When Red is Black

referred to a promise given by a gallant knight in the Tang dynasty, but he and Gu had merely concluded a business deal, which was anything but heroic. “I will try my best.”
     
    * * * *
     

Chapter 3
     
     
    T
    he bus, full of people packed like sardines, was stuck fast in an early-morning traffic jam. As a low-level cop, Detective Yu had no access to a bureau car, unlike his boss Chief Inspector Chen. This morning, Yu considered himself lucky when he obtained a seat in the overcrowded bus shortly after he boarded. Now, unbuttoning the top button of his uniform, he had plenty of time to think about the new murder case.
     
    Party Secretary Li had called earlier in the morning, informing him that Chief Inspector Chen was on vacation, and that Yu would be in charge of the Yin case. Chen had also phoned, explaining that he was too busy translating a business proposal at home to come to work. Yu would have to investigate the Yin murder by himself.
     
    Information had been gathered about Yin Lige already. He had been given a fat folder full of material from the Shanghai Archives Bureau, as well as from other sources. Detective Yu was not surprised at this evidence of bureaucratic efficiency. A dissident writer like Yin must have been the subject of secret police surveillance for a long time.
     
    The folder contained a picture of Yin, a bamboo-thin, tallish woman in her mid-fifties, her high forehead and oval face deeply lined, sad eyes looking out through a pair of silver-framed eyeglasses. She wore a black Mao jacket and matching black pants. Her photo was like an image copied from an old postcard.
     
    Yin had been a Shanghai College graduate, class of 1964. Because of the enthusiasm she displayed in student political activities, she had been admitted to the Party and, after graduation, assigned a job as a political instructor at the college. Instead of teaching classes, she gave political talks to students. It was then considered a promising assignment; she might rise quickly as a Party official working with intellectuals who forever needed to be reformed ideologically.
     
    When the Cultural Revolution broke out, like other young people she joined a Red Guard organization, following Chairman Mao’s call to sweep away everything old and rotten. She threw herself into criticism of counterrevolutionary or revisionist “monsters,” and emerged as a leading member of the College Revolutionary Committee. Powerful in this new position, she pledged herself to carry on “the continuous revolution under the proletarian dictatorship.” Little did she suspect that she herself was soon to become a target of the continuous revolution.
     
    Toward the end of the sixties, with his former political rivals out of the way, Chairman Mao found that the rebellious Red Guards were blocking the consolidation of his power. So those Red Guards, much to their bewilderment, found themselves in trouble. Yin, too, was criticized and removed from her position on the College Revolutionary Committee. She was sent to a cadre school in the countryside, a new institution invented by Chairman Mao on an early May morning, after which May 7th Cadre Schools appeared throughout the country. For Mao, one of their purposes was to keep politically unreliable elements under control or, at least, out of the way.
     
    The cadre students consisted of two main groups. The first was composed of ex-Party cadres. With their positions now filled by the even more left-wing Maoists, they had to be contained somewhere. The other was made up of intellectuals, such as university professors, writers, and artists, who were included in the cadre rank system. The cadre students were supposed to reform themselves through hard labor in the fields and group political studies.
     
    Yin, a college instructor, and also a Party cadre for a short while, fit into both categories. In the cadre school, she became the head of a group, and there Yin and Yang met for the first time.
     
    Yang, much older than Yin, had been a professor at East China University. He had been in the United States and had returned in the early fifties, but soon he was put on the “use under control” list, labeled a Rightist in the mid-fifties, and a “black monster” in the sixties.
     
    Yin and Yang fell in love despite their age difference, despite the “revolutionary times,” despite the warnings of the cadre school authorities. Because of their untimely affair, they suffered persecution.