Huayu Xu

A Professor in the University!

[Huayu Xu @huxu20]

https://t.co/AgfAkyyjTi
Embers of the Floating World
浮世烬灯
Chapter One
The Guttering Lamp
Autumn, the thirty-fourth year of the Republic. Cold Dew had just passed, and the nights had teeth in them now.
Dawn hadn't broken yet over the lane off the French Concession. The soymilk man was still setting up, ladling the first batch, and it caught a little on the bottom of the pot — that burnt-sugar smell that always meant it was too early for anyone decent to be up. On the third floor of one of the buildings, a window had stayed dark the whole night.
Ah Gui knocked twice. She'd dressed Manli's hair and pressed her clothes three years running, long enough to know her mistress never slept past sunrise no matter how late the dance hall kept her — so when the second knock went nowhere, she went and got the building super, and between the two of them they got the door open.
The smell hit her first, before she'd even made out the shape against the wall. Something underneath the incense and the old face powder that didn't belong. Manli was still in the ivory satin she'd worn out the night before, and her rouge had gone a strange flat color in the grey light, worse somehow than if she'd worn none.
Ah Gui's scream carried the length of the lane and woke most of it.
• • •
Word reached the station a little past six, and by then the tabloid men were already ahead of the police — three of them at the mouth of the lane before a single officer had been sent for. A name like Manli's didn't die quietly. Headline act at the Paramount, half the monied men in the city on her call list at one time or another. Within the hour the lane was solid with people: reporters up on their toes with cameras, flashbulbs cracking white every few seconds; newsboys who'd given up hawking anything else and just stood repeating the same three lines to whoever would listen; the neighbors in twos and threes, each retelling a little more colorful than the last. A jealous suitor. An old enemy come back. One man, dropping his voice like he was doing her memory a kindness, said a woman like that had had it coming for years, and nobody troubled to argue him out of it.
Ming Ling and Zhou Wenbin got through the rope a little before ten. Ming kept his hand up against the cameras the whole way in — a habit he'd never made peace with, seeing his own face turn up in tomorrow's paper before he'd even worked out what had happened.
He went in soft-footed, in a gown that had seen a few too many washes at the collar, and he didn't go near the body straight off. He stood just past the doorway and read the room first — where the windows sat, which way the furniture had been shoved, what the light was doing — the way he always did, the way half the station thought was a waste of ten minutes on a case that would likely solve itself by lunch anyway.
"Chief." Zhou came up beside him already talking, notebook out, a name underlined twice on the open page. Two years partnered together, and Ming still hadn't decided whether Zhou's hunger for a name in the paper under his own was a fault in him or just what youth looked like from the outside.
"Asked around already," Zhou said. "Four or five regulars at least. A bank manager named Cen sends a car for her daily. A trader up from Canton took a swing at another man over her two nights back, right there on the dance floor. A couple others I haven't run down yet." He tapped the page. "Has the shape of it, doesn't it. Remember the Subei girl last year — rose fast, turned up dead past the city line, and it was an old lover who couldn't stand seeing her with someone new. That's twice in two years, this exact story."
Ming remembered the case. It hadn't taken four days to close. He understood well enough what Zhou meant him to hear — that the shape fit, and a shape that fit was a comfortable thing to stop looking at.
"Could be," he said, and left it there, and went further into the room.
Someone had been through it — wardrobe hanging open, furs and silk dresses dragged down and left in a heap, every vanity drawer pulled out, a gilt powder compact smashed near the table leg with rouge tracked into the carpet on one side. A jewelry box lay tipped over by the bed, its contents spilled and, as far as he could tell without touching anything yet, all present. He crouched over the spill: a kingfisher-enamel hairpin, a decent pair of jade earrings, each piece sitting exactly where it had fallen, not one of them close to the door.
"Thrown around," he said, "and nothing worth pawning is gone."
"Startled off before he could take anything, maybe."
Ming crossed to the window instead of answering, and tried the brass latch — fastened from inside, the rust on it old and even, no fresh scratch anywhere near the catch. He looked down at the sill. A thin, undisturbed skin of dust lay across it, no footprints, no smear — which struck him as odder than footprints would have been.
"Door?"
"Lock's fine. Key was in her handbag, no pick marks." Zhou was already talking again. "Someone she let in, is my read on it. Trusted him, he turned on her, tossed the room on the way out to make it read as a burglary. Fits the passion angle even better, if you ask me."
"Everything disturbed, nothing valuable taken, latch fastened from the inside, no prints in the dust." Ming said it flat, laying the pieces next to each other rather than under each other. "Somebody wanted this read as a robbery. Did it in a hurry, though. None of it quite sits right together."
"So it's deliberate."
"Don't know what it's for yet." He crouched by a stocking balled up under the vanity, left it where it was. "Could be the real one wants us looking somewhere else. Could be I'm reading too much into a mess. Too soon to hand anybody a reason."
He knelt by the body last of all. She lay on her back, ivory satin, the rouge garish in the flat morning light. He didn't touch her yet — just bent close over the throat, the wrists, then the hands. Nails clean and trimmed, no blood under them, no torn skin.
"No fight in this," he said, half to Zhou, half to the room. "Nails like this on a woman like her — she'd have gone for his eyes at least. Scratched something."
"Caught off guard. No time."
He moved on to the vanity drawers, which gave up a stack of letters in a fine hand signed only "Cen," flattery of the ordinary suitor kind, a sheaf of pawn tickets, and IOUs marked "Canton" and a shop name, the sums not small. He read and logged each one without letting himself settle on any of it. A woman like Manli, in debt, keeping several men on a string — none of it was strange for her circle, which was exactly the trouble. Too many threads here that could hang a motive.
Zhou, going through the IOUs, was warming to his own theory by the minute. "One of these four. I'd put money on it."
Ming's pen kept moving. A woman who'd held her spot at the Paramount this many years, running this many men at once, hadn't done it wearing her real face the whole time. There'd be something kept back, somewhere. He went through the vanity again, the nightstand, the lining of a trunk, even sifted the broken pieces of the compact in the corner, and turned up nothing.
Maybe there was nothing to find. Maybe it was already gone. Either way it wasn't a thing worth saying out loud yet.
"Seal the room, log everything in it," he said, straightening up. "And get every statement going — neighbors, the super, anyone who's done for her these past years. Don't let one slip past."
"Understood." Zhou said it easily enough, still privately certain the whole thing would crack open the moment they leaned on the right man.
He made one more slow circle of the room, and his eye caught, last, on a sewing basket in the corner nobody had bothered with, a piece of half-finished embroidery inside it, the stitches small, patient, unhurried. Zhou hadn't given it a second look, the sort of thing any woman's room might hold. Ming crouched over it a while longer than it warranted. A woman who spent her nights under the dance-hall lights, keeping this kind of quiet, careful handwork on the side — it didn't sit easy next to everything else glittering in this room. He didn't mention it.
Outside, the soymilk man was still at it, steam going up in slow gusts, the street filling in with footsteps. The reporters hadn't thinned at all — a few still hanging at the mouth of the lane, waiting on a line for tomorrow's front page. Shanghai didn't pause for anyone's death. It didn't let go of good gossip either.
"Chief." Zhou couldn't hold the silence any longer. "What are you actually thinking?"
Ming took his time with it. Truth was he had nothing settled yet — only a nagging sense that the room was pointing him one direction a little too helpfully, and that the help itself was what bothered him.
"Nothing worth saying yet," he said finally, and turned for the door. "The more I look at, the less I want to guess."
• • •
By afternoon every item from the apartment had been boxed and carted back to the station. It wasn't until night that Ming had a clear hour to sit alone at his desk and go through the box again, start to finish.
Letters, pawn tickets, IOUs — he logged each one a second time. At the bottom sat a stack of plain white stationery, maybe a dozen sheets, edges even, unused as far as he could tell. Nothing about it should have held his attention. It held his attention anyway.
A woman who wrote often enough would keep paper on hand, that was ordinary. But the top sheet had a faint roughness along one edge, as if it had once lain pressed under another sheet that had been torn away in a hurry. A stack that had never been touched shouldn't look like that.
He drew the top sheet out and tilted it under the desk lamp, turning it slow against the light. There — shallow indentations across the surface, the kind a man flipping through in ordinary light would miss nine times out of ten. Someone had written on the sheet above this one, pressing hard enough to leave a ghost of it behind.
He set it flat, took a pencil from the drawer, dulled the point against the blotter, and dragged it sideways across the page in even strokes.
Grey bloomed up slow. Nothing at first. By the third pass, pale shapes started to surface against the shaded ground — the ghost of characters in someone's ink, coming up out of the paper like they were fighting for air.
He stopped and brought the lamp closer, reading them one at a time.
...master and pupil...
...twenty years...
Past that the impressions thinned out too far for the pencil to raise anything readable — a few broken marks that never resolved. He tried from another angle and got the same handful of words back, no more. The rest stayed lost in the grey.
He slid the sheet into a stiff folder and set the Cen letters and the Canton IOUs beside it, and sat with all three in front of him, unwilling to touch any of them again that night.
Taken alone, those few words meant nothing anyone could hang a case on. Which was exactly what made them impossible to set aside. If this had been some ordinary business of love or money, why write it in a hand meant to hide itself, and why tear away only the one page, leaving nothing behind but an impression somebody had very nearly gotten away with?
He sat under the lamp without moving. Out past the window, the station's rear yard had gone still. Even a city this restless allowed itself a little quiet, at this hour.
He put the sheet away carefully, and in his casebook wrote one line: Unresolved. Follow up.
Whatever it was, it wasn't going to let him alone. He could feel that much already.

[Huayu Xu @huxu20]

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烟熏的熱度，燙＋脹＋濃烈的煙草味瞬間衝進體內，我尖叫一聲，腿直接軟在地上，潮吹的水混著煙霧噴了他一手。 下一秒，他把我壓在下鋪，粗糙的手指捏開我的嘴，兩根直接插進喉嚨攪得我口水直流。
雪茄還留在下面，每動一下都帶出黏膩的水聲。
他俯身在我耳邊低吼：
「小騷貨，才上車就濕成這樣？」
「今晚從廣州到北京，38個小時，老子要讓你下面被射滿到溢出來，一滴都不准浪費。」 說著，他解開皮帶，一根青筋暴跳、粗得嚇人的大肉棒彈出來，龜頭已經濕亮。
我驚得張大嘴，他順勢抓著我頭髮，整根狠狠捅進喉嚨深處，頂得我乾嘔，眼淚瞬間湧出。但是心裏還是有些興奮，這根大肉棒要是插進下面我的漂亮的小穴，會有多嗨，我心裏這樣想著。男人卻沒有停止動作，他的另外一隻手抓住插在我下面的雪茄，前後抽送，不時插的太深靠近雪茄正在燃燒的頂端，雪茄的高溫熱度燙得我尖叫起來，但是他的大肉棒堵在我嘴裏卻讓我發不出聲。聲音只能嗚嗚的在嗓子裏滾動。
「忍不住了？」
他低笑，把帶著大股透明愛液的雪茄猛地拔出來，隨後叼在嘴裏。他吸了兩口雪茄說：“真香，你是我見過的最乾淨的女人“！
我還沒喘過氣，他雙手拎起我雙腿，把我狠狠壓在小沙發上，大肉棒從後面一插到底—— 「啊啊啊——！」
整根沒入，龜頭直接撞開子宮口，撞得我小腹鼓起一個清晰的輪廓。
而他嘴裏依然叼著雪茄，他深吸了一口雪茄，把嘴裏的煙全部吐到了的臉上。
一股從子宮深處麻酥酥的快感瞬間衝上頭頂，我哭著弓起腰。心裏卻無比的暢快。前男友肉棒算是夠粗，但是長度不夠，總是用上吃奶的勁兒，才能頂到我的子宮口。可是這個男人的龜頭輕而易舉的就把我的花心擠扁了，子宮口被他的龜頭結結實實地堵上了。雪茄的味道，下面被操的滿滿的。我要醉暈了。他抽著雪茄手并沒有停下來。一手從後握住我沉甸甸的乳房，使勁揉捏，粉紅色的硬挺的乳頭被他捏得發紫；另一手插到下面，按住腫脹的陰蒂瘋狂摩擦。 我要爆炸了，全身上下酥＋麻＋癢＋痛一起飆升。他又是猛地一頂，整根沒入，龜頭硬生生撞開子宮口，撞得我小腹鼓起一個清晰的肉棒形狀，像懷孕六個月一樣瞬間隆起！
突然他把肉棒抽出，只留龜頭在陰道口磨蹭，故意不給我，磨得我裡面癢得發狂，愛液像水龍頭一樣往外噴。
我哭著扭臀去追，他卻「啪」地一巴掌拍在我屁股上，我白嫩的立馬出現五個鮮紅的手指印：
「想被操就自己求。」
我崩潰了，哭著喊：「求你……插進來……操我……」
他低吼一聲，猛地整根捅進去，瘋狂抽插上百下，最後死死頂住子宮口，
低吼著把滾燙的精液一股股射進最深處，燙得我尖叫著高潮，潮吹的水噴了滿沙發。我的子宮口像小嘴一樣死死吸住他的龜頭，一吸一吸，把他殘餘的精液全部吸進子宮深處，吸得他低吼著又射出一股！我還在抽搐，他拔出來，濃稠的白濁順著大腿往下流。他把混雜著愛液和精液的肉棒又插進了我的嘴裏。我的舌頭不由自主舔弄起他的肉棒，隨後又用力吸他的又圓又軟大龜頭。他被我吸得低聲的哼了兩聲，隨後他的龜頭在我的嘴又跳到了幾下，把餘下的精液射進了我的嘴裏。我吞下他的精液説到，你的精液也是我吃到過的精液裏味道最好，最好吃的。他嘿嘿地笑了說：“小騷貨見識不少���”！我繼續含住他的龜頭繞著圈兒舔。心裏想，我哪有那麽多見識，你才是在這個世界上的第二個，你的肉棒是我見過的第二根陰莖。我心裏在笑自己，怎麽能説出他的精液最好，不過他的精液的味道，比起前男友的精液，的確好吃，一股清香味道。綠皮火車的咣噹咣噹聲，仿佛一首催眠曲，我居然喊著他的龜頭睡着了。
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[Huayu Xu @huxu20]

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第一章 雪茄直接捅進去，我當場潮吹噴了滿地

金秋的北京該是涼風習習，可廣州還熱得像蒸籠。廣州站更是人氣加熱氣。
我��沈星梨是一名服裝設計師，今天我穿著自己設計的那件墨綠色高開衩旗袍出門，絲綢緊貼大腿根，每走一步，開衩就直接露出大腿內側的濕痕。當我走進站臺時下面那條黑色蕾絲丁字褲早勒進陰唇裡，細繩死死磨著腫脹的陰蒂，癢得我腿軟。更要命的是今天太熱，我沒穿奶罩，旗袍下兩個 C+ 罩杯的大奶子晃得厲害，硬挺的乳頭隔著絲綢被反覆摩擦，像有隻男人的舌頭在用力舔咬，癢得我小腹一陣陣抽搐。 越走越濕，愛液順著大腿內側往下流，把絲襪頂端都浸透了。
我咬著唇幻想著：要是現在有一根、兩根甚至三根青筋暴起的粗大肉棒一起狠狠插進去，整根頂進子宮口把我操到哭，估計瞬間就能止癢嗨到失神。想到3P甚至4P，我��是聼唐詩詩閨蜜講過她的經歷。她曾經在飛機上跟機長和副機長一起在駕駛室裏3P，操的都嗨翻天了。可我自己還沒有被幾個人一起操過，而且另外一個閨蜜林宛兒也說過，特別是走後門比前門還舒服。林宛兒是個護士，她看上十分清純可人，居然也和醫生病人一起3P，真是人不可貌相，越是看上去清純的越騷。哎，真想享受一下被幾個男人前後門一起伺候的滋味。想到這裡，後庭也跟著養起來，前門小穴下面猛地一縮，直接噴出一大股熱流，丁字褲瞬間濕得能擰出水，旗袍開衩處都透出了深色水痕。 我幾乎是跌進高級軟臥包廂的，門「咔」一聲反鎖，腿軟得站不住，直接扶著牆喘。
包廂裡只有上下兩張鋪，一張小沙發和一張小桌子，旁邊還有扇虛掩的門，應該是衛生間。 得趕緊換條內褲……
我撩起旗袍褪下絲襪，脫下那條濕透的丁字褲，我看著自己的小穴，悠然產生了一份自豪感，別的女生一過22嵗，被男人操個幾次，下面就成黑木耳了，而我已經24嵗了，下面還是粉紅粉紅，配上一身白皙的皮膚，這我的讓小穴顯得格外誘人。再想想林宛兒和唐詩詩的小穴，自己看到過也摸過，都沒有自己的漂亮。林宛兒小穴也很漂亮，也是粉嫩嫩的，但是陰唇太過突出，唐詩詩的小穴雖然不是黑木耳，但是大概是操的太多，已經有些發黑了。我的小穴也跟男朋友操過無數次，但是依然粉嫩。它雖然不是一綫天，但是大小陰唇也僅僅露出來一點，真是萬白叢中一點紅。林宛兒小穴可以和我的媲美，但是她的還差那麽一點點。唐詩詩小穴漂亮，但還是黑了那麽一點。林宛兒臉蛋和我有一拼，但是個子比我矮。唐��詩個子比我高，但是皮膚卻沒有我那麽白皙，她的皮膚和她的小穴真的很配。今天等她們上車了一定再摸摸看看她們小穴，一年多沒見了有什麽變化，是不是操變色變形了。我摸著自己漂亮的臉蛋，搖晃了一下我1米68的魔鬼身材，一隻手不由自主地摸弄起自己漂亮的小穴，跟前男友分手後，已經有快半年沒有男人的肉棒操我的小穴了，想到這裏，我的不由得輕揉我的陰蒂，一股愛液又流了我一手，我一隻手摸弄著小穴按揉著陰蒂，另一隻手裏拿著手裏拿着上面黏膩的愛液還在滴的丁字褲。心神有點恍惚的自我陶醉著。 「吱嘎——」
衛生間的門開了。 一個西裝筆挺、肌肉要把襯衫撐爆的高大男人走了出來，手裡夾著一支燃燒的特大號雪茄，煙霧繚繞。
他眼神像狼，視線直接鎖在我赤裸的下身。
我下意識想夾腿，雙手捂住小穴，卻已經來不及了。 他兩步上前，雪茄還冒著滾燙的煙，直接捅進我還在滴水的小穴。
「啊——！」
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[Huayu Xu @huxu20]

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Chapter Five
The Ledger
A-Kun’s pawnshop stood on Guanqian Street, the frontage narrow, a black-lacquered counter taller than a man, the finish rubbed shiny by countless hands, chipped white at the corners. Behind the counter ran an iron grille, and behind that the clerk’s seat — an old custom of the trade, meant to guard against robbery and against customers who tried to renege once the money changed hands. When Ming Ling arrived it was noon and the shop was empty of customers, except for a boy who looked like an apprentice crouched by the door, scrubbing an old padded coat in a basin of water, grey suds floating on top. The boy was called A-Xiang, some distant nephew of A-Kun’s who’d fled here from Shunde the year before last to learn the trade. He hummed some tuneless little song as he worked, though his hands never slowed. A-Kun had taken in more than one poor relation’s child this way over the years, teaching them to weigh silver and judge a piece by its color, a trade that could feed a person even in hard times. The iron grille in this shop seemed to shelter these half-grown boys with nowhere else to go about as much as it guarded the till.
Just before Ming Ling stepped inside, he saw A-Kun set down his abacus and take a jade bracelet from a customer, turning it twice in the light from the window, then scraping it lightly with a fingernail. “Not enough translucency,” he said, shaking his head. “Quartz at best, not real jade. Three dollars, and that’s generous.” The customer made a face and tried to argue, but A-Kun said nothing more, only set the bracelet down on the counter. “Try another shop if you think it’s worth more.” The customer hesitated and, in the end, couldn’t bring himself to walk away, and took the price. A-Xiang, still crouched by the door, had watched the whole thing, and once the customer left he came over and asked his master how he could tell real from fake at a glance. A-Kun only said, “It’s not the eye that matters in this trade. It’s not letting your heart go soft. Go soft once, and you’ll have ten people trying to fool you after.” Then he went back to his abacus without explaining further.
A-Kun sat alone behind the grille working the abacus, the beads clicking fast and light. When Ming Ling came in he didn’t stop, only lifted his chin — a greeting of sorts.
“Back again,” A-Kun said, resetting the abacus. His voice gave nothing away.
Ming Ling stood outside the grille and stated his business: whether anything Cheng Weilan had left behind was still here, and whether he might be allowed to look.
A-Kun’s abacus went still. He came around from behind the grille, not a tall man, but there was a settled weight to how he walked, something thirty years behind that iron grille had worn into him. He didn’t answer right away. He called out for A-Gui, not loudly, but with something careful in it. A-Gui appeared from behind the curtain in back, a half-picked bundle of greens still in her hand; hearing what was wanted, her face stiffened for a moment before she sighed, set the greens down on the stove, and wiped her hands on her apron before coming out.
“The things are still here,” A-Gui said, her eyes going over Ming Ling’s face again, as if reweighing him. “The room she rented got given up, the landlord wanted it back for someone else, and there was no one to claim what was left, so we thought we’d hold onto it a while — in case some proper family turned up asking, we’d have something to show.” She glanced toward the front of the shop before she went on. “You can look, I’ll bring it out for you, but I’ll say this plainly first: nothing leaves this shop. You look here and it stays here. Not that we don’t trust you. It’s just — these days, nobody’s word is good enough to take whole.”
“Understood,” Ming Ling said. “A look is all I need.”
A-Kun added, more evenly than his wife had spoken, “She was good to us over the years. This much, we can hold for her. We don’t want anything for it.” Said plainly enough, but Ming Ling heard something underneath it he couldn’t quite name, as though the two of them had agreed long ago to make this quiet keeping look like nothing more than ordinary neighbourliness.
A-Gui went into the back room and came out after a while carrying an old wicker trunk, much like Ming Ling’s own — the same style, the corners worn pale, the clasp the same cheap brass fitting, the kind every traveller of that era carried. She set it on a low stool by the counter and brought over another for Ming Ling to sit on, then stayed where she was, arms crossed, as if she meant both to watch and to keep an eye on him at once.
There wasn’t much inside. Two plain everyday dresses, drab in colour, the cuffs worn pale, folded neatly. A wooden comb with a few teeth missing, a few strands of someone’s hair still caught between the others. Several pawn tickets, all for cheap trinkets — a pair of earrings, a pocket watch — the dates spread far apart and the sums small, as if these were quick loans in a pinch and not real pawns at all. A few letters, opened and read, the handwriting unfamiliar, the contents ordinary, a neighbour’s baby’s one-month feast, a shop’s grand opening. Nothing from Shanghai. Not a word anywhere about where she’d come from.
Ming Ling went through each item slowly. His fingers paused on the broken comb a moment, and he set it down without saying anything.
At the very bottom of the trunk lay a notebook wrapped in blue cloth, the corners of the fabric worn to fuzz, a little dust caught in the folds. Ming Ling lifted it out, heavier in the hand than he’d expected, and unwrapped it: a thick ledger bound in kraft paper, no title on the cover, the corners reinforced with cotton thread stitched through twice, the pages softened and rounded from years of handling. It was easily twice the size of the one he carried against his own chest.
“This one,” A-Gui said, “we never really read. Looked at a page or two once, and it didn’t feel right to keep going, so we stopped.”
Ming Ling opened to the first page. The hand was a woman’s, neat, the strokes clean, with the discipline of someone who’d once been trained properly in bookkeeping. The first pages were dark-inked, the paper newer; further in, the ink lightened and the paper aged, the edges going soft, clearly added to over years, not all at once. This was no one or two years’ worth of accounts. Each page was ruled into columns with thin ink lines: name, date, sum, paid or not. Some names had a small circle after them, drawn in one quick stroke, as if the writer had taken a certain pleasure in closing out a debt. Some names came up again and again, the sums rising and falling, evidence of years of dealings. Some had only the words “holding off” after them, no circle, no cancellation, and those two words were written lighter than anything else on the page, as if the hand had hesitated before setting them down.
Ming Ling turned page after page and found names he half recognized. Yuelai, proprietress — a string of small sums after it, five dollars, three dollars, two dollars, gathered slowly over half a year, the last entry circled: the woman who’d once borrowed to get her rotating credit circle started, long since paid back, never mentioned again. Further on, names he didn’t know. Old Chen, Inner Harbour — one entry, fifty dollars, the words “holding off” pressed beneath the number. A-Qi, Central Hotel — several scattered debts, close together in date, as if they’d only started this past half-year. Boss Ma, Sam Pa Tang — one entry, “medicine,” no sum, just a circle, as though she’d never meant to collect it at all. A-Cai, Cheng Ping Theatre — a blank where the sum should be, only the words “the troupe.” Chan’s Teahouse, Fai Lung San Kai— a handful of small sums, in and out quickly. A-Chuen, the border gate— one entry, “boat fare,” the sum not small, followed by a question mark, the only piece of punctuation in the whole ledger, as though even she hadn’t been sure how to record it.
A few pages further in, the writing turned rougher, squeezed in between other entries, some names cut down to a single surname, some reduced to a code Ming Ling couldn’t work out. This ledger recorded more people than he could put faces to. What he’d recognized so far was only a fraction.
Ming Ling closed the ledger and sat without speaking, his fingers still pressed against the kraft-paper cover, as if he could feel through it exactly how much weight it held.
A-Gui watched him, started to say something, stopped, twisted a corner of her apron in her hands, and finally said only, “Miss Cheng — what she owed people, what people owed her — she probably kept clearer track of it than anyone on this street.” Then, almost as an afterthought, her voice dropping, “Though A-Kun and I always said, a person who keeps accounts this careful isn’t necessarily counting pennies. More like she was afraid of forgetting. Afraid that one day she wouldn’t remember who’d been good to her, or who’d had a hard year. Everyone round here gets by the same way, really. Leaning on each other, a little at a time, year after year.”
A-Kun, behind the grille, made a small sound of agreement and said nothing more, nudging one bead of the abacus, as if the small click of it could fill the silence that had settled over the room.
Ming Ling wrapped the ledger back in its blue cloth and returned it to the bottom of the trunk, then put the dresses, the comb, the pawn tickets back exactly as he’d found them, and stood to thank them. A-Gui carried the trunk back to the inner room, and before she went in, turned to look at him once more. The same curiosity as before, deeper now. Still unspoken.
By the time he left the pawnshop it was already dark. He stood on the step outside and looked back once at the shop. A-Kun was back behind the grille working his own accounts, the abacus beads clicking fast and steady, as if the conversation a moment ago had never happened. A-Gui moved in and out of the back room with the same brisk efficiency as always. Ming Ling knew there was no more to be learned this way. That ledger wasn’t going to open itself. He would have to go through every name in it, one at a time.
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Chapter Four
Hua Du
He didn’t go back to the station the next day, and instead asked around the neighbourhood for where this Detective Wa usually spent his evenings. Someone told him he went most nights, after his shift, to a tea stall on Rua do Campo, staying until dark. Ming Ling went that evening and knew him at once — a man of middling height sitting in the corner, mixed blood in his face, in plain clothes, an enamel cup chipped at the rim in front of him, the tea inside dark brown with condensed milk. He drank without hurry, but his eyes moved over everyone around him.
The stall wasn’t large, four or five low tables set out under the arcade, no real shelter from wind or rain. The woman running it carried three teapots at once, moving between tables without a break in her stride. At a nearby table, a few dock workers just off their shift were playing a drinking game over a dish of peanuts, shouting the count, the losers throwing back mouthfuls of liquor with their necks stiff, the winners slapping the table and laughing with teeth stained yellow from tobacco, their noise mixed with the diesel smell drifting up from the harbour. The one hour of the day these men allowed themselves to be loud. It was a different world from the quiet at Hua Du’s table. Ming Ling understood only later that this was exactly why the stall worked for private talk. With so much noise around, no one paid any attention to what one quiet corner table was saying.
The drinking game got heated. Two of the workers started grabbing at each other over a single coin, and it looked about to turn into a fight; the woman running the stall shouted for someone to pull them apart, and no one could. Hua Du didn’t even look up. He rapped his cup once against the table and threw out a line of Cantonese profanity, loud enough to carry, saying everyone on this street knew his face, and if this went to the station tomorrow no one here would be working the docks again. The two men’s grips loosened at once. They glared at each other a while longer and finally let go, sitting back down, saying nothing further. The woman gave a look their way and laughed, muttering that it was a good thing Detective Wa could still keep order, and refilled his cup with hot water, no charge. Hua Du picked it up again, unhurried, as though nothing at all had happened.
Ming Ling walked over, sat down across from him, and gave his name and his reason for coming.
The man looked at him and didn’t answer right away. He called out for more hot water first, in Cantonese with a strong local accent, spoken clean and correct, nothing like the stiff Cantonese Ming Ling had just heard from the Portuguese constables at the station. Only then did he turn back and answer in Mandarin. “Hua Du.” A pause. “I’ve heard your name before.”
Ming Ling waited for him to go on. Hua Du took his time looking him over, head to foot, the way a pawnbroker weighs an old piece brought across the counter, deciding whether it’s worth the trouble. “That gown you’re wearing — Shanghai tailoring,” he said suddenly. “Good cloth. But nothing new added to it in a couple of years. The cuffs are worn nearly through. Not because you can’t afford it. Because you haven’t had the heart to.”
Ming Ling looked down at his own cuff before he caught himself doing it.
“The first thing you learn in this job is how to read people,” Hua Du said, taking a sip. “Not what they say. What they don’t. A man comes all this way from Shanghai over the death of an ‘old acquaintance,’ and can’t be bothered to buy himself a new coat. That’s not how a man visits family or friends.”
“A few years back there was a case in the French Concession, a gun-smuggling ring, and one of the men caught up in it was a distant cousin of mine, on the Portuguese side,” Hua Du went on. “The way I heard it, your station decided he’d been talked into it and let him off light. That’s a debt I remember.”
“I don’t recall that.”
“Of course you don’t,” Hua Du said, smiling faintly. “How many cases like that did your side handle in a year. But my cousin remembers. So does everyone on that side of my family. He runs a small business here in Macau now, still sends a gift back to Shanghai every New Year, except the constable who handled the case got transferred long ago and nobody’s known where to send it. Years now.” He paused, as if something had occurred to him. “Information is the whole business I’m in. Your name’s come up more than once from my cousin. He called you one of the few in that station who’d actually listen to reason. Coming from him, that’s about as high a compliment as it gets.” He set the cup down. “You’re here today about the woman from the Inner Harbour. Miss Cheng.”
It wasn’t a question. Ming Ling nodded.
“The case is closed. That’s the official word.” Hua Du studied him. “If you really want to dig into it, I can open a few doors, ask a few people questions that wouldn’t get asked officially. But understand this isn’t an official inquiry, and don’t expect any paperwork out of me. There’s no arrangement between the Portuguese authorities here and your French Concession. Push this into the open and my road closes too.”
“I don’t have any paperwork to show you,” Ming Ling said. “I don’t even have proper standing to say what I was to her.”
“I know,” Hua Du said, drinking again. “If you did, I wouldn’t have taken this on.” He paused, choosing his words. “The rules here aren’t like Shanghai’s. Lisbon’s whole habit is to avoid trouble wherever possible. Neutral country, don’t offend anyone, don’t get close to anyone either. By the time that habit works its way down through every layer of official here, it comes out as: better to do nothing than something. Wait for the truth to come out through proper channels and you’ll wait until the world ends.”
Ming Ling waited him out.
“Last month the Governor’s office sent round an internal notice,” Hua Du added, his voice dropping. “Times being sensitive, everyone watching everyone, any case touching a foreigner should be left alone where possible, so as not to stir up trouble with some embassy or other. Miss Cheng’s case — it’s not that the men at the station are lazy. It’s that the whole thing’s been leaning that way from the top down, and they just followed the lean.” He paused again. “I’m telling you this so you understand what you’re up against. Not a few men cutting corners. The whole temperament of this place, top to bottom. Lisbon wants neutrality, the Governor wants quiet, and nobody working under either one wants to be the first to make trouble.”
“What I can do,” Hua Du went on, “is take you to a few people the station wouldn’t bother asking, and let them say a few things they couldn’t say officially. The rest of it, you’ll have to walk yourself.” He finished the last of his tea in one go, stood, and paid, then turned and traded a few words in Cantonese with the woman running the stall, asking after her son’s cough. His manner had gone easy, nothing like the register he’d used a moment before. Ming Ling watched the shift and thought that this man had probably spent years learning to move between two selves — Detective Wa in front of the Portuguese, one of the neighbourhood in front of everyone else. Which of the two was closer to the real Hua Du, he couldn’t say yet, and didn’t try to guess.
Ming Ling watched him go. This was probably the best hand this city was going to deal him.
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Chapter Three
Going Through the Motions
The Macau police headquarters stood in an old two-story building behind Largo do Senado, its outer wall whitewashed, the window frames rusted through in patches. By the time Ming Ling arrived a line had already formed at the entrance, bending round the corner under the arcade of the grocery shop next door. Most of the people in it were refugees fresh off the boats, dragging children and bundles, gripping wrinkled papers, waiting to register their entry. A Portuguese constable in uniform stood at the head of the line waving people forward, shouting in Portuguese with a few stiff phrases of Cantonese mixed in, herding them through in batches. The air held sweat, damp, and some kind of tobacco smell, all pressed together until it was hard to breathe.
The line moved at a crawl. Ming Ling stood off under the arcade and watched a man in a short jacket work his way down it, murmuring to the more anxious-looking refugees that papers were no trouble at all, he had connections, three days and a small fee would see it done. One man had started to follow him off to talk it over when an old fellow grabbed his sleeve and hissed a warning: last month someone on this same corner believed exactly that, handed over the money, and the man vanished. Go looking afterward and there wasn’t even a shopfront left to find. The man in the short jacket, caught out, made an awkward face and drifted to the other end of the line to try his luck elsewhere.
Ming Ling skipped the line and went straight to the side door, where he told a second constable his business: a death two months back, a woman named Cheng Weilan, drowned. The constable asked for papers first. Ming Ling handed over the only thing he had — an old identification card from his years at the police station in the French Concession, no longer worth anything, just his name and a faded stamp. The constable turned it over twice, frowned, said nothing more, and pointed him up the stairs to the criminal registry on the second floor.
The corridor upstairs was more crowded than the one below, files stacked crooked, half the labels on the cabinets curling at the edges. A Chinese clerk sat behind a desk with the paint peeling off it, forms spread in front of him. He glanced up once, went back to writing, and only after a good while asked what Ming Ling wanted. The clerk’s surname was Cen, past forty, wire-rimmed glasses tied behind his ears with string so they wouldn’t slip while he worked, his cuffs worn shiny — the kind of man who’d spent half a life in government offices and had the local wisdom carved into his bones: do more, get blamed more; do less, get blamed less. On the corner of his desk sat a chipped enamel mug with a few faded tea leaves floating in water topped up so many times the color barely showed, and he still drank it, cup after cup, as though the bitterness alone kept him upright. Ming Ling repeated his business. The clerk dug through a thick register, turning pages, stopped at one, glanced at it twice, and closed the book.
“Examined,” he said. “Ruled an accident. Lost her footing at night, went in the water. Case closed.”
“Could I see the full record of the examination?”
The clerk looked up as if he’d been asked something odd. “And you are — family?”
“An old acquaintance.”
“An acquaintance has no standing to review a case file.” His tone was flat, reciting something worn smooth from repetition. “How many of these happen in Macau in a month, you think? Investigate every one and the station might as well shut its doors.”
“This old identification, then—” Ming Ling slid the police-station card forward.
The clerk glanced at it and shook his head without picking it up. “A Shanghai constable has no jurisdiction over a Macau case. You know that yourself.” He said it flatly, no mockery in it, which somehow left even less room to argue.
Ming Ling didn’t back off. He tried another question — who had examined the body, and could he see a copy of the report. The clerk, growing impatient, said the examination had been done by a doctor they used for this kind of thing, a quick look, nothing worth chasing further. “No family came forward to make trouble over it. Why would we spend the time.”
Ming Ling asked whether Cheng Weilan had had any disputes with anyone before she died, whether any complaint had ever been filed against her or by her. The clerk flipped back a few pages and shook his head — no formal report on record. “Everyone on that street had good things to say about her. Who’d have a grudge against a woman like that?”
Ming Ling pressed on, asking for the name and address of the doctor, thinking he might get more out of him privately. This time the clerk made no trouble, and pulled out a slip with a name on it. Surname Lu. A doctor they used regularly for cases that didn’t need much looking into. “Old Dr. Lu’s eyesight isn’t what it used to be, but for telling whether a woman fell in on her own, that’s plenty.” The clerk laughed a little at his own joke, then caught himself and added, “Just talk. Don’t take it too seriously.” Ming Ling filed the name away and asked no more about it.
He asked next whether the body had been examined at the morgue or on the spot, and where it had been buried. The clerk checked the register again — examined at a charnel house near the Inner Harbour, buried right after, the neighbours pooling money for a grave out at Taipa, one of those unmarked burial grounds, no proper headstone, just a wooden marker with a name on it. “That’s how it goes here,” the clerk said, a tired edge in his voice, the kind that comes from having seen the same thing too many times. “No family to claim the body, it doesn’t keep long, the undertakers can’t wait around. Bury it quick and be done.” Hearing this only tightened his grip, without his quite noticing, on the strap of the bag over his shoulder. A person could live most of a life and still not manage a proper burial at the end of it.
While they talked, a choked sobbing started up down the corridor — a middle-aged woman on her knees before another desk, a baby wrapped in rags in her arms, begging the clerk there to make an exception. The child’s entry papers had been lost somewhere on the road, she said, the baby had a fever these past few days, please let them through and she’d sort out the paperwork after. The clerk waved his hands helplessly, said the rules couldn’t bend, and the woman cried harder, until the people waiting nearby turned their faces away, unable to watch and unable to help. Ming Ling stood where he was and said nothing.
Just then a commotion started at the stairwell — a group of refugees who’d finished registering were being led up to wait a few days in some emptied rooms on this floor until they could be placed somewhere. Clerk Cen was called over to help. Before he went, he reached into a drawer, took out two coppers, and pressed them, without anyone noticing, into the hand of the woman with the baby. “Go buy some rice paste at the corner,” he said, low. “Get some food into her.” The woman blinked, too startled to thank him, and he’d already turned away, his face settling back into the same official coldness. “Nothing else, then, I’ve got to go,” he said, not waiting for an answer, and hurried off, leaving the register open on the desk, its pages turning twice in a draft from the stairwell. Ming Ling watched this and felt something shift toward the clerk he’d found so unlikeable a minute before. Everyone in this place, it seemed, was quietly doing what small kindness they could within whatever little authority they had, and saying nothing about it.
He stood there a while longer. No one paid him any more attention. He walked back down the corridor to the stairs and looked at the line below, still stretching out of sight. This place had swallowed thousands of unfamiliar faces these past months. One woman’s death didn’t make the list.
On his way down, a local constable smoking in the corner of the landing noticed his face and asked, offhand, whether he’d come up empty. Ming Ling nodded. The man took a drag and said, quietly, that if he really wanted to get anywhere, the proper channels wouldn’t do it. “There’s a detective here, surname Wa. Doesn’t much go by the book. You could try him.” He didn’t wait for an answer, just turned and went back into the office.
Ming Ling stood at the station entrance. The line of refugees hadn’t shortened any, each one shuffling forward under their load, no one sparing him a glance. To that line, his errand today was worth less than the ground under their feet. He stood a moment longer, then turned and walked back into the city.
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Chapter Three
The Riverview Pavilion
The Song residence stood on Bubbling Well Road, a Western front hall of terrazzo and crystal built for show, and behind it a Suzhou garden of rockery and still water that was the real thing. Old Master Song had made his money half as a comprador, half on the old ground of salt, and the house laid both halves out for anyone to see. Deepest in the garden, at the water's edge, stood the Riverview Pavilion — built for Su Wandeng years ago, back when she was still a dependent child in the house and not, by blood, a daughter of it. A debt he'd never once mentioned aloud. She never quite stopped feeling it anyway.
The murder had gone through the household like something spilled — old Zhang at the gate had a theory, Auntie Liu in the kitchen had a better one. Su Wandeng rose at her usual hour, ran her usual practice, kept her rehearsal at the Golden Theatre, same as any week, and let nothing cross her face while she did it. Twenty years of practice at that particular trick.
"Miss," said her maid Chunxiao, pinning up her hair, "they're saying out there Manli was killed by someone she knew — and some are saying there was a young master from a grand family, coming and going after dark without so much as a lantern."
"Idle talk. None of it worth minding." Su Wandeng kept her voice light and her hand moving at her brows — though for one instant, no longer than a held breath, the brush stopped dead against the mirror, and a fleck of kohl smudged crooked below her lashline before she caught it and wiped it clean with her thumb. Chunxiao, chattering on about which dress to wear, didn't notice.
She didn't ask again about the young master. She already had a fair guess what shape that story would take by its third telling. She and Manli went back to the same Suzhou lane, girls together before either of them had a stage or a dance floor — worn down over the years to a card at New Year, nothing more, or so she'd have told anyone who asked. She hadn't imagined it would end like this. She hadn't imagined it would reach back and put its hand on something she'd kept buried since she was twelve.
That afternoon Wei Zhongyan came, as he always did, to work through her repertoire. Fifty-eight now, the same grey gown, twenty years of never once raising his voice to her the way he did his other students. "This passage wants more restraint," he said, tapping the score. "You've been singing it too full these past two days — wearing the feeling right on your face. The whole difficulty here is concealment. The deeper it's hidden, the more it startles when it finally shows."
"Yes, teacher." She held the next phrase where he'd asked her to, and it came out thin and strained instead of restrained, cracking half a tone off pitch on the turn — a mistake she hadn't made in years, and one she covered by coughing once and starting the line again from the top, not quite meeting his eyes.
Wei only watched her a moment, said nothing about the crack, and let it go the way he let most things about her go unsaid. "Stay in these next few days. See no one you don't have to." He rose to leave, and paused at the door, some old, unresolved tenderness crossing his face that he'd never once put a name to, not even to himself.
Song Yanqiu came at dusk, and stood by the pond a while before he went looking for her. Three years promised to each other had taught him to read the smallest change in her the way other men read a ledger, and something in her these past days had shifted. He couldn't have said what.
"You knew her?" he asked, once they'd exchanged the usual pleasantries about the case.
"An old acquaintance, from home. We hadn't kept in touch." Her voice didn't waver. Her hands, wrapped around her own teacup, tightened enough that the porcelain clicked once against her ring.
"If it's troubling you, you don't have to bear it alone."
"I'm fine. It's only all this noise around the case." She reached up and straightened his collar instead of answering further, a gesture flawless in its ease, and turned the whole conversation aside with it. He didn't press. He'd learned long ago exactly where she stopped a sentence and turned a full quarter away from it without seeming to move at all. But something had crossed her eyes just now, there and gone, and it sat wrong with him longer than it should have.
He watched her walk back to the house and didn't see her hands, once his back was turned — how they closed into fists, how long she stood there afterward before she let her face do anything at all.
• • •
Ming and Zhou called at the Song residence three days later. The steward tried to turn them away first: the young miss resting, not receiving. He only gave way, sourly, when Zhou produced the paperwork. Su Wandeng came out in a plain cotton robe, no powder, a just-woken haze about her that made her look, oddly, more ordinary than she ever did in the tabloids, and sat with her hands folded on her knees like a woman about to walk onstage.
"I understand you and Miss Manli were from the same town — knew each other as children?"
"We grew up in the same lane. Stole loquats off a neighbor's tree once and got scolded for it by both households." Her fingers traced the rim of her teacup as she spoke — and then, reaching for it, misjudged the angle by a hair and caught the handle wrong, tea sloshing over the rim onto her own sleeve. She set the cup down too fast, pressed her sleeve flat with her palm, and went on as though nothing had happened, though her voice had gone half a register higher than before. "My family met with some misfortune not long after. We lost touch."
"Misfortune?" Zhou asked.
"My father died young. What came after, I don't remember clearly. Mr. Wei took me in — a debt I could never repay." She reached for a napkin to blot the tea stain and didn't look up while she did it.
Ming watched the whole business with the cup and said nothing about it, though he noted, later, that it was the only unplanned thing she'd done since they'd sat down. Everything else came out smooth: the account of her father, her age at the time, all of it poured out even as a jug someone had already measured. Asked whether she and Manli had had any dealings with money, she answered readily: small sums, now and then, nothing worth mentioning, her accounts open to anyone who wanted to look. Asked where she'd been the night of the murder, she named the Golden Theatre and the ride home with Song Yanqiu without a beat of hesitation, as if the question had been waiting for her rather than the other way around.
She saw them out herself, composure back in full, right up to the gate.
"Nothing more, nothing less," Zhou said once they were clear of it. "That one knows how to answer a question."
"An old friend dies and she doesn't crack once. Not even over the tea she spilled on herself." Ming frowned at the closed gate behind them. "Nobody's that steady on their own. Somebody built her this way..."
He didn't say the rest of what he was thinking. He wrote it in the file instead, later that night, in four words: composure — built, not natural.
They confirmed the Golden Theatre end of it easily enough — the house steward there, a wiry man named Sun, had the playbill and the schedule ready before they'd finished asking, and the stagehands' accounts matched hers down to the minute. Whether that meant it had simply happened that way, or that someone had gone through the theater in advance making sure it would sound like it had, Ming didn't decide either way. He wrote it down and kept walking.
"She's about to marry into the Song family," Zhou said, on the walk back. "Why risk it all for a woman she barely knew?"
"Maybe she doesn't have to risk anything at all." Ming watched the streetlamps come up along Bubbling Well Road. "That's rather the trouble with her."
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Chapter Two
The Mourning Hall
The mourning hall had been set up beneath the arcade of a shop at the end of Guanqian Street. Two lengths of white cloth had been strung up on bamboo poles, bellying out with each gust of wind and falling slack again. When Ming Ling arrived, a shop hand was crouched by the door pasting together a small paper boat, still unpainted at bow and stern, the smell of paste mixing with incense smoke thick enough to catch in the throat.
He didn’t go in right away, but stood a while under the arcade to see who was in charge. A married couple were seeing to things — the man in his fifties, short, in a half-worn short jacket, cloth shoes gone grey with washing, crouched behind the register table with a worn writing brush, recording each mourner’s gift in careful, even strokes; the woman in her forties, an apron tied on, moving in and out with tea, her voice loud but her manner attentive — when someone arrived late she said nothing about it, only pressed a bowl of hot tea into their hands.
A coffin-bearer’s man came up to the husband and named a price. The man frowned and haggled in a low voice, saying the undertakers’ rates had gone mad these past months, a plain thin coffin running twelve dollars now, nearly half again what it would have cost in spring — “you’re robbing the dead as much as the living” — and after some back and forth got the price down by twenty cents. He crossed out the figure in the ledger and rewrote it, his hand never faltering, then murmured to A-Gui that the rest of the shortfall would come from their own pocket for now, to be made up later from the incense-money box, and no need to trouble the neighbours with it.
Ming Ling had been standing there long enough that the woman noticed him first, and came over to look him up and down. Her eyes went to the long gown he wore, soaked through and dried into wrinkles, then down to his mud-caked leather shoes — not the local way of dressing; more like someone from outside.
“Come to pay respects?”
“Yes. An old acquaintance.”
“Ah.” She asked nothing further, only turned and called out, “A-Kun, bring a stool.”
The man answered and brought over a low stool, setting it in an unobtrusive corner near the altar, then reached up without being asked and replaced a nearly spent stick of incense with a fresh one — the motion so practiced it was clear he’d repeated it more times than he could count these past few days. Ming Ling learned only later that this couple were no blood relation to the dead woman, only neighbours; Cheng Weilan had no family of her own to speak of, and it was this couple who had seen to the whole funeral from the start, even fronting the money for the coffin.
“There’s been so many coming down from Canton and Shanghai these past days,” A-Kun said, half to himself, once he’d finished the entry, as if to explain why there weren’t more hands to help. “By rights we should’ve hired a proper undertaker’s crew, but the prices have gone up so — we neighbours are managing it between us. Miss Cheng, wherever she is now, won’t mind us making do.”
Ming Ling stood a while before the altar without speaking, looking at the portrait — an old photograph, its edges yellowed, the woman in it smiling faintly, her eyes bright. He didn’t let himself look long.
A-Gui brought over a bowl of tea and pressed it into his hands. “Cold out. Drink something hot.”
He thanked her and didn’t drink, only held the bowl until it went cold in his hands.
Mourners came and went in a steady trickle, mostly neighbours. A boat-dwelling old man came in and kowtowed, muttering that the few dollars he’d borrowed from Miss Cheng were meant to be repaid this month, then sighed and put a little extra into the donation box. Two shopkeeper wives came in together, signing the register and murmuring that Miss Cheng had never much cared to speak of her Shanghai years, and if pressed too hard she’d only smile and change the subject — no one had ever gotten a straight answer from her. A fishmonger came in and said something low to A-Kun, who nodded and drew a small cloth bundle from a drawer and handed it over; the man took it, kowtowed once, and left — some old debt being settled, Ming Ling guessed, and asked nothing. He stood to one side and listened closely, his face giving nothing away.
Partway through, a dye-shop worker came striding in without so much as pausing at the threshold, announcing loudly that Miss Cheng owed the shop three months on her cloth bill and that, with so many people gathered, now was as good a time as any for A-Kun to settle it. His voice was loud enough that several people burning incense turned to look. A-Gui’s face went hard; she crossed the room in a few steps, pulled the man aside into a corner, and scolded him under her breath — was there no shame in dunning a debt before the dead, did he not fear for his own luck — all the while fishing a few coppers from her apron pocket and pressing them into his hand, telling him to come by the dye shop tomorrow for the rest. The man took the money looking chastened, shrank back toward the door, and said nothing further. A-Gui brushed at her apron as though wiping away dust that wasn’t there, and turned back with her hospitable face already back in place, as if none of it had happened.
A middle-aged man in a long gown came in next, a stranger to the place; he looked around before putting a note of no small value into the donation box, drawing a few glances. A-Kun went to greet him, and the man introduced himself as a member of one of Miss Cheng’s credit circles, saying he’d only recently drawn an emergency sum from it, and now that Miss Cheng was gone and the circle disbanded, he’d come to see her off — he left without giving his name. A-Gui watched him go and murmured to a woman beside her that men like him — ���circle members” — had come by five or six times already this week, some familiar faces, some she’d never seen before. “Miss Cheng must have had more of these circles running than half this street ever guessed.”
With so few hands to manage things, and A-Kun run off his feet minding the register while seeing to the undertaker’s men, Ming Ling went over and lent a hand, stacking the folded paper money into neat piles. A-Kun made a show of declining at first, but seeing how deftly Ming Ling worked, let him be, though he glanced at him more than once.
The two folded paper money side by side a while before A-Kun asked what line of work he was in. Ming Ling said vaguely that he did a little trading here and there. A-Kun didn’t press, only went on talking about his own pawnshop, nearly thirty years running, passed down from his father — “every family on this street has come through our door at one time or another. Miss Cheng, though, she never pawned anything of value — pawned a bracelet once, back when she first arrived and money was tight.” He caught himself there, as though he’d said more than he meant to, and bent his head back to the paper money without finishing the thought.
A-Gui passed by with a tray and caught the last of it. “What exactly are you to her?” she cut in. “She never once mentioned any old acquaintance who came round.” The question was tossed off lightly, but her eyes went over his face all the same.
“An old acquaintance from Shanghai,” Ming Ling said, his hands not slowing. “Haven’t seen her in many years.”
A-Gui said only “Ah,” and asked nothing more, turning to see to another guest — but Ming Ling could tell, from that one glance, that the woman had filed something away.
A while later, a young woman in a mission-school uniform came in leading a small boy by the hand, seven or eight years old, shy, ducking behind her the moment they crossed the threshold. She lit incense for him and helped him kowtow before the portrait, murmuring, “This is Auntie Cheng — you won’t see her again — say thank you to her.” The boy nodded, not quite understanding. Ming Ling glanced at them twice and thought nothing more of it, taking the boy for just another neighbourhood child Cheng Weilan had once looked after. The young woman finished quickly and led the boy away, saying there was still business back at the school.
Toward evening the Daoist priest arrived, a tall, spare man in his fifties, his robe washed pale, a set of chime-bells in hand that he struck as he walked, ringing out crisp and quick. Business had been unusually brisk these past months, and he had three or four services to get through in a day; he came in at a near-run, untying his bundle of scripture scrolls even as he negotiated the schedule with A-Kun. “I’ve two more waiting — one on Almirante Road, one in Sá Kei Vun — by rights this service runs forty-nine minutes, but today I can only give you thirty. Not meaning any disrespect, there’s simply no time to spare.” A-Kun frowned but agreed, and slipped him a little extra under the table, at which the priest, satisfied, cleared his throat and began striking the bells, chanting fast and urgent, the ends of each line drawn out and floating, half song, half the hurried cry of a street peddler — a sound that mixed with the solemn grief before the altar into something you couldn’t quite call comic, and couldn’t quite call sorrowful either.
The paper boat was carried to the back lane and burned, firelight throwing a shifting glow across the wall. The neighbours followed one by one, each with a stack of folded paper money, feeding it into the flames without a word, only the crackle of the fire rising and falling. A-Gui crouched by the blaze, stirring the ashes with a bamboo stick, murmuring something Ming Ling couldn’t quite make out — only a few broken words reached him: ...go well... don’t worry for us... The fire snapped and leapt higher; the paper boat’s bow curled at the edge and slowly collapsed into the ash, its small light flickering twice, then going out.
A-Kun stood behind her without crouching down, watching the fire, the worn brush still in his hand. The neighbours drifted off one by one, back to their homes, their shops, no one lingering. Only then did A-Kun crouch and tamp down the ashes with his foot to be sure the fire was fully out, before he and A-Gui, one after the other, gathered up their things without a word between them — one rolling up the bamboo poles, the other folding the length of white cloth from the register table into a neat, careful square, as though meaning to keep it for next time. Ming Ling stood some distance off, not going to help, and watched them carry everything back into the shop before he turned and made his way back toward the Yuelai Inn.
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Old Acquaintances
A thin grey mist still hung over the city the next morning when Ming Ling and Zhou Wenbin went back to the lane. The uproar of the night before had already burned itself out — flatbread stalls open as usual, women hurrying past with chamber pots to empty, not one of them sparing a glance at the building half the street had gathered around only hours before. Only the strip of police seal across the door still said anything had happened there at all.
Ah Gui had been put up at the superintendent's flat downstairs. Three years dressing Manli's hair wasn't a deep bond, in the end, but it was a familiar one, and the sudden hole where it had been showed in the way her hands shook pouring the tea.
"She was never stingy with us," Ah Gui said, voice still raw. "New Year, any holiday, the bonuses were never short. When my mother took sick last year, it was Manli sent the money for the medicine." She twisted her handkerchief. "Only her temper had gone short, these past months. Sat up some nights writing, drawing, whatever it was — and if I came in to fill the kettle she'd throw a hand over the page like I'd caught her at something."
"Writing what?" Ming asked. Ah Gui ran on when she talked, circled back, repeated herself — none of it sounded rehearsed, which was itself worth noting.
"Never dared look. Wasn't my place, and she kept the jewelry-chest key on her person day and night besides." Ah Gui hesitated, then lowered her voice, glancing at the door as if it might be listening. "There was an old man, about two months back — country dress, worn out, hanging round the mouth of the lane a good while. Never came in. But she knew him. Watched him from the window so long her hand shook over her teacup. Wouldn't say who he was. Told me to mind my business. Never came back after that, and she was never quite herself again."
"What did he look like?"
"Too far off to say. Bent in the back, walked with a limp. Not a local — country accent I couldn't place."
Ming and Zhou traded a glance and wrote it down without a word between them.
The tailor's wife next door had heard voices through the wall not long before — a woman's, she thought, something like kept it from you all these years and nothing after. The widow upstairs was too deaf to offer anything beyond a complaint about the noise the police had made at six that morning. On their way out, Ming turned back once more and asked whether there was anything in the room Manli herself had set store by — nothing valuable, just something she'd kept close.
Ah Gui pressed her lips together, thinking it over. "The sewing basket by the bed, maybe. Never let anyone see what she was working on. Said once it was a keepsake. For someone who'd passed."
• • •
The Paramount by daylight was a different building entirely — the dance floor that blazed gold every night now swept by two bored staff with long brooms, the air gone stale with old powder and liquor under a thread of mildew. The manager, a heavyset man named Pan, came hurrying out the moment he saw the badges, bowing lower than the occasion called for and shouting for the good tea before anyone had asked for it.
"I brought that girl up from nothing," Pan said, easing his bulk into a groaning wicker chair. "This grieves me more than you'd credit. Ask whatever you like — and frankly, the longer this case drags, the worse it is for my business, so ask fast."
Fewer clients these past months, always some excuse about feeling unwell, was as far as Pan would go on "different." On Cen he grew more careful, then less: presentable man, serious money, would've been a good turn for her if it had gone anywhere — only his wife wasn't the type to look past it, and had come in once to make a scene of it in the main hall. On other regulars he counted off a Canton trader who booked the whole floor when he felt flush, and then, voice dropping to almost nothing: "There was a young master from the Song house too. Side door only, never the front. If you want to go digging there, gentlemen, I wish you luck."
Two dancers who'd known her well gave conflicting accounts — one said Manli had gone gentler this past year, her old pride worn thin; the other, mouth twisting, said Manli had taken to borrowing small sums from her, always for "household expenses," never quite explained. Pan bowed them all the way out to the lane, thickening with gratitude the whole way, as if goodwill might yet buy back whatever this cost him.
• • •
Dusk was settling over Avenue Joffre by the time they left, streetlamps coming on over wet pavement. Zhou walked ahead, turning the case over out loud with real relish, the passion angle looking stronger by the hour in his opinion, while Ming slowed at a secondhand stall on the corner, caught by an old sandalwood box with a rusted clasp. It looked, uncannily, like the one that used to sit on his mother's dressing table.
"Suzhou work, that," the stallkeeper said, hurrying over. "Even has a false bottom to it."
Ming crouched over the box and didn't touch it. He was seven the year his mother left without a word — no word since, only a vague sense she'd settled somewhere near Suzhou, nothing he'd ever confirmed. It had been raining that day. He'd been in the back room practicing his characters, and by the time the noise outside brought him running there was nothing left in the courtyard but rain filling up footprints, and the box gone from her table. He learned much later that his father had kept another woman for years, that the household had been held together by nothing but appearances long before that, and that his mother had likely been planning her exit for a while.
He'd traced more missing people than he could count by now. Never once opened a file on his own mother. Told himself there was no time for it. The truer version was that he'd rather not know some days than know for certain — dead, or worse, alive somewhere and simply not thinking of him at all.
"Chief, we going?" Zhou called back. "Getting dark, and there's still Cen tomorrow."
"Coming." He didn't ask the stallkeeper where the box had come from. He caught up to Zhou, who was still talking, something about Cen and the wife and tomorrow's schedule, and let most of it go past him unheard.
• • •
Assistant Manager Cen's house near the Garden Bridge announced money before anyone opened the gate — clipped magnolias, black ironwork, the works. Mrs. Cen, the servant said, happened to be visiting her own family. Neither man remarked on it. Neither believed it either.
Cen poured the tea himself, hand unsteady enough to rattle the cup against the saucer, and didn't bother wiping up what spilled. "I still can't make sense of it," he said, eyes flicking once toward the inner rooms. "Who would do such a thing. She was a good woman."
He'd known her a little over two years, had meant, more than once, to buy out her contract properly, gone over the figures, never quite managed to see it through, his wife's temper being what it was. These past months Manli had seemed to lose interest in the whole arrangement, which he'd taken for resentment at his delays. "But now that I think of it—" He stopped himself hard enough that his teacup clicked against the saucer a second time, and shook his head. "Nothing. Not worth your time."
Ming let it go without writing it down. He'd remember the exact word Cen had stopped on regardless.
"Your wife made a scene at the Paramount not long ago," Zhou put in, blunt, watching the color go out of Cen's face.
"She shouted, broke a vase, went home the same night. Nothing came of it." His voice cracked up sharp, surely you don't suspect me, then dropped again, ashamed of itself. Asked where he'd been the night it happened, he answered too fast: home, all night, the servants could vouch for it. On the way out Ming drew one of the older servants aside, and got a much less certain version: the master had been in his study very late, as far as anyone could say for sure.
"Best you not travel anywhere for the time being," Ming told Cen at the door, and left him nodding, hands still unsteady, in the doorway of his own good house.
• • •
They walked back along the Huangpu past noon, the wind snapping at their coats. "Doesn't strike me as a man who could do it," Zhou said. "Looked like a man who'd actually fallen for her."
"Could or couldn't, we don't know yet." Ming watched a barge push a muddy wake across the water. "But his wife's timing's worth a second look. And whatever he swallowed mid-sentence."
An old rickshaw puller resting by a candy stall had caught enough of their talk to lean in uninvited. He'd waited fares outside Manli's lane for years, he said, and she'd never once looked down on a man like him for it — but there'd been a young fellow lately, fine black motorcar, driver in uniform, plainly somebody's son. Always deep in the night, always gone before light, and not a man's business to ask after a car like that. He hadn't caught the plate. He remembered the crest on the door, though — a small gold flower, chased into the lacquer.
Ming paid him for it and said nothing to Zhou about what he already suspected that crest belonged to.
• • •
Back at the station that night, Zhou worked through a cold steamed bun and his own theory at the same time. "Comes down to money or love, always does. One of this lot's bound to crack." Ming circled three names on his sheet without much conviction, Cen, the Song car, the Canton trader, and said only that everything in that room had pointed one direction from the start, and the ease of that pointing was the one thing he still didn't trust.
"That's your one flaw, Chief," Zhou said, half a complaint. "Nobody at this station is more careful than you, and it costs you time."
"Costs less than being wrong." Ming folded the sheet under the paperweight and said nothing else. Outside, the night watchman's clapper struck the third watch, and the two of them gathered their things without another word between them.
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Ashes of the Floating World
ASHES OF THE FLOATING WORLD
浮世残灯
A Novel
By Harvey Xu
Ashes of the Floating World
Copyright © 2026 by Harvey Xu
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Where actual historical place names and institutions of Macau in the 1930s and 1940s appear, they are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
First edition.
Contents
(Right-click this table and choose “Update Field,” or press Ctrl+A then F9, to generate chapter page numbers.)
Chapter One
Rain Over the Inner Harbour
The rain came first off the ship’s rail, carrying the smell of diesel and something faintly fishy. Ming Ling gripped the gangway’s iron railing with one hand and drew the wicker trunk close with the other; its corner still caught on a step, letting out a dull thud, and the clasp sprang open a crack. He crouched to press it shut, with no time yet to lift his head and see what sort of place this was. Against his chest, in an inner pocket, a palm-sized ledger swayed and knocked against his ribs — seven or eight years of money spent hiring people to ask after news, down to the last few coppers, all recorded there, a habit he’d picked up in his years at the police station and never managed to break.
The boat had been three days at sea. The hold was packed shoulder to shoulder, most of them people making their way down from Shanghai and Canton, their luggage outweighing themselves — bedrolls tied with rope, wicker cases, one man carrying an entire door panel lashed to his back with hemp cord, saying he couldn’t bear to leave behind anything of the family home. An old woman kept muttering that her son was still up in Zhabei, that when she’d left, the guns had already been sounding a few streets off; no one could talk her out of sitting on deck facing north, as if from there she might see something. Ming Ling said nothing, only drew his own small bundle closer — he had no household goods worth mourning, only the ledger, and a slip of paper.
On the second night, a middle-aged man with two children sat down beside him and held out half a cigarette, which he declined with a wave of the hand. The man lit it himself and asked, without much interest, whether he was going to stay with relatives or to do business. Ming Ling couldn’t say which, and murmured something vague about visiting a friend. The man didn’t press him, only sighed and said he’d once kept a small dry-goods shop in Hongkew; the day the bombs fell it went, shop and stock together, and now he was taking his two children south to an uncle several times removed. “Long as you’re alive,” he said, “you’re alive, and there’s still a ledger to keep.” He said it lightly, in passing, but it lodged somewhere in Ming Ling, who didn’t answer, only stood a while longer in the wind on deck before going below to sleep.
The boat put in at the Inner Harbour early in the morning. The sky hadn’t fully lightened, and the wharf was already a crush of noise — porters shouting their rates, the sampans of the boat people jostling each other on the muddy water, someone cursing in Cantonese with the ends of the words dragged long and sharp, more of it than he could follow. A congee seller had her stall set up on the stone steps, bowls clattering against the pot’s rim, two coppers a bowl with a pinch of pickled vegetable on top. A barefoot boy trailed him a dozen steps, reaching for the trunk, and when Ming Ling turned it out of reach the boy only grinned and went off to pester a man carrying two baskets of salted fish, who tossed him a copper for no reason Ming Ling could see.
He asked around and learned of a few inns near the harbour, and took the nearest — a narrow shopfront, the two characters on its sign flaked down to an outline he could just make out as Yuelai. Behind the counter sat a woman of about fifty, stitching a shoe sole by the light of an oil lamp. She glanced up at him, took in his soaked long gown and then the trunk in his hand, and spoke, unhurried.
The woman’s surname was Feng; the neighbours called her “Boss Feng,” though the inn had all of six rooms and hardly needed a boss — she had simply run it alone for more than a decade, and the name had stuck. Her husband had worked the boats in his day and been lost in a storm, leaving her the small inn and a daughter still at the breast. She had raised the girl on her own, and the trade of stitching soles, people said, she’d picked up in those years, minding the counter by day and doing piecework by night out of sheer restlessness. The daughter was long since married off to Hong Kong, and the woman kept her few rooms without complaint, telling anyone who’d listen that “guests coming and going beat an empty house any day.” Her hands, from years of needle and thread, had thick, knuckled joints, yet when she poured tea they were perfectly steady — not a drop spilled.
“How many nights?”
“Not sure yet.”
“Fifty cents a night, morning tea included. Pay in advance.” She ran the needle once through her hair to sharpen it. “Where are you from? Doesn’t sound like local speech.”
“Shanghai.”
The woman said “Ah,” her eyes lingering half a second on his face, as though about to ask something more and thinking better of it. She only rose and led him upstairs. The staircase was too narrow for two to pass; the boards creaked underfoot. On the second-floor landing, someone was arguing loudly with the houseboy about bugs in the bedding — the woman walked past without turning her head, tossing back “I’ll change it for you later,” as if she’d heard it all before.
The room was small — a bed, a table, a washstand, the window facing the back lane. Rain ran off the eaves and pooled on the sill outside. Ming Ling set down the trunk, in no hurry to open it, and stood by the window a while watching the rain. Across the lane, someone’s washing hung out dripping, and no one had come to bring it in.
By dusk the rain had eased, and rather than rest, he went out to get his bearings. Along the Inner Harbour the arcaded shopfronts ran one into the next, bamboo poles for drying clothes jutting out overhead, the dripping sound coming from every direction at once. Two lanes south, past the low ridgeline of tiled roofs, a building blazed with a light too bright to be anything but a gambling hall — red paper lanterns at the door, a stream of people in and out, and faintly, the barker’s voice calling the bets. As he watched, a man came stumbling out of the doorway, coins spilling from his arms across the ground; he didn’t stop to gather them, only lurched off into the depths of the lane, cursing at no one in particular. He hadn’t gone far before two shapes slipped out from the far end of the alley, took him one on each side, and pressed him without a word against a wall. The stocky one in front struck him open-handed across the face. “Three months,” he said, “and you thought our money grew on trees?” The man staggered, half sobered by the blow, and began begging for more time, saying his wife was still sick at home. The stocky man only sneered, went through the man’s pockets, drew out a pocket watch, weighed it in his palm, and tucked it away. “The interest still stands,” he said, and walked off with the other. The man slid down against the wall and sat there a good while before he managed to stand, and shuffled away without another curse left in him. Ming Ling watched from the mouth of the lane and did not step in. It was none of his business.
A dessert-soup stall by the road was still open. He bought a bowl of sesame paste for two coppers and sat on a low stool to drink it slowly. The old woman running the stall, seeing his face was new to her, asked where he’d come from, and on hearing Shanghai she sighed. “They’ve been coming down in waves from Shanghai and Canton these days. The Settlement’s still quiet for now, but who’s to say how long that’ll last.” A few other customers joined in, scattered talk — someone said the Japanese would take all of Shanghai sooner or later, someone else said Macau at least had the Portuguese over it, wouldn’t come to serious trouble any time soon. Ming Ling said nothing, finished his soup, and only asked whether anyone nearby ran a rotating credit circle, a hui, where money changed hands. He was thinking that a woman newly arrived here, wanting to get a footing, would have had to learn her way around such things first. The old woman thought a moment and said there were a few people on this street who ran such circles, though she couldn’t give him names — “that’s the sort of thing the neighbours know among themselves; an outsider won’t get anywhere asking.” He thanked her and went back to the inn.
That night he barely slept. He lay down, then sat up again, and opened the ledger he kept against his chest, reading it by the little light coming through the window. The entries ran early to late, the ink darker in some years than others: the nineteenth year of the Republic, paid a courier to carry a letter, three dollars; the twenty-first year, paid old Zhou the boatman to ask again, five dollars, the reply came back no such person found; the twenty-third year... page after page, densely written, and then, toward the end, blank. He closed the book without reading further.
He got up in the middle of the night to relieve himself. Downstairs the hall was still lit — the woman who stitched soles was settling accounts with a guest come in late, talking about another boatload of people transferring down from Hong Kong that day, saying things weren’t quiet in Canton either, the train station too crowded to get near. The guest answered halfheartedly and complained that rice had gone up again, over thirty cents a catty even for the coarse grade — these days, he said, “you keep your life, but your stomach goes hungry first.” Ming Ling stood a moment at the top of the stairs listening, said nothing, and on his way back picked up half a torn newspaper the guest had left on the landing — a Canton paper, its edges curled, the ink smeared past reading in most places, except in one corner of the front page, where he could still make out the characters for Shanghai front, a month of fierce fighting, and our forces withdraw. The rest had bled away in some old rain. He held it to the lamp until the wick guttered and steadied again, and made out nothing more, then folded it and tucked it into the lining of his trunk, next to the ledger.
The rain had stopped by the next morning. He went down for morning tea at the Yuelai and asked the woman, in passing, whether there was a woman here surnamed Cheng, from Shanghai, who’d done a little business in Macau these past years and might be known about.
The woman, tray in hand, didn’t break her stride. “Miss Cheng? Of course — everyone round the Inner Harbour knows her.” She paused, then added, as if it were an afterthought and a complaint both, “Fish prices are up again this year, thirty-six cents a catty for mackerel. Good thing Miss Cheng taught me a thing or two about keeping accounts, or this place would’ve gone under long ago.”
“Is she—”
“Is she what?” The question seemed to trip her up. She set the tray down on the table and turned to look at him properly. “What are you to her?”
“An old acquaintance.”
“Ah.” She pulled out a stool and sat, not especially surprised. “Then you’ve come at a bad time. She died two months back. Fell into the harbour — somewhere along the Inner Harbour, I couldn’t tell you exactly which wharf. By the time word got round, they’d already pulled her out.”
Ming Ling’s hand had gone still on the teacup. He didn’t trust his voice enough to use it yet.
“A shame, losing someone like that.” Her tone was as even as if she were still talking about fish prices. “She looked out for people while she was alive — whoever was in a bind could count on borrowing a little from her to tide them over. Simple funeral, no family to speak of, the neighbours saw to it themselves.”
“Was there an inquest? How did she die?”
“There was one. The authorities called it an accident — lost her footing in the dark.” She glanced at him and said no more, though her eyes lingered on his face a moment longer, as if she’d guessed at something and decided not to ask.
Ming Ling was quiet a while, then asked whether Miss Cheng had, while she was alive, run any credit circles for the neighbours.
This seemed to interest her more. “She did — several of them. Half the households on this street had dealings with her one way or another. She kept the numbers straight and never took advantage — if someone was short, she’d find a way to help if she could, but the books themselves, not a cent out of place. You don’t see her kind often.�� She seemed a little surprised at herself, at having said so much.
Ming Ling finished his tea. It had gone cold without his noticing.
That afternoon he went alone to the Inner Harbour wharf. The tide had gone out some way, leaving moss and broken shells slick on the stone steps. The tide crept back over two more of them before he moved again, not entirely sure himself what he was waiting for — an answer, or only the moment he would finally believe the answer he already had. The wharf carried on as always around him, porters with their loads, children chasing each other over the steps; no one knew he was standing there, and no one knew that two months before, the water beneath that stone had taken someone under.
An old man mending fishing nets sat nearby on the steps, and after watching him stand there so long, asked whether he’d lost something. Ming Ling shook his head and said nothing. The old man didn’t press him, only went back to his net, the needle moving in and out at an unhurried pace, as if nothing at all had happened on this wharf — or as if everything had, and it was simply not his place to say.
That night he opened the ledger again, and took out the stub of pencil he carried with him, meaning to add a line by the lamplight. In other years, whatever word came back from his inquiries — no such person found, or some rumor of another sort — he had always been able to set down a line and close the book. This time he sat with the pencil hovering over the page until the nib dried, and in the end wrote only four characters: Cheng Weilan, deceased. The pen paused a moment after the final stroke, and a small blot of ink bled out and spread. He wrote nothing further, closed the book, and tucked it back against his chest, pressing his thumb once more over those two words before he lay down. The bedding smelled faintly of mildew, the inn’s rooms never quite drying out in this weather; he paid it no mind, and slept without waking again until morning.
Click to read the full book:
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[Huayu Xu @huxu20]

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[Huayu Xu @huxu20]

Chapter One
The Guttering Lamp
Autumn, the thirty-fourth year of the Republic. Cold Dew had just passed, and the nights had teeth in them now.
Dawn hadn't broken yet over the lane off the French Concession. The soymilk man was still setting up, ladling the first batch, and it caught a little on the bottom of the pot — that burnt-sugar smell that always meant it was too early for anyone decent to be up. On the third floor of one of the buildings, a window had stayed dark the whole night.
Ah Gui knocked twice. She'd dressed Manli's hair and pressed her clothes three years running, long enough to know her mistress never slept past sunrise no matter how late the dance hall kept her — so when the second knock went nowhere, she went and got the building super, and between the two of them they got the door open.
The smell hit her first, before she'd even made out the shape against the wall. Something underneath the incense and the old face powder that didn't belong. Manli was still in the ivory satin she'd worn out the night before, and her rouge had gone a strange flat color in the grey light, worse somehow than if she'd worn none.
Ah Gui's scream carried the length of the lane and woke most of it.
• • •
Word reached the station a little past six, and by then the tabloid men were already ahead of the police — three of them at the mouth of the lane before a single officer had been sent for. A name like Manli's didn't die quietly. Headline act at the Paramount, half the monied men in the city on her call list at one time or another. Within the hour the lane was solid with people: reporters up on their toes with cameras, flashbulbs cracking white every few seconds; newsboys who'd given up hawking anything else and just stood repeating the same three lines to whoever would listen; the neighbors in twos and threes, each retelling a little more colorful than the last. A jealous suitor. An old enemy come back. One man, dropping his voice like he was doing her memory a kindness, said a woman like that had had it coming for years, and nobody troubled to argue him out of it.
Ming Ling and Zhou Wenbin got through the rope a little before ten. Ming kept his hand up against the cameras the whole way in — a habit he'd never made peace with, seeing his own face turn up in tomorrow's paper before he'd even worked out what had happened.
He went in soft-footed, in a gown that had seen a few too many washes at the collar, and he didn't go near the body straight off. He stood just past the doorway and read the room first — where the windows sat, which way the furniture had been shoved, what the light was doing — the way he always did, the way half the station thought was a waste of ten minutes on a case that would likely solve itself by lunch anyway.
"Chief." Zhou came up beside him already talking, notebook out, a name underlined twice on the open page. Two years partnered together, and Ming still hadn't decided whether Zhou's hunger for a name in the paper under his own was a fault in him or just what youth looked like from the outside.
"Asked around already," Zhou said. "Four or five regulars at least. A bank manager named Cen sends a car for her daily. A trader up from Canton took a swing at another man over her two nights back, right there on the dance floor. A couple others I haven't run down yet." He tapped the page. "Has the shape of it, doesn't it. Remember the Subei girl last year — rose fast, turned up dead past the city line, and it was an old lover who couldn't stand seeing her with someone new. That's twice in two years, this exact story."
Ming remembered the case. It hadn't taken four days to close. He understood well enough what Zhou meant him to hear — that the shape fit, and a shape that fit was a comfortable thing to stop looking at.
"Could be," he said, and left it there, and went further into the room.
Someone had been through it — wardrobe hanging open, furs and silk dresses dragged down and left in a heap, every vanity drawer pulled out, a gilt powder compact smashed near the table leg with rouge tracked into the carpet on one side. A jewelry box lay tipped over by the bed, its contents spilled and, as far as he could tell without touching anything yet, all present. He crouched over the spill — a kingfisher-enamel hairpin, a decent pair of jade earrings — each piece sitting exactly where it had fallen, not one of them close to the door.
"Thrown around," he said, "and nothing worth pawning is gone."
"Startled off before he could take anything, maybe."
Ming crossed to the window instead of answering, and tried the brass latch — fastened from inside, the rust on it old and even, no fresh scratch anywhere near the catch. He looked down at the sill. A thin, undisturbed skin of dust lay across it, no footprints, no smear — which struck him as odder than footprints would have been.
"Door?"
"Lock's fine. Key was in her handbag, no pick marks." Zhou was already talking again. "Someone she let in, is my read on it. Trusted him, he turned on her, tossed the room on the way out to make it read as a burglary. Fits the passion angle even better, if you ask me."
"Everything disturbed, nothing valuable taken, latch fastened from the inside, no prints in the dust." Ming said it flat, laying the pieces next to each other rather than under each other. "Somebody wanted this read as a robbery. Did it in a hurry, though. None of it quite sits right together."
"So it's deliberate."
"Don't know what it's for yet." He crouched by a stocking balled up under the vanity, left it where it was. "Could be the real one wants us looking somewhere else. Could be I'm reading too much into a mess. Too soon to hand anybody a reason."
He knelt by the body last of all. She lay on her back, ivory satin, the rouge garish in the flat morning light. He didn't touch her yet — just bent close over the throat, the wrists, then the hands. Nails clean and trimmed, no blood under them, no torn skin.
"No fight in this," he said, half to Zhou, half to the room. "Nails like this on a woman like her — she'd have gone for his eyes at least. Scratched something."
"Caught off guard. No time."
He moved on to the vanity drawers, which gave up a stack of letters in a fine hand signed only "Cen" — flattery of the ordinary suitor kind — a sheaf of pawn tickets, and IOUs marked "Canton" and a shop name, the sums not small. He read and logged each one without letting himself settle on any of it. A woman like Manli, in debt, keeping several men on a string — none of it was strange for her circle, which was exactly the trouble. Too many threads here that could hang a motive.
Zhou, going through the IOUs, was warming to his own theory by the minute. "One of these four. I'd put money on it."
Ming's pen kept moving. A woman who'd held her spot at the Paramount this many years, running this many men at once, hadn't done it wearing her real face the whole time. There'd be something kept back, somewhere. He went through the vanity again, the nightstand, the lining of a trunk, even sifted the broken pieces of the compact in the corner, and turned up nothing.
Maybe there was nothing to find. Maybe it was already gone. Either way it wasn't a thing worth saying out loud yet.
"Seal the room, log everything in it," he said, straightening up. "And get every statement going — neighbors, the super, anyone who's done for her these past years. Don't let one slip past."
"Understood." Zhou said it easily enough, still privately certain the whole thing would crack open the moment they leaned on the right man.
He made one more slow circle of the room, and his eye caught, last, on a sewing basket in the corner nobody had bothered with — a piece of half-finished embroidery inside it, the stitches small, patient, unhurried. Zhou hadn't given it a second look, the sort of thing any woman's room might hold. Ming crouched over it a while longer than it warranted. A woman who spent her nights under the dance-hall lights, keeping this kind of quiet, careful handwork on the side — it didn't sit easy next to everything else glittering in this room. He didn't mention it.
Outside, the soymilk man was still at it, steam going up in slow gusts, the street filling in with footsteps. The reporters hadn't thinned at all — a few still hanging at the mouth of the lane, waiting on a line for tomorrow's front page. Shanghai didn't pause for anyone's death. It didn't let go of good gossip either.
"Chief." Zhou couldn't hold the silence any longer. "What are you actually thinking?"
Ming took his time with it. Truth was he had nothing settled yet — only a nagging sense that the room was pointing him one direction a little too helpfully, and that the help itself was what bothered him.
"Nothing worth saying yet," he said finally, and turned for the door. "The more I look at, the less I want to guess."
• • •
By afternoon every item from the apartment had been boxed and carted back to the station. It wasn't until night that Ming had a clear hour to sit alone at his desk and go through the box again, start to finish.
Letters, pawn tickets, IOUs — he logged each one a second time. At the bottom sat a stack of plain white stationery, maybe a dozen sheets, edges even, unused as far as he could tell. Nothing about it should have held his attention. It held his attention anyway.
A woman who wrote often enough would keep paper on hand, that was ordinary. But the top sheet had a faint roughness along one edge, as if it had once lain pressed under another sheet that had been torn away in a hurry. A stack that had never been touched shouldn't look like that.
He drew the top sheet out and tilted it under the desk lamp, turning it slow against the light. There — shallow indentations across the surface, the kind a man flipping through in ordinary light would miss nine times out of ten. Someone had written on the sheet above this one, pressing hard enough to leave a ghost of it behind.
He set it flat, took a pencil from the drawer, dulled the point against the blotter, and dragged it sideways across the page in even strokes.
Grey bloomed up slow. Nothing at first. By the third pass, pale shapes started to surface against the shaded ground — the ghost of characters in someone's ink, coming up out of the paper like they were fighting for air.
He stopped and brought the lamp closer, reading them one at a time.
...master and pupil...
...twenty years...
Past that the impressions thinned out too far for the pencil to raise anything readable — a few broken marks that never resolved. He tried from another angle and got the same handful of words back, no more. The rest stayed lost in the grey.
He slid the sheet into a stiff folder and set the Cen letters and the Canton IOUs beside it, and sat with all three a long while.
Taken alone, those few words meant nothing anyone could hang a case on. Which was exactly what made them impossible to set aside. If this had been some ordinary business of love or money, why write it in a hand meant to hide itself, and why tear away only the one page, leaving nothing behind but an impression somebody had very nearly gotten away with?
He sat under the lamp a long while without moving. Out past the window, the station's rear yard had gone still. Even a city this restless allowed itself a little quiet, at this hour.
He put the sheet away carefully, and in his casebook wrote one line: Unresolved. Follow up.
Whatever it was, it wasn't going to let him alone. He could feel that much already.
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[Huayu Xu @huxu20]

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Embers of the Floating World: 浮世烬灯 (Shanghai Lantern Mysteries Book 1)
by Harvey Xu (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
Book 1 of 2: Shanghai Lantern Mysteries
Shanghai, 1945. The war is over, but the city hasn't stopped keeping secrets.

When a dance-hall headliner is found dead in her own apartment, Inspector Ming Ling reads the room the way he reads everyone — patiently, and without believing what he's told. The obvious answer is a jealous lover. The real answer is buried twenty years deep in a Kunqu opera teacher's devotion, a young heiress's engagement to one of the city's oldest families, and a name someone faked a death to escape.

As Ming Ling pulls the thread, it drags in a fiancé who can't decide whether to trust the woman he loves, a father who has spent two decades watching his daughter from the shadows, and a debt that was never going to stay buried once the wrong person started asking questions.

Embers of the Floating World is the first novel in the Shanghai Lantern Mysteries — a series about the cases that outlast their solving, and the people who carry them home.

[Huayu Xu @huxu20]

长篇谍战悬疑小说| 负片 | 作者：水木 https://t.co/hajka2F8pB 来自 @YouTube

[Huayu Xu @huxu20]

https://t.co/8yQs7UAHMW, 1938. A refugee with nothing left to lose is the only one asking the question everyone else has already decided to drop.
Ming Ling washes ashore with a boatload of refugees fleeing Shanghai, a police card that means nothing on this side of the border, and a small ledger recording seven years of favors paid for in coin. He isn't looking for work. He isn't looking for a case. But two months before he arrived, a woman named Cheng Weilan was found drowned behind her lodging house, and the Macau police closed the file in an afternoon: lost her footing, went in the water, case closed.
Ming Ling doesn't believe it. And the moment he starts asking, half the street turns out to owe Cheng Weilan something it never repaid — a debt quietly forgiven, a loan never called in, a kindness no one was allowed to thank her for. Interview by interview, he starts filling in a second ledger: hers. What she gave away, to whom, and why she made sure none of them could ever pay her back.
The trail leads him to a pawnshop on a back street, a boy named Man Zai learning his characters at a kitchen table, and a secret about whose child he really is — one that at least three people in this city would do almost anything to keep buried, and one Ming Ling can no longer walk away from once he understands what he's looking at.
Ashes of the Floating World is a quiet, clear-eyed novel about the ledgers people keep in secret — the debts, the money, and the ones they choose not to forget — set in a city crowded with people who left everything behind and are trying, one uncertain kindness at a time, to build somewhere to stand. For readers who loved the restraint and moral ambiguity of Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans.
Book Two of the Shanghai Lantern Mysteries. New to the series? Start with Book One, Embers of the Floating World, set in Shanghai, 1945 — or begin here in wartime Macau; each novel stands on its own.

[Huayu Xu @huxu20]

Graet book!
https://t.co/VyDnPb0V3R

[CNN @CNN]

Trump signs executive order renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America," escalating ongoing tensions between the US and Canada https://t.co/kGslincn40

[Huayu Xu @huxu20]

It is not a film!

[Sean Hannity 🇺🇸 @seanhannity]

This is not a movie. Security cameras at the Nepal-Tibet border just recorded a flash flood burying an entire border crossing in real time. Ground and aerial footage show the scale of what hit the region. Hundreds still missing.

[Huayu Xu @huxu20]

😭😭😭

[😊 NiTu 😊 @NituTiw81600052]

देखते ही देखते पानी में समा गया नेपाली यु��क..
फिर उसके बाद हुआ चमत्कार... 😳😳

[Huayu Xu @huxu20]

GOD

[Ayesha Khan @Ayesha0Khaan]

#Nepal Flood की यह वीडियो देखकर के आपके होश उड़ जाएंगे

देखिए किस तरह 1 मिनट के अंदर अंदर सब कुछ बिखर गया 😭