Welcome to Fluentide True Crime. A real case from Chinese history, in English. Learn Chinese without trying.
I handle the Chinese. You follow the story.
In January 1933, on the cover of a small leather notebook she had bought at the market, Shi Gulan signed her new 名字 for the first time outside her own study.
Shi Jianqiao.
The notebook was a working notebook. Inside it she began keeping the second list she had ever kept. The first list, started in 1925, was her 爸爸的 telegrams in chronological order.
The second list, started in 1933, was rumored sightings of Sun Chuanfang的 whereabouts.
Sun Chuanfang was in semi-retirement by 1933. He had lost his armies during the Northern Expedition. He had spent a few years moving between cities.
He had cultivated a public reputation as a private citizen with religious interests and 没有 active political role.
He was quiet enough that most newspapers had stopped tracking him.
Most newspapers, but 不是 all of them.
Shi Jianqiao read every paper she could get from the market town. She subscribed to two more by mail under her old 名字. She also began writing letters.
She wrote to a Anhui朋友 of her 爸爸's, a former staff officer who had retired to a town along the Yangzi. She wrote to a former senior clerk in Shi Congbin的 brigade who had moved north to Beijing.
She wrote to her cousin Shi Yuhuan, the man who had taught her to shoot. She wrote to two civilian classmates of her 爸爸的 from before the Qing collapsed.
Five 朋友. None of them politically exposed. None of them in current military service. All of them owed something to her 爸爸的 memory.
朋友. Friend. Two characters. 朋 and 友. 朋友 is anyone you trust enough to ask a hard favor.
What she asked them was always the same.
If you 听到 anything about Sun Chuanfang, send the address.
She did not 说 why.
说. To say, to speak. She did not 说 why means she did not say why. 说 is one of the most common verbs in Chinese.
The five 朋友 did not ask why. They had read the same newspapers in 1925. They knew what the 名字 in the inside of the new notebook meant.
Through 1933, the answers 来 in slowly. Sun Chuanfang had been seen in Qingdao for a winter, the 朋友 in Anhui wrote.
Sun Chuanfang had been seen entering and leaving a small temple in Nanjing in the spring, the former clerk in Beijing wrote.
Sun Chuanfang had moved north again in the summer; rumor placed him in Tianjin, but the rumor was unconfirmed.
Shi Jianqiao entered each rumor in the notebook in the order it arrived, with the 名字 of the 朋友 who reported it and the date of the letter.
In the spring of 1934, she made the first trip.
She told her husband Shi Jingong she was going to Shazigang to see her 妈妈, who had become ill. The illness was real. She had been planning the trip for two months on the cover of it.
She went to Shazigang. She stayed for a week with her 妈妈. She helped her elder brother arrange a doctor. Then she left Shazigang and 去 north.
去. To go to. 去 already includes the direction, so 去Beijing means went to Beijing. No extra word for "to" in Chinese — the verb does the work.
She 去 Nanjing. She walked the streets near the small temple her former-clerk 朋友 had named. She watched the entrance for two days from a tea house across the lane. She 看到 a great many 人 enter and leave.
Sun Chuanfang was not among them in those two days.
看到. Same 到 as in 听到 from last episode. 看 alone is just looking. 看到 means saw, registered, took in.
到 attaches to perception verbs to mark that what was looked at, or listened for, actually landed.
She 去 Qingdao next. She watched a different building for three days. Sun Chuanfang was not there either.
She went home.
She had been gone five weeks. The two 儿子 had been with their grandmother on Shi Jingong's side. The household assumed she had been at her 妈妈的 the entire time.
In the autumn of 1934, the rumor about Tianjin firmed up. The former senior clerk in Beijing, who had a network of his own, sent her a confirmed sighting.
Sun Chuanfang had taken up regular morning attendance at a lay-Buddhist society in Tianjin, the kind of place where retired men sit on cushions and chant scripture.
He had a new religious 名字. He was going by Zhi Yuan. The two 字 of the new 名字 meant smooth circle.
He chanted at the same hall every morning. The hall was in the southern part of the Tianjin foreign concession area. The hall had a back gate and a front gate.The chanting began at six in the morning and ran for ninety minutes.
Worshippers were required to remove their shoes at the door.
Shi Jianqiao read the letter twice. Then she walked into the back room, where the small leather notebook was kept under the lining of a sewing basket, and she wrote down everything the former senior clerk had reported.
By the end of 1934, the second list had become a single column of facts about a single building.
Shi Jianqiao was then twenty-eight years old. The two 儿子 were seven and six. She had been a wife for eight 年 and a 妈妈 for almost as long.
She 会 hit a teacup-sized circle at fifty paces with a Browning model 1900.
She had a list of post-office addresses, a record of confirmed sightings, and a notebook that named the warlord, the hall, the gates, and the schedule.
What she did not yet have was a way to live in Tianjin for as long as it would take to study the worshippers in the hall and find the right morning.
She did not yet have a story for her husband, her 妈妈, or her 儿子 about why she would disappear from the small Anhui town for months at a stretch.
She had spent three 年 working on the firearm. She would spend the next 年 working on the cover.
In the spring of 1935, she would 去Tianjin for the first time, under a story she had 学习 to tell well.
In Episode Eleven, she builds the cover.
That is where we start Episode Eleven.
