The True Story Behind The Red Mandarin Dress

At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Red Guards raided and ransacked my family home. As with many other so-called “black families” at the time, in the campaign of “Sweeping Away the Four Olds” the Red Guards subjected my parents to revolutionary “mass criticism,” seizing whatever they saw as capitalistic or counter-revolutionary, such as gold jewelry, fashionable clothes, bank savings, and old books.

That night, my mother suffered a breakdown, and I turned into a “black puppy” trembling beside her. Weeks later, I discovered in a dust-covered box a pile of books that mysteriously survived that campaign. Among them, a photo magazine contained a picture taken in the early 1960s, entitled “Mother, Let’s Go There.” The son in the picture, six or seven years old, is scampering about in a garden, pointing toward the distant horizon, pulling the hand of his beautiful mother in a stylish mandarin dress.

Judging by the details of picture, they, too, must have been of the “black family background”—in the days of the Cultural Revolution. Now, even Wang Guangmei, the “ex-first lady” of China, had to stand on a mass-criticism stage, wearing a deliberately torn mandarin dress that served as humiliating evidence of her decadent lifestyle. What could be in store for the mandarin dress wearer in the photo? And what about the son—who had been about my age—beside her? Still so happy looking into the lens, so unprepared for the disaster drawing close. I shuddered at the thought of it, failing to find answers to those questions.

Thirty years later, after having lived in the States since 1989, after enormous changes in China during the unprecedented reform, I came back to a family reunion in Shanghai. I met with a relative who ran a boutique mandarin dress store near Jingjiang Hotel. She told me about her booming business, with the mandarin dress staging a comeback in a collective nostalgia of the city.

Unexpectedly, her talk reminded of the picture examined so long ago, and of the questions still unanswered. Actually, they seemed to have gained a new poignancy in a historical perspective. Did the people in the photo survive the national disaster?

My mother never really recovered; I did, although scarred. Once again, I succumbed to the temptation of identifying myself with the son in the picture.

The memory of the picture haunted me. Eventually, as I started contemplating the possibility of writing something out of it, all the thoughts and associations came crowding into my mind: the cause of the Cultural Revolution, the absurdities and atrocities demonstrated in those years, the collective unconscious, the archetypes of the femme fatale in the Orient, the disastrous childhood trauma, the Confucian discourse at the expense of romantic love…

Most of the above are topics avoided, if not exactly banned, in today’s China. Naturally, all these converge on the background of a most challenging serial murder case, with each of the victims wearing a red mandarin dress.

Then I knew I had a new book in the Inspector Chen series. This time, pulled away from his academic paper on the deconstruction of love in classical Chinese literature to the investigation, Chen investigates further, not just into the present-day materialistic society festered with rampant corruption and social injustice, but into the Cultural Revolution, and into the long history that led to the disaster.

And thanks to such a picture, Chen finally flounders to the conclusion, when he shudders and exclaims, “But for luck, what has happed to the boy could have happened to me.”
-Qiu Xiaolong

so i checked on the qiuxiaolong's website as my sister told me, and i've finally found the new title for the latest inspector chen's latest investigation. me and my sister both are deeply fascinated by the way Qiu Xiaolong's portray Shanghai and the bitter side of residents in shanghai. sure, he still loves his native country where he was born and half brought up before he went to US and made a history himself. definitely a must buy this end of brilliant year.