Yuehua Theater was not far. From Weixin Road heading south to West Lake Road, turning east, and continuing to the next intersection, one could see the large theater signboard beneath the arcade. That night’s playbill did indeed feature Little Phoenix, in an act from Ten Beauties Encircling King Xuan called “Undoing the Red Silk Wrap,” with Little Phoenix playing Su Jinding.
By the time it grew dark, Chen Qianli and Liang Shichao had bought tickets and entered the theater early. It was not yet time for the performance, and the central tables were still empty, though quite a few people had already taken the side seats. The two of them had already changed clothes—one wearing a long gown and mandarin jacket, the other in light-colored Western dress, looking like a comprador at a foreign trading firm. They did not sit down right away; walking from behind the pillars toward the stage, Chen Qianli signaled for Liang Shichao to wait outside while he himself pushed open a side door and went in.
A stagehand sat before the backstage door. Just as he was about to ask a question, Chen Qianli produced a silver dollar and pressed it into his hand, saying bluntly, “Go see Little Phoenix.”
The theater’s backstage often had wealthy patrons come in asking to see this or that performer; the theater staff thought nothing of it. The man took the money, and not having expected to receive a tip before the show had even started, was quite pleased. He told Chen Qianli, “Little Phoenix is upstairs.”
Climbing the stairs, a scent of powder and rouge filled the air. Qunfang Yan was an all-female troupe, and backstage buzzed with women’s chatter. Along the upstairs corridor, two people walking side by side would already be a tight fit; on either side, half-open doors let out the sound of murmured conversation. Chen Qianli stood in the middle of the corridor and said loudly, with an air of ease, “I’m looking for Little Phoenix.”
“Who’s looking for me?”
A door opened from within. Her eyebrows were pinned back with strips, only the base layer of face powder applied, not yet wearing the phoenix headdress, but already dressed in an embroidered gold-and-red opera costume. Uncle Li at the tobacco shop had said she was dazzlingly beautiful, but at this moment that beauty was not evident.
Chen Qianli walked over and said with a smile, “Me.”
Entering the room, he added, “My surname is Chen.”
Little Phoenix looked at him with puzzlement. Visitors who came backstage were usually regulars at the theater, faces she had come to know well from the stage. This man was tall, his eyes bright and alert, nothing at all like the usual pampered young dandies she was used to seeing; something in her felt a moment’s pause.
“Haven’t even seen the show yet, and already Mr. Chen wants to see the person behind it.”
She replied with a smile of her own.
Chen Qianli took out a silver cigarette case, flipped open the lid, took one for himself, and held the case out to Little Phoenix. Little Phoenix reached for a cigarette, then suddenly noticed it was Craven “A” and froze for a moment.
“I’ve come on behalf of a friend to see how you’re doing.”
Little Phoenix eyed him warily. This visitor had not flirted with her the way most people who bribed their way backstage usually did. Those types generally came in only after the show had ended. A few would come during intermission, while she was offstage, to pay their respects, implying that only her performances were worth watching.
Coming in before the show even began—over all these years, only one person had ever done that.
Because at this hour, those officials and dignitaries were usually still at their banquets, or had just left them; they always arrived fashionably late, well into the performance, swaggering into the central tables, calling for tea and hot towels, making quite a scene.
“My friend—his name is Lu Zhongde. He was a Public Security Bureau officer.”
“He’s dead.” She turned to face herself in the makeup mirror, answering quickly.
“Of course he isn’t dead. And I know—you know he’s still alive too.” Chen Qianli replied just as quickly, the exchange running like a tongue-twister, though his tone remained gentle.
“You’ve seen him?” she asked, suspicious.
“I just arrived by boat from Shanghai.”
Now she grew interested. Still, she said nothing, wary of the visitor.
“He goes by the surname Yi now.” Chen Qianli took a gamble. Though her makeup was applied and her brows lifted high, he could still see a flicker in Little Phoenix’s eyes. So she did indeed know that the man now went by the surname Yi.
“Who are you? What’s your relationship to him?” Little Phoenix asked quietly, mournfully.
“He and I are colleagues, in Nanjing. Have you heard of Teacher Ye?” Chen Qianli followed his instinct and probed further.
She relaxed somewhat. Perhaps they had threatened her; perhaps—they had even considered killing her; perhaps in the end they had let her live. Had she herself heard about that last possibility?
“He’s run into some trouble now, and there are things you might be asked about, in Guangzhou.” Chen Qianli began speaking in vague, mysterious terms—perhaps too vague, for he noticed Little Phoenix falling silent again.
Someone pushed open the door—it was the stagehand who had been sitting at the backstage entrance—carrying a large flower basket in one hand, and in the other, gleaming silver, a plaque nearly as large as the mirror on the dressing table. Over the past couple of years, the fashion of presenting opera stars with silver plaques, popular in Beiping and Shanghai, had spread to Guangzhou too. A solid silver plaque—the size of it depended on the giver’s means. This one was not small.
“From Young Master Wu—flowers and a silver plaque.”
“Put it on the stage.” Little Phoenix showed little interest. After the stagehand left, she turned back to Chen Qianli. “Haven’t seen a trace of him for two months, and now he’s sending baskets and plaques.”
“Little Phoenix is famous across all of Guangzhou—visitors from outside the province will surely have heard of you as well.”
“You flatter me, Mr. Chen.” She spoke as if reciting stage dialogue, paused a moment, her expression turning somewhat somber. “Times aren’t what they used to be. People would rather watch films than opera now. Applause used to shake the very stage—those days are long gone. Outsiders see the excitement, but we know the cold reality behind it. All those gold plaques and silver banners, flowers in full bloom—all just fleeting clouds. Ever since he left, everything’s been going downhill.”
Chen Qianli confirmed his instinct, and ventured a bold guess: “He promised he’d come back for you in half a year, but he never showed up.” He said it in a low voice, half a sentence with neither beginning nor end.
He guessed that Ye Qinian had not, at first, planned a long-term infiltration. He had simply succeeded once in Guangzhou, and thought he might do the same again in Shanghai—sending an agent to impersonate someone and infiltrate the Shanghai underground party, hoping to uncover another Communist cell or two, arrest more members. It was probably only later that Ye Qinian gradually realized that, back in Guangzhou, the underground party’s original candidate slated to go to Shanghai would very likely be unknown to anyone there. The organizational network had been destroyed; these had all been single-line contacts, and with some sacrificed and others turned traitor, there was no longer anyone left who knew the truth.
The transfer plan had been set in motion before the Guangzhou underground was broken up, and the Shanghai underground organization had no idea that the man sent to them had been quietly swapped for someone else—they had no way to verify it, and perhaps never would. And so this agent’s period undercover had stretched on and on. He had originally believed that if he could just hold out a few more months, he could shed the disguise. He had very likely promised the woman before him that in half a year he would return, and the two of them could live a good life together from then on.
Chen Qianli had guessed correctly.
“He said three months at first,” Little Phoenix blurted out. “By the time he left it had become at most half a year. Now a full three years have passed. What is he even doing in Shanghai? Can’t write letters, can’t send telegrams, can’t tell anyone he’s still alive. But it was only supposed to be three months—half a year at the very most.”
“Do you know what he is?”
“I don’t know—I’ve never known what he was doing. He told me later that he’d first fallen for me at the rooftop amusement park at Sincere Department Store. Later, when the troupe disbanded and re-formed and I moved to Yuehua, he followed, came to listen to the opera, sat in the corner day after day. It was at Yuehua that I first started to notice him. Usually dressed in plain clothes, occasionally in his police uniform. I liked it when he wore the uniform—looked so dashing. Not like other men—when he watched the show, he’d fix those eyes on me and it would send chills through me.”
Out in the corridor came the muddled sound of footsteps, and outside came a passage of King Xuan’s drunken singing:
This Zhaoyang, her face like a lotus rising from water, more beautiful than the moon’s own goddess, what a pity she knows nothing of romance, like a block of wood—if it’s flirtation and grace you speak of…
Little Phoenix seemed suddenly to have thrown open some floodgate, as if years of pent-up words were finally spilling out. At first she had thought she only had to wait a few months for him; though it had felt a bit forced, she had agreed in the end. But he had vanished after that, as if he had forgotten her entirely. She thought maybe it was for the best to forget him too, thought she could manage it—but she could not, just like some of the women she played onstage, the harder to see someone, the harder to forget them.
“After a few months he suddenly came backstage. I kept wondering—when would he finally come in? But even when he did come, he didn’t speak—just sat in this very chair, though not like you, he’d pull the chair even closer, right up near the dressing table—”
Chen Qianli shifted his chair slightly.
“Yes, about there. He wouldn’t talk, just smoke—your same brand. He worked at the Public Security Bureau, not far from here, so he could come every day. In the afternoons he’d come backstage first, then go watch the show, and after the show, come again. He was a man of many thoughts, never told you what was on his mind. I never understood what he was really doing—clearly working at the Public Security Bureau, yet after his shift he’d sneak off to listen to Communist speeches, attend some kind of training class.”
Little Phoenix looked at Chen Qianli, who sat with lowered eyes, listening quietly, like a connoisseur of opera taking in a slow, melancholy aria. She thought that perhaps someday, someone would take her own life story and put it on the stage.
“But I never could tell which side he was really on. One night I saw a half-written letter on the table—it said something about executing the letter’s recipient on behalf of the workers and peasants, for his shameless tyranny and reckless conduct. The envelope was addressed to Whampoa Military Academy. A few days later, I came home late at night from the theater and saw him in the back room, digging in the dirt, roots and all, pulling up flowers to bury a bomb underneath the pots.”
Seeing that this Mr. Chen was listening intently, Little Phoenix turned back to the mirror and adjusted the strip pinned to her forehead. “I was scared out of my wits. He just laughed and told me not to worry, it wouldn’t actually explode—just meant to scare someone. I asked who he wanted to scare, but he wouldn’t tell me. I asked if he was a Communist, if the Communists were planning to assassinate someone—he told me not to worry, that he was absolutely not a Communist. He said he was only pretending to be a Communist to scare someone, to make that person hate the Communists all the more. A month or two later, there was suddenly a rumor going around that the Zhongshan gunboat was going to mutiny, planning to sail up the Pearl River and open fire on Guangzhou. He came home especially happy that day, and that night he was especially good to me.”
Little Phoenix paused, looking down at the freshly lit cigarette in her hand. With her makeup on, no expression showed on her face.
“Then eventually the papers reported that he was a Communist, that he’d been executed. I still wasn’t sure whether he was really a Communist or not. Before that, for a whole week he’d been extremely tense, as if he were in the middle of doing something, worried something might go wrong. By that time we’d been living together for over two years.
“Before that, that Teacher Ye came from Nanjing to see him. He flew in by plane—Dashatou Airport. In that period, every time Teacher Ye came to Guangzhou to see him, it was always by plane, coming and going in a hurry. He was an important man—I hadn’t seen many people who flew around all the time.
“After Teacher Ye left, he sat on the bed smoking and told me that things could finally be settled once and for all. That night it rained heavily, and I didn’t have to go to the theater. That evening, after a bath, he opened a bottle of foreign liquor. He said the work was done, everything was settled, all that was left was to wait to be rewarded for his achievements.”
Chen Qianli said nothing, made no movement at all. The leading lady of the Qunfang Yan troupe, the famous performer known throughout all of Guangzhou, now wore a faint smile, having slipped into the role, remembering that hope and happiness, though it had long since vanished into smoke.
“But just at that moment, a man surnamed Long called on the phone. I knew of that man—he would call occasionally looking for him, and if he wasn’t home, would leave word to say to go to ‘the usual place.’ Later, when the papers reported it, that’s how I found out he was a Communist—the ‘usual place’ they mentioned must have been Haoxian Street. On the phone, he told the man surnamed Long that he’d been looking for him for two days, that there was something urgent to tell him. He said, ‘Did you see the note?’ I think he’d probably left a note somewhere for the man surnamed Long, saying he needed to find him—”
Chen Qianli thought to himself: she really was born for this trade of performing—she remembered every single detail.
“At first he didn’t want to say it over the phone, but in the end he told him anyway. He told the man surnamed Long that someone named Ouyang was in danger—the Public Security Bureau was going to arrest him, and someone needed to go warn him, but he himself couldn’t go, because this Ouyang didn’t know him. The man surnamed Long seemed to think it over on the phone for a while; the two of them fell silent for a bit, neither speaking. Then the man surnamed Long started talking again—it seemed he’d decided to go himself, and the two of them started arguing over the phone. He told the man surnamed Long, ‘Since you’ve already left, you shouldn’t be the one to go.’ But in the end he couldn’t talk him out of it, and agreed to let the man surnamed Long go to that usual place.
“But after he hung up the phone, he told me he was going too. I wasn’t too happy about it—hadn’t they just agreed the man surnamed Long would go? He said he wasn’t at ease about it. He came home very late that night; I’d already fallen asleep. He crawled into bed with his hair still wet, his face pale, saying he’d nearly been killed. He tossed and turned all night.”
Little Phoenix suddenly stopped, avoiding the visitor’s gaze, murmuring half to herself: “Why am I telling you all this?”
Chen Qianli understood now: at the time, Long Dong had indeed already been preparing to evacuate, but Lu Zhongde had used Ouyang Min as bait to lure him to Haoxian Street. Chen Qianli looked up at Little Phoenix—she cared nothing at all for Young Master Wu, her heart was still with Officer Lu. Not only had he been so dashing, he had promised her he’d be back within half a year at the most, that they would never be apart again. She simply could not understand why, after three years, he still had not returned.
Just then, there came a soft knock at the door, and the troupe master pushed it open, entering with a bow toward Little Phoenix and Chen Qianli respectively, an ingratiating smile on his face. “When will the master performer be ready to open? Several distinguished gentlemen have already taken their seats.”
“Wait!” Little Phoenix snapped sharply. Great opera stars never went on time; the troupe master, well used to it, scratched his head and retreated.
Little Phoenix calmed herself and looked at Chen Qianli.
“The next morning he was much better. Had some congee, said he’d accomplished something great, that good days were coming. He was happy for two days, buying me this and that every day. He’d always had money, more than other officers. On Dragon Boat Festival he gave me a set of jadeite hair ornaments, said the stage needed bright reds and greens to look good. But right after Dragon Boat Festival, he said he had to leave, be away from Guangzhou for a while. Couldn’t write letters, couldn’t send telegrams. On the day he left, I saw the news in the papers and rushed home in shock to find him. He changed his story again—said at most half a year, no longer than that. The news in the papers was fake—if everyone believed it, he’d be safe.
“That night I helped him pack his bags and saw the travel agency’s shipping manifest—the name on it wasn’t his, it was ‘Yi.’ I asked him about it, and he scared me by saying I could never tell anyone he was still alive. Now he was dead—he had to stay dead for half a year, and after half a year he could come back to life again, come back to Guangzhou, and we’d never be apart again. But before then, I couldn’t tell anyone about my own situation, or not only would he be in danger, I would be too. He scared me by saying there were people who, because I knew he was still alive, wanted to kill me—that it was him who had stopped them.
“Every year the troupe disbands in May; after Dragon Boat Festival I’d gotten my advance pay, so I had a little money on hand. I was afraid he wouldn’t have enough while traveling, so I gave it all to him.” Little Phoenix steadied herself, seeming to have finished what she wanted to say.
Once Lu Zhongde left, she must have spent a long, anxious stretch of time in terror, and only once she found that no one came to harm her did she gradually settle down, believing herself to be safe after all. And then, she began once again to dwell on Lu Zhongde’s virtues…
Chen Qianli rose to take his leave. Just as he stepped through the door, Little Phoenix suddenly spoke from behind him: “Mr. Chen, if you see him, pass along a message for me.”
Chen Qianli nodded.
“The rouge has run out.” Little Phoenix closed the door.
Chen Qianli and Liang Shichao did not take seats at the tables, but neither did they hurry to leave the theater. They stood behind a pillar in the back row on the left side, watching the stage for a while.
Onstage, the king gazed brazenly at Su Jinding, who had turned her back, shyly undoing the red silk wrap presented by the barbarian king—a puzzle the entire court of officials could not solve, but which she solved with ease.