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 became less frequent, and then stopped. According to someone from the same village, Bao had not been doing too well in the city. The latest information Hong had was that about six months ago, Bao had shared a room with some other people from Jiangxi. Then he had moved out without leaving a new address.

So the problem was how to find Bao in a city where millions of people kept pouring in from every province. With new construction going up everywhere, provincials provided an ever-growing mobile labor force. Naturally, they did not bother to register their residences; they stayed wherever they found cheap housing.

Yu went over to the old address, where Bao had lived until six months ago; only one of Bao’s former roommates remained. He did not know where Bao was. They did not keep in touch.

A notice was sent out to the neighborhood committees, particularly to those areas where provincials were known to gather together.

In normal circumstances, three to five days would be considered a reasonable period before any feedback started coming in, but Yu did not think he could wait that long.

Chapter 21

Chen had several days left of his vacation, but he went to the office because he had turned in the translation of the New World business proposal. It had not taken as long as he had expected. Of course, he anticipated that he would have to make minor changes when Gu’s American partner faxed back corrections and suggestions. But according to Gu, the initial response from across the Pacific Ocean was positive. Chen himself was now quite satisfied with the English proposal, which presented a comprehensive, convincing argument for the potential success of the project.

It would be nice to have a secretary working for him here in the office too, he thought, but he knew he’d better wait patiently, until he moved up one more notch in the bureau hierarchy before making this request.

There was a noise outside the window. He looked out. Not too far away, another matchbox-like apartment complex, supposedly postmodern, seemed to look back at him with a dull stare. Each building in the area seemed to be identical, each lost in the other’s reflection.

After all, the New World might be a good addition to the city, a fresh alternative to the commercially designed metropolitan landscape, even though the New World itself had been conceived out of commercial considerations.

What convinced him of its plausibility was not the study of the city’s architectural history, as elaborately presented in the business proposal, but his realization that there was now a rising middle class eager to claim a culture of its own. China was no longer a society of Utopian egalitarianism as it once had been under Chairman Mao.

From the various documents littering the desk, he managed to dig out the latest bulletin of the city housing committee. Turning to the last section of the bulletin, he started checking through a list of rooms that had been turned back in to the city authorities.

Housing assignment was a very complicated issue. Because of the severe housing shortage, some of the new apartment assignees had to hand over their former rooms in exchange. Most of them were single, all-purpose rooms rather than apartments. Invariably, they were smaller, or shabbier, than the newly assigned housing. But they would in turn be reassigned by the city housing committee. Those on the top of their respective working unit waiting list, like Detective Yu, might not be interested in such secondhand rooms with neither bathrooms nor separate kitchens.

Chen wanted to see if there was a room listed in the area designated for the construction of the New World. To his pleasant surprise, he found one-actually, one and half rooms, converted out of an original shikumen front wing, facing the courtyard. The former resident had even partitioned the wing into two areas, though the small back room thus created could contain only a single bed. And there was an extra bonus. Rooms in shikumen houses built in the thirties never had an indoor flush toilet; the chamber pot was a necessary nuisance. Here the previous resident had installed a kind of electric chamber pot. It was not as good as a toilet, but it would spare its owner the trouble of getting up early every morning to perform the routine of chamber pot emptying and washing.

He placed a phone call to the city housing committee. The associate director of the committee gave Chen a positive answer regarding the availability of that particular room.

“We will hold it for you, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen.”

Such an old-fashioned room might not appear to Yu to be a satisfactory substitute for the new apartment in Tianling New Village that he had lost. But this shikumen room had potential that Chen alone knew about: it was on the street where the New World was going to be built. The value of properties there would increase tremendously when construction started. And as Gu was the potential buyer, Chen was sure he would be able to put in a word or two on behalf of Yu. According to the newest policy, compensation to the resident would be negotiable depending upon the value of the property-and, even better, the original resident could claim a new apartment of similar size in the same area when the project was completed.