HUA HIN, Thailand - At
the beginning of Qiu Xiaolong's mystery novel
When Red Is Black, Chief Inspector Chen Cao
of the Shanghai Police Bureau is sitting in an
elegant bar, sipping French wine with a property
developer.
His name is Gu, the chief
executive officer of New World Group, and they are
discussing a business proposition. "You have to
translate this business proposal for me, Chief
Inspector Chan, not simply for my sake but for the
city of Shanghai."
The project that Gu
wants to sell to American investors is to raze
a
neighborhood of old shikumen houses,
replacing them with a row of private luxury
apartments. "It's a grand project," Chen agrees.
"Have you gotten approval of the city?"
"Of course, the city government is all for
the project. When the New World goes up, it will
not only enhance the image of our great city but
also bring in huge tax revenues."
Welcome
to contemporary Shanghai.
And welcome to
the world of Qiu Xiaolong, a Chinese writer who is
making a name for himself and finding a wide
readership with his Inspector Chen mysteries, of
which When Red Is Black is the third in the
series.
A native of Shanghai, Qiu has
lived, worked and taught in the quintessential
middle-American city of St Louis, Missouri, for
the past 18 years. There could hardly be a starker
contrast between his adopted home and the wild,
bustling, corrupt Shanghai, the setting for all
his mysteries.
Qiu is one of two exiled
Chinese writers living and working in the United
States. Perhaps the more famous of the two goes by
the name of Ha Jin, though he works in the
literary-fiction genre, not detective novels.
Their careers have followed similar
trajectories. Both were in the US as visiting
scholars - Ha Jin at Brandeis University in Ohio
and Qiu at Washington University in St Louis -
when the 1989 Tiananmen massacre occurred in
Beijing. They decided to stay in the US.
"Ha Jin is a friend of mine," Qiu told
Asia Times Online in an e-mail interview. "In some
Chinese reviews we have been lumped together - not
all that favorably. They ask, 'Why are you writing
in English instead of Chinese?' Are we just trying
to please a Western audience?"
Well, in
fact, they are pleasing a growing number of
Western readers. Ha Jin won the National Book
Award in 1999 for his book Waiting. Qiu's
first novel, Death of a Red Heroine, won
the 2001 Edgar Award for Best First Mystery.
There is a lot of Qiu in his Inspector
Chen character. Both are intellectuals. Like Qiu,
Chen studied English literature and is fluent in
English (which is why he is commissioned to
translate the New World brochure). Both have a
passion for poetry, especially that of T S Elliot,
a native of St Louis.
But Qiu hastened to
add, "I have never been a cop or a [Communist]
Party member." Indeed, he says he doesn't much
like Inspector Chen. "For me Inspector Chen is a
kind of anti-hero, a survivor in the system,
although he is trying his best to do a good job as
a cop."
Inspector Chen is also something
of a prude. In When Red Is Black, Chen is
provided with a lissome "K" (karaoke) girl named
White Cloud to serve as his "little secretary".
Toward the end of the book she expresses disgust
at his lack of attention. Even the fat cats of
Shanghai "know what to do with a woman", she says.
The Inspector Chen character merits some
comparison with the fictional Scotland Yard
Detective Adam Dalglish, who is also a poet -
except that author P D James never lets her
character write poems in her novels (probably
because James isn't a poet).
In contrast,
snippets of classical Chinese poems and some by
Chen (Qiu) himself are scattered throughout Qiu's
novels. "It is in the tradition of Chinese novels
to have poems in stories, sometimes a lot of
poems."
In fact, Qiu thinks of himself as
both a poet and a mystery writer. Before he
started writing novels, he wrote poetry for years,
both in English and in Chinese. His
English-language poems have won awards.
Qiu's mysteries are, of course, cast with
the characters of modern Shanghai: triads,
ex-model workers, Communist Party cadres, children
of old revolutionary leaders, and simple honest
cops such as Sergeant Guangming Yu, who does most
of the donkey work investigating the death of a
dissident writer, which is the core mystery of
When Red Is Black.
Owning one of
the New World luxury apartments would be for him,
as for millions of other Shanghainese, "a dream he
could not dare to dream". His is the old world of
a low-level Chinese cop with a monthly salary of
400 yuan (about US$52), whose highest aspiration
is to qualify one day for a modest state-provided
apartment after years of waiting.
Qiu's
books have been translated into a several
languages besides English and Chinese. In fact,
his latest work, Red Mandarin Dress, came
out in May in French but won't hit the
English-language bookstores until November or
December.
The English-language books have
been translated into Chinese and are available in
mainland China, though often heavily censored.
That is not hard to understand given that they
deal with sensitive issues such as corruption and
greed by party members. The locale is cunningly
disguised as "S-City".
Qiu travels
frequently back to China to refill the well of
inspiration. "I was in Beijing and Shanghai in
March, and what I saw was more new houses, more
cars, more people in the stock market, more
corruption in the newspapers." In short, more good
material for the next Inspector Chen mystery.
Todd Crowell is a Thailand-based
correspondent for Asia Times Online.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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