Free Whispering Shadows by Jan-Philipp Sendker Page A

politely but firmlyrefused the envelopes of cash, the cigarettes, the whiskey, and all the other presents at Chinese New Year. He even paid for his noodle soup lunches at the street stalls around the police headquarters from his own pocket. This honesty was a regular cause for quarrels in the Zhang family. The basic salary of a detective superintendent and that of a secretary, even one like Mei, who worked for the office of an international company, was not enough to enjoy all the advantages of these new times in which they lived, especially not when some of this income went toward supporting parents in Sichuan and donations toward the building of a Buddhist temple. It was not enough for an apartment. It was not enough for a car. It was not even enough for a regular shopping trip to one of the new shopping malls with their many international brands. The computer in the Zhang household was a Chinese make. The video camera, the digital camera, and the television too. Mei’s Prada bag and Chanel belt were imitations of the cheapest sort, just like her son’s Adidas shoes, Levi’s jeans, and Puma jogging suit. Mei could accept the time-consuming search for bargains and the crude imitation goods in her home, but what she could not forgive her husband for was the fact that she could not send her son to one of the many new private schools. Out of the five secretaries in her department, she was the only one who did not send her child to a private school. The only one! Did he really understand what that meant? What a loss of face. The people who could not afford one of those expensive schools did at least send their child to one of the private language schools in the afternoon or in the evening so that the child learned English well or at least received a certificate claiming that he or she had done so. But they didn’t even have enough money for that. Not even for a shitty second-class certificate.
    Why did their fifteen-year-old son have to suffer from the moral strictures that his father applied to himself? What kind of job did he think their son would get later on? He was welcome to play the hero, but not at the expense of his family. It was his responsibility as a father to provide the best education possible for his son,that was what Confucius had stipulated, Mei used to remind her husband on a regular basis. Since Zhang did not accept the master as an authority on such things, she had buried herself for weeks in the writings of the Buddha to find something in them that would bring her husband to his senses. Sadly, Siddhārtha proved to be fully unsuited to justifying the acceptance of money and gifts in the name of the higher good. Quite the opposite: Greed and desire were constantly mentioned by him as the causes of human suffering, strengthening Mei’s conviction that this religion would never succeed in China and that her husband was a terrible eccentric in his beliefs. She could only appeal to his feelings of responsibility and his common sense: Could he tell her, please, how it could harm anyone if he merely did what everyone else in his position did, that is, let himself be paid commensurately for his work? And if the government did not pay enough, a person had to secure his livelihood by other means. In the past, he had replied to her with a long monologue saying that nothing, absolutely nothing, that a person did in life was free of consequences, and that we, not the government, not a political party, not a boss of any kind, were responsible for them.
    In more recent times, he simply responded to her questions by saying that he, Zhang, would be harmed if he took bribes; he didn’t want bad Karma, after all, and he had to think about his next life. Who wanted to be reborn as a snake or a Japanese person? The hint of mockery in his voice told her that it would be foolish to object.
    They were tough quarrels, long and fruitless, which ended with Mei refusing to speak to her husband for days. She