The Eye of Jade Page 3

  Ling Bai was a painter who worked in the art department of a propaganda magazine called Women’s Life. She was an ordinary employee who had gained seniority in her old age, if not authority. Although Ling Bai had little ambition for herself, she expected her daughters to succeed. She might have been able to overlook Yaping’s residency problem, for with luck and talent, he could be allocated a job in Beijing. But he could not change his upbringing. His parents were merely schoolteachers. Yaping was not someone who could give Mei prospects and protection.

  “One cannot live long on a diet of poetry,” Mama told Mei.

  But Mei went on seeing Yaping anyway. They were in love.

  In their last year at university, Yaping won a scholarship from the University of Chicago. After they graduated, he went to America. At first his letters were long and enthusiastic. Then they became shorter, more infrequent. A year later, after not having written for a long time, Yaping wrote to tell Mei that he had fallen in love with someone else.

  Mei wasn’t entirely surprised. But she had not expected him to fall in love with another person so soon. She felt that all the things he had said about loving her forever were lies. She felt betrayed. She tore up his letters. She wanted to throw them in his face. But Yaping was far away. All she could do was curl up in bed and cry.

  “I told you so,” said Mama. She was sitting in a folding chair on the balcony of her apartment with a cup of green tea. “Now you see that I was right to be against it, don’t you? I only wish you had listened to me. You are like your ba, too romantic.”

  It was typical of Mama, thought Mei, clenching the steering wheel. Mama was good at making Mei feel that she could do nothing right.

  Before the Cultural Revolution ended and Mama was given the job at the magazine, they moved around a lot, following her temporary jobs and temporary housing. Mama became more fragile each time they moved. Mei and her sister learned not to do things that disturbed her. These might include noise, silence, things not in their proper place, dirt, and bad news. But no matter how careful they were, Mama still cried.

  It seemed to Mei that only her sister could make their mother smile. Lu was three years younger and extremely beautiful from an early age. She was sweet, charming, and talented. Lu’s teachers had only the best things to say about her. She was always praised as special, intelligent, and kind. Mama loved her so much that Mei thought she had no more love left for her older daughter.

  So it was a relief for everyone when, at the age of twelve, Mei went to boarding school, though even there, she failed to fit in. This became clear to Mei when Ling Bai was summoned to the school to see Mei’s class mother. Mei sat outside Mrs. Tang’s office, bored because Mama had been inside for a long time. What could they be talking about?

  She tiptoed to the door and put her ear to the keyhole. She heard the voice of Mrs. Tang. “Mei is a good student. But it is unhealthy for a girl of her age to be alone all the time.”

  “I am afraid she’s got her father’s temperament,” said Mama. “He was a solitary person, the type who lived his life through literature, ideals, and principles. He was a brilliant writer. But he didn’t understand how the world worked. Eventually, his personality destroyed him. Whenever I see Mei, I see her father. They have the same eyes. She’s even got his expressions. I am scared. I try to help her, but she won’t change. My other daughter, Lu, is not like this. She’s good with people and understands everything automatically. I don’t know why Mei is so different. Not because of anything I did, I hope. I love them both and treat them the same. Yet Mei has turned out just like her father—always looking down on others, always judging. It is as if no one is good enough. No one is up to her standards.”

  “Perhaps you could take her to see an herbalist,” suggested Mrs. Tang. “They know how to soothe the temperament.”

  “If only they could,” said Mama.

  When Mei heard her mother coming toward the door, she ran back to her seat.

  The herbs and the reading of chi, life energy flow, did not help. Mei continued to live in a world of her own, surrounded by her books and her thoughts. She read everything she could find. She wanted to be a writer, like her father.

  “Absolutely not.” Her mother put her foot down. “How can you even think of being a writer? Writing is the most dangerous profession in China. Whenever there is a political movement, writers are always the first to go to jail.”

  But Mama couldn’t stop Mei, and neither could she convince her that pragmatism was better than principles.

  They had been in Ling Bai’s living room when Mei told her that she had resigned from the Ministry for Public Security.

  Mei had shrugged, trying to look lighthearted. “I will be fine. There are plenty of private companies out there. I will have no trouble finding a job. I can make more money.”

  “But you won’t have the same kind of future. Don’t you know that power is all that matters? When you got that job at the Ministry, I was so happy and relieved, to tell the truth. You know how I felt about your determination to be a writer or a journalist. I was glad that you didn’t have to be either. I thought finally you were safe and I could stop worrying about you. But once again you prove me wrong.” Mama had paced in front of Mei. “There must be something in you that is self-destructive. All those perfectly fine young men you were introduced to, not a single one worked out. Why?” She stopped moving and stared at her daughter. “What happened to all the things I told you about? Guanxi networks? Compromise? Has it all gone in one ear and out the other?”

  Mei had bitten her lips until they hurt.

  “You could really learn from Lu,” Mama had said.

  Mei couldn’t stay quiet. “I’m not like Lu. You must know that by now. Frankly, I don’t want to be like her. I don’t want to be anybody’s pretty pillow.”

  “That’s a horrible thing to say about your sister.”

  “How much do you think she loved those boyfriends of hers? How much do you think she loves Lining? She loves his money.”

  “You’re jealous because she’s happy.”

  “She’s happy because she lives for the moment and loves only herself.”

  “That’s not fair. No one asked you to carry a burden. I sacrificed my life so that you could have it easy—good school, nothing to worry about. But you choose to make life hard for yourself. All your principles and morals, what good are they if they can’t make you happy?”

  Mei had tried to find a retort, but the words had stuck in her throat like fish bones. She’d gotten up from the sofa and walked to the window. Below, someone was coming out of the bicycle parking hut. Mei had watched him get on his bike and ride away. She’d watched the empty afternoon. She’d seen the same story repeating itself—the odd child, the disobedient daughter, the failure.

  “You are just like your father. You must act big. You set yourself up on a pedestal. You don’t care about who you hurt.”

  “If anyone, I hurt only myself.”

  “You hurt me, your mother. I’m worried about you.”

  A violent urge had stirred inside Mei like never before. She’d turned around. All the anger and betrayal she had felt exploded. “Then I ask you to stop worrying about me. I can take care of myself. I learned to do that when I was five, thanks to you. Have you any idea what it was like for me to see my father being beaten up and humiliated every day? If you really worried about me, you wouldn’t have left me in the labor camp. You wouldn’t have left Baba there to die.”

  “How dare you? You—you ungrateful little beast! You have no right to judge me.” Mama had begun to shake, her voice cracking with suppressed tears. “What do you know about love? All you do is read books. You think life is like a novel. No, reality is much darker than that. I didn’t abandon you or your ba. If I could have taken you out, I would have. But I could only take one child with me, and your sister was just two years old and very sick…” Tears had rolled down her cheeks. “I got you out eventually, didn’t I? You don’t know how diff
icult it was. But you’ve never appreciated it. I gave up so much for you and Lu. All I want is for you to be happy. But look at what you’ve done.”

  What, indeed? Mei asked herself now, turning off College Road. Was her mother right about her? Was she really the assassin of her own happiness? But no—as difficult as it had been to leave the Ministry, she couldn’t have stayed. There can be no place for lies in true happiness, she asserted. As she turned onto the ring road and saw, in the distance, the Gate of Moral Victory, she decided that she had done nothing wrong and that she would waste no more of the weekend brooding about the past.

  FIVE

  TWO WEEKS LATER, the heat wave was gone. A cold wind blew again from the north. The residents were warned of another yellow sandstorm.

  Mei was in her office writing up the notes on the Mr. Shao case. She was happy. As she put down the last word, she reflected warmly on the interest and variety her work brought.

  The telephone rang in the entrance hall. A few minutes later, Gupin stuck his head in the doorway. “A Mr. Chen Jitian just called. He’d like to come and see you tomorrow. He says he is a friend of your family.”

  “Yes, he is.” Mei’s eyes lit up.

  “I’ve made the appointment. He will be here in the morning.”

  “Very good.”

  Mei leaned back in her chair and thought for a moment. She smiled. She was delighted to hear from Uncle Chen, though at the same time, she wondered why he wanted to see her. She looked out the window. The sky was dark. The wind lashed at bare tree branches. She thought of the last time she’d seen Uncle Chen, one and a half years ago, on a beautiful autumn day.

  It is said that a daughter grows up and changes eighteen times, and the more she changes, the more beautiful she becomes. This was certainly true of Lu. By the time she met Lining, when she was twenty-five, she had turned out to be, in the words of her future husband, possibly the most beautiful woman in Beijing. Yet her beauty was only part of her story; she was smart, too. She had studied psychology at university and was considered one of the best students in her class.

  After graduation, Lu was assigned to work in Beijing Mental Hospital. She hated the job. After a year, she left the hospital, first to teach at the university she had so recently graduated from, and then to join the Ministry of Propaganda.

  Her swift moves from one job to another were nothing short of miraculous, given that changes like this had to be approved by the central government as special cases. But Lu was the kind of special person on whom good fortune always seemed to be bestowed.

  Her job at the Ministry of Propaganda landed her in the media. Soon she became a guest psychologist for Beijing TV. It was in one of Beijing TV’s studios that Lu met Lining, an industrialist, who was appearing on the same program.

  Three weeks before her wedding, Lu took Mei and her mother to dim sum at the famous Grand Three Element restaurant.

  It was a Tuesday morning. The restaurant was nearly empty. Aside from the Wang family, there were only two other customers, a Cantonese-speaking couple who were probably guests of the nearby Shangri-La Hotel. Streams of waitresses—dressed in traditional embroidered figure-hugging qipao dresses with high mandarin collars and side slits—made the rounds with food trolleys.

  Over tiny steamers of curried snails, red-oil beef tripe, and prawn dumplings, the Wang women discussed the seating arrangements for the honored guests at Lu’s wedding.

  “I want people to remember my wedding for years to come,” Lu announced. “I want them to talk about it as one of the classiest events. I’m not going to copy the deputy mayor’s daughter. Do you know that her father shut down the entire route to her wedding so that she could have a hundred-car parade? And then she had five thousand guests at her reception.

  “My wedding will be different. I have limited the guest list to four hundred people, so it will be the most exclusive wedding of the year. Only the powerful, famous, and wealthy have been invited.”

  “That’s as it should be,” Mama endorsed.

  Another food trolley arrived. Mama picked her favorite salted fish and peanut porridge. Mei chose a steamer of dragon buns.

  “How is your new apartment?” Mei asked her sister.

  Lining had bought a penthouse apartment near the Embassy District. It was being renovated by the best construction company in Beijing, according to Lu.

  “It will be ready when we get back from our honeymoon. Did I tell you that they’re doing it for free?”

  You did, thought Mei.

  “The chairman said that it’s going to be his wedding present to us—isn’t that sweet?” Lu smiled. “Lining has so many friends, and they all adore him and want to help.

  “When we go to Europe, Lining said to me that I must go to all the shops. He knows that I love beautiful things. But a shopping honeymoon, how dreadful. ‘No,’ I told him, ‘I want to see the sights and go to museums.’ I can’t wait to see the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and the Coliseum.

  “Besides, I told Lining that I can’t shop even if I want to. We’re already running out of space as it is, so many wedding gifts—Chinese antiques, modern Italian furniture, German appliances. Where will I put the new things? The sad truth is, some of the stuff that we have been given is really not to my taste. Don’t get me wrong, they are perfectly wonderful, absolutely top of the line. But often I would have preferred a different color or style.”

  As Lu spoke of her new life, she waved her hands in tender excitement. Her fingers—slender, perfectly manicured—seemed to express her sensuality as well as a recollection like the feel of a first kiss, or the aura of a girl becoming a woman.

  She was wearing a long white dress. Just below the her breasts, yards of chiffon were gathered and tied together with velvet ribbons. When she moved, one of these secret folds stretched to reveal faint contours, a veiled suppleness that had been hidden before.

  A food trolley once again lined up beside their table. Lu, her teeth white and complexion radiant, leaned over to check the selections. “Chicken feet,” she ordered.

  The waitress removed the lid and placed the steamer on their table. She drew a stroke on the order slip and left.

  “Oh, Mama, I almost forgot. Yesterday Lining gave me another present.”

  “What is it?” Mei saw Mama’s face light up.

  Lu tilted her head to the side, biting her lips. Then she swung her head back up, eyes shining like stars, and said, “An imported Mercedes-Benz.”

  “Bravo!” Ling Bai clapped her hands together in a praying gesture. Her smile was as broad as that of her favorite daughter.

  “Isn’t he wonderful, Mama?”

  “It’s obvious that he loves you very much,” said Ling Bai, patting Lu’s hand.

  “But what about your Mitsubishi?” Mei asked, spitting out a tiny bone from the chicken feet. Lu had a small red two-door car that had been given to her by a previous boyfriend.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.” Lu stopped shifting her chopsticks.

  Ling Bai frowned at her older daughter, who was, as usual, pouring cold water on a hot plate.

  “Do you want it? I will give it to you,” Lu suddenly said cheerfully. After hearing her own words, she clearly felt pleased and quickly carried on with the idea. “Yes, you take it and do something with your life. Maybe you can…” She raised her eys to the ceiling in thought. “Maybe you can drive around Beijing solving crime.” She laughed.

  Lu was only joking, but her words were more accurate than she realized. For some time now, Mei had been considering setting up her own business: a detective agency. The idea had come to her while she looked for work in the private industry. She had seen the freedom and prosperity that entrepreneurship could bring.

  A detective service was a natural choice for her. She had worked for years in the Ministry for Public Security—the police headquarters—in the thick of criminal investigations. And she had always loved Sherlock Holmes books. As a child, she had even fantasized about being a d
etective like Holmes.

  Having her own detective agency would give her the independence she had always longed for. It would also give her the chance to show those people who shunned her that she could be successful. The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that she could make money with her agency. People were getting rich. They owned property, money, business, and cars. With new freedom and opportunities came new crimes. There would be much that she could do.

  SIX

  LU HAD CONSIDERED holding her wedding ceremony on the eighth of August, a double-lucky date because the number eight, Ba, rhymed with “getting rich,” Fa. But Lu hated the heat, which could be wicked in August. So she checked with a feng shui master who confirmed that the eighth of August of the Lunar Year was in fact luckier. For 1995, the eighth of August of the Chinese calendar fell in September.

  Two days before the wedding, Lu called Mei.

  “Sorry that I am doing this on the phone. There is still so much to do and, on top of that, a crisis—the chef of the restaurant has left for the new Beyond Ocean. I went over there today and told Mr. Zhang that he’d better have his old chef cooking for my guests on Saturday. You know the kind of people who are coming to the wedding. I can’t have some unknown chef. ‘It just won’t cut it,’ I said to Mr. Zhang. This is the trouble with restaurants in Beijing these days—something new is opening up every month. You can’t catch up fast enough with the next hip thing.”

  Mei said nothing. She did not know much about restaurants now that she no longer worked for the Ministry.

  “I’ve been thinking and also talking to Mama about this. You know that I’m sorry for what happened to you at the Ministry, whatever the truth might be.”