With the death of Chairman Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, everything changed, of course. The propaganda teams withdrew from college campuses. Wan, too, came back to the lane toward the end of the seventies. Later, he retired, like any ordinary old man, and in time, like a piece of tarnished silverware, his days of stardom gleamed only in his memory.
In an increasingly materialistic society, Wan must have come to the belated realization that he had not benefited at all from all his revolutionary activities. Too busy, and too dedicated even to think about himself, he ended up alone, in an attic room. His pension did not catch up with inflation, and the state-run company where he had worked barely covered his medical insurance. So Wan complained constantly, darkly, like his steel-factory chimney, about what the world was coming to. Then fate brought Wan into Yin’s path. According to an ancient proverb, The path where enemies meet one another must be narrow indeed. In their case, it was in this same building, as they climbed up and down the same narrow staircase every day.
In Death of a Chinese Professor, there were harsh descriptions of the propaganda worker teams. Wan heard about this and bought a copy of the novel. To his outrage, he found the university in question to be the very one where Wan had been stationed, although Yin named no names in the book. Wan flew into a rage and tore the book to pieces in front of her door. Yin fought back, shouting, from behind her closed door, “If you were not a thief, you wouldn’t have to be nervous.”
Bursting with anger, on the staircase just outside her door, Wan cursed her loudly: “What a stinking bitch! You think China is a country for bourgeois intellectuals. You should go to your grave now with that stubborn granite brain of yours! Heaven be my witness: I will make sure of it.”
Several neighbors heard him, but no one took him seriously at the time.
People might say anything in a fit of anger, and soon forget about it. Not so with Wan, Old Liang pointed out. Wan had never since spoken to Yin. He bore a profound hatred for her, one in which, in Wan’s words, “Two cannot share the same piece of sky.”
What made Wan an even more serious suspect was his unconfirmed alibi for the morning of February 7. He said that he performed tai chi on the Bund that morning, but he could have sneaked downstairs, killed Yin, and either gone back to his room or on to the Bund without having been seen. And he could certainly use any money taken from her drawers, as the state-run steel factory had fallen several months behind in paying pensions to its former employees.
An interview was arranged between Yu and Wan at the office.
Wan did not look like a man in his mid-sixties. He had a medium build. He might even be considered tall for his generation. He wore a black wool Mao jacket with matching pants. In a movie from the sixties, Wan would have looked like a mid-rank Party cadre, with his collar buttoned high to his throat and his hair combed back. He appeared to have suffered a minor stroke, as his lips were slightly slanted downward at one corner, which added an impression of inner tension to his expression.
Wan turned out to be more ready to talk than Yu had expected. Holding a cup of hot tea tightly in his hands, he said “The world is turned upside down, Detective Yu. What the hell are those rotten private enterprisers or entrepreneurs? Black-hearted, black-handed capitalists, making obscene amounts of money at the expense of working-class people. That’s why all the state-run companies are going to the dogs. What has happened to the benefits of our socialist system? Pensions, free medical care. All gone. If Chairman Mao were still alive, he would never have allowed this to happen to our country.”
A passionate statement, purely proletarian, although not so loyal to present Party policy. Yu thought he could understand the old man’s frustration. For years, the working class had enjoyed political privileges, and at least had felt a sense of pride in their status, based on Chairman Mao’s theory of class struggle in socialist China which deemed the working class to be the most important because it was the most revolutionary. Now the tide had completely turned.
“Our society is currently in a transitional period, and some temporary phenomena cannot be avoided. You must have read all the Party documents and newspapers, and you don’t need me to explain,” Yu said, before coming to the point. “You must be aware of the purpose of our talk today. Tell me, Comrade Wan, what was your relationship with Yin?”
“She is dead. I should not say anything against her, but if you think my opinion matters to your investigation, I will not mince my words.”
“Please go ahead, Comrade Wan. It will be very helpful to our investigation.”
“She was part of the evil black force that has tried to turn back history, back to the twenties, the thirties, to the miserable years when China was downtrodden by imperialists and capitalists, while those bourgeois intellectuals enjoyed the pathetic bones thrown to them by their masters. In her book-you must have read it-working-class people are all described as clowns or thugs, without acknowledging the vital fact that it is we who overthrew the Three Big Mountains-imperialism, feudalism, and capitalism-and built a new socialist China.”
Yu could see why Wan was even more embittered than most other retirees. Wan must have given many political lectures at the college, and made himself at home with the political terms popular in the seventies. Now, in the nineties, his views had become obsolete.
“She, too, suffered a lot during the Cultural Revolution,” Yu observed.
“Anybody else may complain about the Cultural Revolution. Not Yin Lige. What was she? A notorious Red Guard! Why were the propaganda worker teams sent into the schools? To deal with the disastrous mess they left.”
“Well, the past is past,” Yu said. “Let me ask you another question, Comrade Wan. Did you notice anything unusual about her of late?”
“No, I didn’t pay any attention to her.”
“Anything unusual about the building?”
“No, not that I can remember. I’m a retired old man. It’s up to the neighborhood committee to notice things.”
“Now, you were not at home the morning Yin was murdered, were you?”
“No, I was practicing tai chi on the Bund,” Wan said. “The state-run company I worked for can no longer pay our medical bills. We have no choice but to take care of ourselves.”
“I see. Do you practice tai chi with others?”
“Oh, yes, with a large number of people. Some practice tai chi with swords, and some practice tai chi with knives, too.”
“Do you have their names and addresses?” Yu added, “It’s just a formality. I may have to ask one of them to corroborate your presence.”
“Come on, Comrade Detective Yu,” Wan said. “People practice tai chi on the Bund for twenty or thirty minutes in the morning, and then go home. There’s no point asking each other’s names or addresses. Some people nod to me, but they don’t know my name, and I don’t know theirs. That’s it.”
What Wan said seemed to make sense, but Yu thought he caught a slight hesitancy in the old man’s words. “Well, if you can locate a few tomorrow-one or two names will be enough- please let me know.”
“I will, if I go to the Bund tomorrow. Now, I have something else to do this morning, if you have no more questions, Comrade Detective Yu.”
“I’ll talk to you later, then.”
Yu lit a cigarette, tapped his finger on the desk, checked Wan’s name off, and moved on to the next name. Glancing through the information about Mr. Ren, the third on Old Liang’s list, Yu was about to cross his name off when he thought better of it. Mr. Ren was a “capitalist” in his class status. Before 1949, the shikumen building had been owned by Ren’s father, who was executed as a counterrevolutionary in the early fifties, when the house was confiscated. The Rens then had to squeeze into a small room partitioned off at the end of the south wing. For the Ren family, the following years became a tale of continuous misfortune and mistrust by one political movement after another. During the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Ren was marched through the lane by a group of Red Guards, his head weighed low by a blackboard declaring “Down with the Black Capitalist Ren!” But as in the Taoist classic Tao Te Ching, when one’s fortune hits bottom, it begins to change. With the whole society caught up in a gigantic reform, there was a reshuffling of cards among the residents. Mr. Ren’s son went to study in the United States and started a high-tech company there. On a recent visit back to Treasure Garden Lane, he offered to buy his father an apartment in the best neighborhood in the city, but Mr. Ren declined.