But is it Shanshan in real life, or Shanshan in Inspector Chen’s imagination?

His head heavy, he tried to see in those lines the same Shanshan by the lake as the one in Zhao’s description at the Pudong hotel, but with little success.

Detective Yu had something on his mind, which Peiqin saw clearly the moment he came home that evening.

‘It must have been a busy day for you, Yu.’

‘A tough day,’ he grumbled.

‘Take a break first. Dinner will be ready soon. I’ve brought back some cooked dishes from the restaurant. Among them, the fried small croak is your favorite.’

She knew he would soon start telling her about things in the bureau. She did not have to push. Whatever the problem, they should have dinner first. It was already quite a late dinner for them.

About half a year ago, Peiqin and Yu had been to a school reunion in which those ‘ex-educated youths’ agreed unanimously that things for Yu and Peiqin were more than acceptable, practically enviable. With the decent pay from Yu’s job in the bureau, and with the fairly good income from her job in the state-run restaurant as well as from her private-run eatery, and with their son Qinqin doing great in college, she too thought she had hardly anything to complain about. Their generation was usually called a ‘wasted generation’. Yet despite ten years wasted in the countryside of Yunnan Province as ‘educated youths’, and with their opportunities for any real education like Qinqin’s lost, things had turned out to be relatively fine for the two of them.

Of late, however, there was something vaguely bothering her. After these years, she was ready to slow down a little into ‘the autumn of life’, like that described in books, but Yu remained restless. Not that it was easy for him to be relaxed, Peiqin understood, with his work involving life and death for people, but she also suspected another reason.

Yu was fond of saying, ‘Working with Inspector Chen has been one of the best things to happen to me,’ with which she mostly agreed. He appeared to be quite content to play the second fiddle to Chen, who was not just his boss, but also his partner and friend. However, Chen was such a restless one, which must have infected Yu.

So she prepared a special dinner, which might unwind him a bit. With their son Qinqin studying and working part-time in college, it was going to be a peaceful night for just the two of them. They could talk, and not just about the new case in his bureau.

On the dining table she had bamboo shoots braised in soy sauce, and wok-fried small croakers. Both were his favorites. She also had a bowl of hot and sour soup of tofu, egg and minor mill. A new recipe she had learned from a short story by a rediscovered writer named Wang Zengqi. For a change, she put on the table a bottle of Qingdao, and slices of a thousand-year egg as well as peanuts in saltwater as the cold dishes for the beer.