Old He has been a police officer for more than 30 years. This is the first time he has encountered a difficult situation like this: Minutes before the victim’s body was to be cremated, her family changed their mind.
He feels sick in his heart as he listens to the sobbing voice of Zhao Yanhong’s mother at the other end of the telephone while glancing at the girl’s body lying in the visitation room at the cremation plant, a young budding life cut short by violence.
Old He tightens his fist and bites his lips as he continues to listen to the sobbing, broken voice at the other end of the line.
While investigating this case, he has been to Zhao Yanhong’s home several times.
Her family is from a small county in the Northeast. Before Yanhong was even born her parents came all the way to Beijing to start a trading company. Soon they made enough money to buy a home and a car and begin to live a comfortable life. Their problem started when their daughter Yanhong had grown to school age. Schools don’t care where you live. They only recognize your residential registration. Yanhong’s parents had to donate a big sum of money to the school in exchange for the permission for her to attend school there. Even at the time of registration, the school didn’t forget to treat her as a visiting student and charge her the proper fee. Every year when the school gave awards to outstanding students, she was not eligible because of her visiting student status. Every year she would watch, teary-eyed, classmates with lower grades going up to the podium to receive awards.
From grade school to middle school, from middle school to high school, each time her parents had to bring a big bundle of money to the school in exchange for the permission for her to register, year after year. By the time of the college entrance exams, her parents gave out several bigger bundles of money but didn’t come home with the permit for her to sign up for the exams. She had no choice but to return to her hometown in the Northwest and sign up as a “non-school youth.” In that small county town Yanhong’s family has nothing left but their residential registration. So Yanhong stayed at a hotel for a week, took the exams and fled back to Beijing where her family has no registered residence either. True, they own their home, but legally it is still their temporary shelter.
Since then she had been in a rather sad mood. She couldn’t understand why as far as she could remember the sky over her head had not been as blue as that over her classmates. The day before it all happened, she had been mad for the whole day for no obvious reason at all. The next morning her mother told her to go to the scenic area of the western suburbs for a change. Nobody had expected her not to return alive. She was raped and then strangled to death.
Old He is brought back to the present by the choking voice at the other end of the phone. He feels warm tears trickling down his cheeks. The veteran police officer takes out a tissue to wipe away the tears and then checks his watch: It’s already ten o’clock. What should he do? Sweat oozes from under his big felt hat.
When Yanhong’s mother seems to have calmed down a bit, Old He says, “Didn’t we talk about this yesterday? Since this is a murder case, the body has to be taken care of in a timely fashion. Now the visitation hour is over and the family is still not here yet.
After a long silence, he hears the broken voice of Yanhong’s father come on the line, “Old He, after thinking this through, we’ve decided not to have her body cremated in Beijing. Instead we will take her to our home in the Northeast for burial.”
“What? Burial?”
“Yes. Our baby doesn’t have Beijing residence. For this she suffered so much while alive. We are afraid our baby will be a homeless ghost, too, and will be treated as second class. It would be better to take her back to our hometown where she has legal residence. That way she and her legal residence will be united at the same place and she can lie in peace.”
Old He hangs up the phone and walks out of the visitation room with a heavy heart. Although all this sounds a bit laughable and ridiculous, it is perhaps the only way the parents can console the spirit of their dead daughter.
An unspeakable sadness washes over him.
Suddenly a strange thought occurs to him: Yanhong grew up in Beijing and had almost no Northeastern accent in her speech. True, a burial there would mean body and residence are united at the same place, yet with no indigenous accent, her ghost would probably be treated as second class, too.
(2005)