Xiao Fengzhen

Xiao Fengzhen is a twenty-eight-year-old teacher and singer at the Shanghai School of Music and Opera whose disappearance becomes a possible link between a missing-person case and a group of unidentified bodies. Remembered by a colleague as a gifted, self-contained performer with a troubled voice and a young child, she is at first known to the investigators through other people’s recollections. The gap between her public promise and the unanswered questions surrounding her private life gives the search its human stakes, while the possibility that she is one of the dead remains unconfirmed.

Identity and Background

Xiao Fengzhen was identified in the missing-person file by Detective Dai. She had been missing for just under a year when Nien Mei-Ling brought the discovery to Li Yan’s attention, describing her as a twenty-eight-year-old teacher and singer. That combination of work and ambition matters to the investigation: her former colleague recalled that Xiao was teaching only until she could become a professional performer.

At the school, Xiao had been its star pupil. The colleague’s memory of her centers on the quality of her voice, which she described as remarkable, but also on a recurring physical vulnerability: Xiao’s throat gave her trouble when she sang too much. The detail offers a practical explanation that briefly occurred to her colleagues when Xiao stopped appearing. It also marks the difference between a promising voice as a public gift and the strain of sustaining it as work.

Reputation and Disappearance

Xiao’s absence was first registered not through an official report but through an interruption in routine. She failed to appear for a couple of days, and colleagues wondered whether her throat was acting up again. Her mother’s arrival at the school, asking where her daughter was, was the first moment the colleague understood that Xiao was missing. The sequence distinguishes a temporary absence that coworkers could explain away from a disappearance recognized by her family as serious.

Her colleague remembered that the disappearance was unlike Xiao: she had not said she was going anywhere. Yet the people around her did not know what had happened. Some apparently imagined that she might have gone to Beijing; the colleague had pictured her becoming a star by then. That hope gives the elapsed year a particular edge: the future her colleagues expected for Xiao had continued in their minds, even as they had no news of her actual fate.

Xiao’s privacy helps explain why those recollections provide little immediate answer. The colleague said she kept to herself and left her personal life outside the school. She was not known to have fallen out with anyone there, and her reserve made her popular rather than isolated in the colleague’s account. The distinction is important: the school remembered a well-regarded performer, but that regard did not mean that coworkers knew the circumstances of her life beyond it.

Family and Private Life

Xiao had a child and no husband. Her mother looked after the child, a practical arrangement shaped by the demands of work in the performing world: the colleague noted that singers kept unusual hours and could be away on tour. The child therefore belongs to the known outline of Xiao’s life even though the child’s identity and circumstances are not described in these passages.

When Li Yan and Nien Mei-Ling visited Xiao’s mother, they found her working while caring for the child. Li objected to bringing a child into such a workplace, and she answered that she had to work and had no other option. Her immediate question was whether the investigators had news of Xiao. The exchange brings the consequences of Xiao’s disappearance into the present: her mother was not only waiting for information about her daughter but also balancing employment with the care of Xiao’s child.

Li told her that the investigators had uncovered a number of bodies and were trying to identify them, while stressing that they did not know whether Xiao was among them. Nien Mei-Ling explained the possible connection by saying that one of the women found had been a singer. The investigators could offer Xiao’s mother neither identification nor confirmation of death. For the family, the investigation therefore turns a long absence into a frightening possibility without resolving it.

Investigation and Narrative Role

The search moves from Xiao’s name in a missing-person file to the memories of a former school colleague, then to her mother and child, and onward to questioning An Wenjiang. When Nien Mei-Ling names Xiao during that questioning, An Wenjiang’s eyes immediately flick back toward the investigators. The passage establishes his reaction as a point of attention, but does not, in itself, explain his connection to Xiao or establish what he knows.

Xiao’s role in these scenes is consequently both central and unresolved. She is not present to account for her movements, ambitions, or family life; instead, each witness supplies a distinct fragment. The colleague recalls the star pupil and the singer troubled by her throat, the mother’s visit reveals the moment the school recognized her absence, and the conversation with her mother shows the ongoing burden left by that absence. The possibility that one of the bodies is a singer connects these fragments to the murder investigation, but the evidence here does not confirm that Xiao is a victim.

That uncertainty shapes the significance of her characterization. Xiao is neither reduced to the unidentified body the investigators fear she may be nor fully recovered through the memories of those who knew her. Her professional promise, private manner, child, and mother’s unanswered question establish a life the investigation must identify before it can determine what happened to her. By ending this part of the inquiry with An Wenjiang’s visible reaction to her name, the narrative extends the search beyond the school and family without yet supplying its answer.