The Mao Case Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    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 concerning Mao — the Mao case. If nothing else, the chief inspector might be able to gain a better historical perspective through the investigation.
    And it could also keep him busy — preferably too busy to think about his personal crisis.
    He sat back at the table, pulled up a piece of blank paper, jotted down the ideas that came to mind, and worked on combining them into a feasible plan. In the end, he decided to break his investigation into two parts. For the Jiao part, he would cooperate with Internal Security, but for the Mao part, he