alone, as far as I know. His divorce, his loss of his job, his years in prison, his failure in the restaurant business, and finally his paralys…

YU: Slow down, Weng. Details.

WENG: After the Cultural Revolution, his wife received anonymous phone calls about his affairs with other women. That was the last straw for their marriage. She divorced him. Surely not a model husband, but his affairs were never proven, and no one knew who made the phone calls. Then his factory came under pressure from above and he was fired and sentenced too. What happened to his ex-wife then was even more unbelievable. Divorced, only in her early thirties, she started dating another man. Soon, pictures of her sleeping with him appeared. In the early eighties, it was a huge scandal and she committed suicide. Jasmine moved back in with Tian. He borrowed money to start a small restaurant, but in less than a month, several customers suffered food poisoning there. They sued him with the help of an attorney, and Tian went bankrupt.

YU: That’s strange. At that time, few would have sued for something like that.

WENG: Do you know how he was paralyzed?

YU: A stroke, right?

WENG: He was so desperate that he tried to reverse his luck on a mahjong table. And he was caught by the neighborhood cop the second time he sat down at the table. A heavy fine and a lecture. He suffered a stroke right there and then.

LIAO: Karma indeed. Now, what about Jasmine’s bad luck?

WENG: It was hard for a little girl, but she turned out to be a good student. On the day of the college entrance examination, however, she was knocked down by a bike. Not badly hurt, she told the biker not to worry, but he insisted on having her checked at a hospital. When everything was finished, she had missed the examination.

YU: It was an accident. A responsible biker could have done that.

WENG: Perhaps. But what about her first job?

YU: What about it?

WENG: She couldn’t afford to wait for the examination the next year. So she started working as a salesgirl for an insurance company. Not a bad job, with a sizable bonus for her. Insurance was then new in the city. During her third or fourth month on the job, however, someone sent a letter to her boss, complaining about her “promiscuous lifestyle and shameless tricks” in selling policies. Her boss didn’t want the company’s image affected by a scandal and fired her.

YU: Well, that’s the version from her perspective.

WENG: There’s no point in making up things like that. I never raised a question about her past.

YU: Did she herself make any comment about her bad luck?

WENG: She seemed to have always lived in the shadow of it. So she came to believe that she was born under an unlucky star. She applied for other jobs, but she had no success until she came to this shabby hotel, taking a dead-end job.

YU: How did she come to tell you all this?

WENG: She suffered from a sort of inferiority complex. When we first started going out, and I talked about our future, she could hardly believe the change in her life. But for the incident in the elevator, she would never have agreed to go out with me. She was a little superstitious, taking the incident as a sign. With so much bad luck in her young life, you understand.

YU: One more question: when did you plan to marry her?

WENG: We did not have an exact date, but we agreed that it should be as soon as possible-after the divorce…

Chen fast-forwarded the tape toward the end, but Yu didn’t make any comments, as he had sometimes did. There were no comments on the written report, either.

Chen rose to make a cup of coffee. A cold morning. Outside the window, a yellow leaf finally tore itself from the twig, trembling, as in a story he had read a long time ago.

He moved back to bed, putting the coffee mug on the nightstand, tapping his finger on the cassette player.

Chen could see Yu tapping his finger on a go chessboard, grappling with a possible opening, not exactly identified-not yet.

It was Weng’s statement about Jasmine’s curse.

While Tian deserved the punishment, most of the people like Tian remained unpunished after the Cultural Revolution, with Chairman Mao’s portrait still hanging on the Tiananmen Gate. As a Chinese proverb goes, to kill a monkey is to scare the chickens, and Tian happened to be the monkey, that was perhaps just his luck.

But what about Jasmine? The bike incident might have been an accident. The anonymous letters, however, went too far. She was only seventeen or eighteen. How could anyone have hated her that much?

The cell phone rang, breaking into the gloomy thoughtful morning.

“Let’s have brunch at the Old City God’s Temple Market,” White Cloud said, her voice sounding close by. “You like the mini soup bun there, I know.”

Probably a good idea to take a break. Talk with her might help-about the paper, and about the case too.

“There are several boutiques selling mandarin dresses there,” she went on before he responded. “Quite a variety of them-not good quality, but fashionable, and some of them nostalgically fashionable.”

That clinched it for him.

“Let’s meet at Nanxiang Soup Bun Restaurant.”

It was for the sake of the investigation, he told himself. She might serve as a fashion consultant in a field study, though he was slightly uneasy about it.

Was it because of something he had been studying for the paper-a femme fatale? There seemed to be a weird echo from the story he had just read. According to one critic, Yingying, in “The Story of Yingying,” was actually someone of dubious background, like a K girl in today’s society.