“I’m no stranger, Peiqin. That’s why I’ve come without giving you advance notice. We’ll just have whatever you’ve already prepared.”
“But there’s only one bowl of eight treasures hot sauce,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the table. “With Qinqin off at college, we sometimes have nothing but noodles with a spoonful of sauce on top.”
“The sauce isn’t bad,” Yu cut in, “fried with diced pork, dry tofu, peanuts, cucumber, shrimp, and whatnot—”
“So it’s called eight treasures,” Chen said with a grin. “I know. It’s a Shanghai specialty. Really delicious!”
“No, it won’t do for a distinguished guest like you. We can’t afford to lose face like that,” Peiqin said in mock dismay. “But have a cup of Dragon Well tea first and I’ll see what I can put together.”
In less than five minutes, Peiqin was able to put two cold dishes on the table: tofu mixed with chopped green onion and sesame oil, and sliced thousand-year egg in soy sauce with minced ginger.
“Something for your beer,” she said, putting a bottle of Qingdao and two cups on the table.
“Don’t go out of your way for me, Peiqin.”
“Let her have her way,” Yu said, opening the beer bottle with a pop.
She put the sauce of eight treasures into the microwave and a bunch of noodles into a pot of boiling water. While those cooked, she stir-fried several eggs into an omeletlike dish called super crabmeat and roe.
Chen helped himself to a spoonful of the omelet the moment it was placed on the table. “It tastes absolutely exquisite,” he declared. “You have to tell me the recipe.”
“It’s easy. You just need to separate the yolk from the white. Fry the white first, and then the yolk. Add a lot of minced ginger, Zhenjiang vinegar, and a generous pinch of sugar too.”
She ladled out the noodles, placed them into bowls, and poured the sauce on top of them.
“Laomian style,” she said before serving a soup of dried green cabbage.
“Wow, that’s the soup I’ve been missing.”
“The fresh cabbage was so cheap back in the early spring, I bought several baskets and dried it at home,” she said. She shook out several drops of sesame oil onto the greenish surface of the soup.
“When I was a child, my mother used to dry cabbage at home, too. She would boil the cabbage, then air dry it on a rope stretched across our small room.”
“Oh, we have not visited your mother for a while.”
“Don’t worry about her. She’s doing fine for a woman her age.”
Chen changed the subject: “I hear you’ve become quite Web savvy, Peiqin. Yu told me about it.”
“She’s absolutely hooked,” Yu chipped in, adding another spoonful of the spicy sauce to the noodles. “She hurries to the computer the moment she gets home—before she even thinks of cooking or washing.”
“You’re always so busy with your work. What else can I do alone at home?” She turned to Chen. “I’m simply fed up with the newspapers. Just yesterday, I read about the exposure of another corrupt Party official. It served him right, but in the newspaper, it’s always due to the great leadership of the Central Party authorities that a rotten cadre is exposed and punished. As to why and how it happened, we are never told anything. The former premier made his famous statement about preparing ninety-nine coffins for corrupt officials and one for himself. It was an unmistakable and heroic gesture promising to fight corruption, no matter the cost. He got a five-minute ovation for his speech. But did he succeed in rooting out the corruption? No. The situation has been getting worse and worse.
“That’s why people rely on the Internet for detailed information on how these officials fatten themselves like red rats. The Web is also censored, but quite a number of sites aren’t run by the government. Consequently, one or two fish may still, from time to time, escape the net. These are commercial Web sites, run for profit, so the contents have to be eye-catching and feature information that’s unavailable in the Party newspapers.”
“Thank you so much, Peiqin. That was a very helpful overview,” Chen said. “But I have a specific question for you. What is a human-flesh search?”
“Oh, that. I hope you aren’t the target of one, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen,” she said, with a teasing smile. “I’m just kidding. When and where the practice of crowd-sourced investigation started, I don’t know. Possibly in one of the popular, controversial Web forums, where users—or netizens—can post their own comments. They are called ‘netizens’ because the public space of Internet is a kind of nation, of which they are citizens. For many, it is the only space wherein they can act like citizens, with a limited freedom of speech. As for the term human-flesh search, it was originally used to describe an information search that is human-powered rather than computer-driven. The netizens—the most dedicated Web users—sift through clues, help each other, and share information, intent on tracking down the target information one way or another. But the popular meaning nowadays is that it is not just a search by humans but also a search for humans, one which plays out online but is intended to have real-world consequences. The targets of this kind of search vary, from corrupt government officials, to new Big Bucks who appear suddenly with surprisingly large fortunes, to intellectuals too obsequious to the authorities, or any other relatively high-profile figure you might imagine. However, almost always there is an explicit or implicit emphasis on sensitive political and social issues somewhere in the target’s background.”