The Mao Case Read Online Free PDF Page B

third-rate actress. But Shang
     would have been too young then.

    Chen thanked Fei and left with his books for the dumpling restaurant.
    When he arrived at the corner, he was disappointed to see a boutique mandarin dress store where the restaurant had been. The
     store was closed and there was only a mannequin posing coquettishly in an unbuttoned red dress in the window.
    There was another eatery open late at night and not too far away, but he had lost the mood. Instead, he plodded home, carrying
     the books.
    Back home, he started reading on an empty stomach. In the distance, a siren pierced the night air. Absurd, he thought, turning
     a page. There’s no guaranteeing a rational account of human existence. Soon, he lost himself in the story — and the story between
     the lines.
    About two hours later, he finished skimming through
Cloud and Rain in Shanghai
. Stretching his sore neck, he slumped on the sofa like the crushed fish in Shang’s death scene in the book.
    The story was pretty much as he had anticipated. It was a tale of a beautiful woman’s suffering, which echoed an archetypal
     motif about a beauty’s “thin fate.” The writer was clever, focusing the narrative mainly on Qian, keeping Shang in the background.
     Like a traditional Chinese landscape painting, the book invited readers to see more in its blank spaces.
    There was little about Jiao, though. When Qian passed away, Jiao was only two years old, and the structure of the book made
     her omission understandable.
    Chen rose to pace about in the room. Lighting a cigarette, he thought he had a rough idea about Shang’s relationship with
     Mao, but no idea what Mao could have given Shang.
    Another question presented itself. Could Mao have known about the special team from Beijing? After all, Shang wasn’t merely
     one of the “black artists.” Things could have been more complicated than Minister Huang had said.
    So what was Chief Inspector Chen going to do?
    It was an investigation he couldn’t refuse to do. Even so, he might
try to conduct the investigation in a “rebellious” way, in his way — meaningful to himself, if not to others.
    Like most people of his generation, Chen had not taken the Mao issue too seriously. As a child, he had worshipped Mao, but
     the Cultural Revolution shook his belief in the Chairman, particularly after the early death of Chen’s father. After that,
     things changed dramatically for Chen. Now, as one of the “successful elite” in present-day society, he tried to convince himself
     that he anchored himself with his faith in the Party. So he was in no position to think too much about Mao and he used his
     heavy workload as a chief inspector as an excuse not to do so. While the Party newspapers still paid lip service to Mao,
     a lot of things were different today in practice. So why bother?
    Chen had heard stories about Mao’s private life. After the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s bodyguards and nurses had produced memoirs
     that turned Mao back into a human being somewhat by highlighting, for instance, his idiosyncratic passion for fatty pork or
     his unwholesome aversion to brushing his teeth. The books sold well, though possibly because of people’s interest in things
     behind those stories. But there were also other stories, not published but nonetheless circulated among the people. Since
     Mao’s archive was still locked up and considered top secret, Chen did not really believe or disbelieve those “other” stories.
    Besides, Chen considered Mao too complex a historical figure for him to judge. After all, he wasn’t a historian, he was a
     cop, having to investigate one case after another. In recent years, however, he’d found it more and more difficult, even as
     a cop, to steer clear of the nation’s history under Mao. In China, a lot of things and a lot of cases had to be seen in a
     historical perspective, and Mao’s shadow still lingered there.
    So it was the time for him to take on a case