The fifth book in the Inspector Chen series, 2007

The texts quoted in chapter 19 were translated by James Legge, slightly modified by the author.

As with other books, I have a long list of people to thank for their help, among whom, particularly, Lin Huiying, a celebrated mandarin dress designer in Shanghai, for her expert lessons; Patricia Mirrlees, a friend I met twenty years ago in Beijing, for her continuing support after all these years; and Keith Kahla, my editor at St. Martin’s Press, for his extraordinary work.

RUNNING ALONG WEST HUAIHAI Road, his breath foggy under the fading stars, Worker Master Huang counted himself as one of the earliest birds in Shanghai. In his mid-seventies, he still ran with vigorous steps. After all, health could be more valuable than anything else, he thought proudly, wiping away the sweat on his forehead. For those sickly Big Bucks, what could all the gold and silver mountains in their backyards possibly mean?

But there was little else for a retired worker like Huang to pride himself on now, in the mid-nineties, as the materialistic transformation was sweeping over the city.

Huang had seen better days. A model worker in the sixties, a Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team member during the Cultural Revolution, a neighborhood security in the eighties-in short, a onetime “worker master” of the politically glorious working class in China.

Now he was nobody. A retiree of a nearly bankrupt state-run steel mill, he had a hard time making ends meet on his ever-shrinking pension. Even the title “Worker Master” sounded ironically rusty in the Party newspapers.