Free Whispering Shadows by Jan-Philipp Sendker

the children, the old people, the men, and the women, and no one helped him. Instead, they screamed, “Punish the counterrevolutionary Hu!” “No mercy for Hu’s betrayal!” And the sixteen-year-old Zhang Lin stood there and screamed with them, and if they had ordered him to hit him, he would have done it. Three peppercorns. Who was he supposed to explain that to? Beaten to death because of three lousy black peppercorns. Who on earth would ever understand that?
    He could only begin to relax once the food was on the table. The white cubes of tofu lay like morsels of deliciousness in the luscious oily red of the chili sauce. The eggplant had exactly the right soft and creamy consistency, he could see that at a glance, and the bok choy, lightly steamed with garlic, had retained its freshness; he tasted it with his eyes and felt it on his tongue before he had even tasted the vegetable. And the bitter gourd! The many shades of its green! Tender and light in some places, almost transparent, and dark and moist in others, like the color of the paddy fields just before the harvest. He loved its bitterness. He loved the dominant taste of it, which did not suck up to anything else, was not overcome by the next-best flavor, and lingered in his mouth until the might of the Sichuan pepper finally covered it.
    Hu would have been proud of him.
    He waited until everyone else at the table had tasted the food; he always helped himself last. After a few bites Paul sighed with bliss. “Unbelievable. Wonderful.”
    Mei nodded in agreement. “Now I remember—
    â€œâ€”why you married me,” Zhang said, finishing her sentence. She rolled her eyes in response. Did she know how much these small intimacies meant to him?
    Zhang tried a piece of mapo doufu, one of his favorite dishes. The smoky, earthy spices filled his mouth immediately, followed by the typical taste of the Sichuan pepper, which bewitched the tip ofthe tongue and the lips then numbed them a little; he felt the kick of their unique spiciness in his throat and even in his ears.
    â€œWhy don’t you open a restaurant, seriously?” Paul asked, with his mouth full.
    Zhang responded with a brief smile. It was a rhetorical question, a ritual, and the answer was the same today as always. “Too dangerous.”
    They laughed.
    Mei and Paul took it as a joke. They were thinking about dissatisfied customers, about drunks, rowdy guests, and policemen asking for protection money. Zhang was thinking about Old Hu and about how times could change so quickly in China.
    â€œDanger aside, at least you’d earn a decent amount with it,” Mei said, helping herself to another piece of eggplant and shooting him a challenging look.
    Just that morning over a quick breakfast, they had had another one of their bad quarrels over Zhang’s attitude toward his work and the poor chances of his career taking off.
    Zhang had been a member of the Shenzhen police for over twenty-five years, but in all this time, he had been passed over for promotions with notable regularity. He had been moved one rank higher three times, until he had made it to a lowly inspector in the homicide division, but every modest recognition of this sort had been conditional on self-criticism in public. His most recent promotion was now fifteen years ago. The official reasons for this were his Buddhist beliefs, or, more precisely, the fact that he publicly acknowledged these beliefs, and his refusal, in the face of several requests, to rejoin the Communist Party after they had expelled him in the 1980s during a campaign to cleanse the party of “spiritual pollution.” Both of these black marks could perhaps still have been overcome, but, in the eyes of his superiors, what totally ruled him out to take on greater responsibility was his honesty. Zhang doggedly refused to extort protection money from restaurants, bars, hotels, businesses, or illegal workers, and he even