Death of a Red Heroine

by Qiu Xiaolong

when you talked about peach blossom luck, it reminded me of a Tang dynasty poem.” “A Tang dynasty poem?” “This door, this day / —Last year, your blushing face, / And the blushing faces / Of the peach blossoms reflecting / Yours. This door, this day/—this year, where are you, / You, in the peach blossoms? / The peach blossoms still/here, giggling / At the spring breeze.”

So a marketplace had been made from a temple. In front of the temple, however, he saw a group of elderly women gathering around something like a cushion. Several were kneeling on the ground. One was kowtowing before the cushion with bunches of burning incense in her hands and murmuring something almost inaudibly: “City God . . . protect . . . family . . . stock . . .” It was obvious that the temple was still a temple—at least to these worshippers. Appearance and reality. Some people said that sooner or later a temple would be made out of the market. Maybe this was a metaphor for commodity fetishism. Maybe not. He was becoming befuddled.

It was pleasant to spend the day in the library: to study under a green-shaded lamp beneath the tinted glass, to walk in the ancient courtyard lined with bronze cranes staring at the visitors, to muse while strolling along the verandah, to look at the tilted eaves of yellow dragon tiles woven with white clouds . . . Or to simply wait there, watching the lovely librarian.

“Capitalist or socialist, that’s none of our business. As long as we have three meals a day, we don’t care.”

It was illegal for man and woman to share a hotel room without a marriage license. Hotel security was authorized to break in. A loud knock at the door was to be expected at any time. “Routine checkup!” Some rooms were even equipped with secret video