“With Overseas Chinese Lu as my instructor, I should be making some progress.”

“I’ll give you a new recipe tonight, after the party,” Lu said. “What a piece of luck, dear Comrade Chief Inspector! Your great ancestors must have been burning bundles of tall incense to the Fortune God. And to the Kitchen God, too.”

“Well, my mother has been burning incense, but to what particular god, I don’t know.”

“Guanyin, I know. I once saw her kowtow to a clay image-it must be more than ten years ago-and I asked her about it.”

In Lu’s eyes, Chief Inspector Chen had fallen into Fortune’s lap-or that of whatever god in Chinese mythology had brought him luck. Unlike most people of his generation, though an “educated youth” who had graduated from high school, Chen was not sent to the countryside “to be reeducated by poor and lower-middle peasants” in the early seventies. As an only child, he had been allowed to stay in the city, where he had studied English on his own. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, Chen entered Beijing Foreign Language College with a high English score on the entrance examination and then obtained a job at the Shanghai Police Bureau. And now there was another demonstration of Chen’s good luck. In an overpopulated city like Shanghai, with more than thirteen million people, the housing shortage was acute. Still, he had been assigned a private apartment.

The housing problem had a long history in Shanghai. A small fishing village during the Ming dynasty, Shanghai had developed into one of the most prosperous cities in the Far East, with foreign companies and factories appearing like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, and people pouring in from everywhere. Residential housing failed to keep pace under the rule of the Northern warlords and Nationalist governments. When the Communists took power in 1949, the situation took an unexpected turn for the worse. Chairman Mao encouraged large families, even to the extent of providing food subsidies and free nurseries.