Becoming Inspector Chen

by Qiu Xiaolong

  As for the long chain of colored links, Chen thought he had read about it somewhere, though he was unable to recall the name of the book. It came from a metaphor about the links of yin and yang in the so-called chain of causality, but with the links misplaced, things could turn out to be entirely different. While unnoticed at the time, each of the links in terms of the cause and effect turns out to be unmistakable in retrospect.

  ‘You reap what you sow,’ as his mother had frequently said to him. ‘Karma.’

  Unlike his mother, however, he did not believe in the Buddhist sayings about karma or causality. It appeared too far-fetched to him for things as insignificant as a peck at the grain, a drink of the water, to be preordaining as well as preordained. After all, he merely wanted to do what was expected of him as a cop.

  But he was not so sure about what he had done through these years, though he had heard people describe him as one of the few honest cops left in today’s China.

  His father, too, had quoted to him time and again a Confucius maxim: ‘There are things a man should do, and there are things a man should not do.’ As far as he was concerned, he might be able to say that he had managed to follow the second part of the Confucian saying, but he was not so confident about the first part, and definitely not all the time.

  But he had to pull his thoughts back from the metaphysical speculations. Wherever the misplaced links, he was supposed to do what was expected of him – at least, he was expected to by his partner Detective Yu, for as long as he remained chief inspector. They had worked together closely for years, though at first no one had believed that the two of them, so different from each other, would make such an inseparable team.

  Struck by a thought connected with the white and black links assembled at random in the dream, he turned to retrieve his cellphone from under his pillow. Earlier, he had turned the phone to the vibrating mode for fear of waking up his mother sleeping below.

  Sure enough, there was a message from Detective Yu.

  ‘The case that Party Secretary Li mentioned to you yesterday is one Internal Security contacted us about for help, and it had been pushed over from the Webcops. From the initial enquiries I’ve made, it involves a netizen who placed a like emoji next to a poem posted on WeTalk, the most popular social media network nowadays in the socialism of China’s characteristics, as you know. Li had said to others that you could have been the very one for a sensitive case concerning poetry interpretation, but Internal Security ruled you out, claiming that you’re not trustworthy for a political case like that.

  ‘And coincidentally, the netizen in question happens to be a man that lives in Red Dust Lane.’

  It was all the information Detective Yu could have gathered at short notice. That Party Secretary Li and Internal Security did not trust him was not too surprising. Nor was he at all eager to look into a case pushed over by the Webcops. With people complaining, criticizing in the midst of the social, economic and political crises, it was now a top priority for the Party government to maintain political stability through Internet control. Hence a special police force – commonly called Webcops – had come to the fore, in charge of the censorship of people’s posts and comments, checking and double-checking them twenty-four hours a day.

  It was a hell of a job for them. Anything interpreted as against the interests of the Party had to be immediately blocked or deleted. In a more serious scenario, the netizens concerned had to be ferreted out in one way or another, and deprived of the right to post online. In some of the worst cases, they would be called out for a ‘cup of tea’, for a stern political reprimand, with possible further punishments. But it was the first time that Chen had learned that an emoji placed by a post could incriminate a netizen.

  What astounded him more, however, was the second part of Detective Yu’s message, which highlighted Red Dust Lane. He might have told Yu something about his connection to the lane before. But it was beyond him why his well-experienced partner should have gone out of his way to mention it. Did Yu want him to take a closer look?

  Arguably it was a sensitive political case. But why should he be worried about it? It was not his case. If anything, getting involved would more likely than not get him deeper into trouble. Unless Detective Yu could see in the case some undisclosed possibility with which Chen could try to turn the tables, or muddy the waters of his demotion, so to speak, through his connection to Red Dust Lane. At least, so it must have appeared to Detective Yu.

  Consequently, would the soon-to-be-ex-chief inspector be able to rule out the invisible chain of yin and yang links with absolute certainty?

  The way he had ridden against all the bumps on his way to the chief inspectorship, as he reflected in the stillness of the night, appeared to have been informed with such karma in the dark – particularly in regards to his connection to Red Dust Lane.

  Red Dust Lane was close, located on Fujian Road, about three or four minutes’ walk from his mother’s. In the years of the Cultural Revolution, that short distance had truly made a huge difference for him. Most of the people there knew little about his family background, so he could step into the lane without having to worry about recognition or discrimination as a ‘black puppy’ in those ‘red revolutionary years’.

  And the evening talks in front of the lane, where the residents would gather to tell stories in the warm or not-so-cold evenings, proved to be a special attraction for him. Those days, with libraries and bookstores closed, and books burned except for the red-covered Quotations of Chairman Mao, the different stories narrated under the starry nights literally opened a window unknown to him before.

  And through an incident he learned of one evening, his interests expanded further in the days when he was still a middle school student. Paradoxically, he did something like an investigation about it, even though he had never dreamed of becoming a cop. Then, when he first became a cop, it was the background knowledge of the lane that contributed to his cracking some cases related to the neighborhood.

  ‘Over thirty years has elapsed. / What a surprise to find myself still here!’ Those were the lines from Chen Yuyi, a Song dynasty ci poet he liked. He wondered whether it was ‘twenty years’ in the original poem, but for him it was more than thirty.

  In retrospect, even the things that had happened in the lane so long ago, with him staying far away as a college student in Beijing, led, albeit indirectly, to the beginning of his police career.

  Now near the end of it, he might as well pay another visit to the lane, as Detective Yu had suggested, whether he would be able to do something about the case or not.

  In my beginning is my end, or in my end is my beginning. And he caught himself feeling superstitious, all of a sudden, about Red Dust Lane.

  Because of Doctor Zhivago I

  It was a summer night in the year of 1969 when a group of special police came out of the blue, rushing into Red Dust Lane to raid Mr Ma’s bookstore next to the side entrance of the lane. Two or three hours later, they snatched Mr Ma away in handcuffs, with Mrs Ma running barefoot behind them, weeping, begging, all the way out onto Fujian Road.

  It threw the lane into confusion. A Red Guard raid was not uncommon in those days, but a special police raid was a different story.

  ‘Mr Ma can hardly harm a fly. Besides, the bookstore has been closed for a couple of years,’ Dehua, a neighbor of the Mas in the same shikumen building, whispered in puzzlement. ‘Why?’

  It turned into a question shared by many in the lane, but there was little they could do about it. In the middle of the Cultural Revolution, it was a matter of course for the Party authorities to whisk someone away without explanation or warrant. That was what the proletarian dictatorship was all about. The Party decided everything – and every case, too. No attorney, no jury, and no court. No questions about it at all.

  ‘We have to believe in the Party authorities. There must be a reason for it. No innocent man would have been wronged under our great leader Chairman Mao. If Mr Ma is to be found not
guilty, he will soon be released,’ Comrade Jun, the head of the neighborhood committee, said earnestly in a lane meeting.

  Such a speech was of course politically correct, but it did not throw any light on the mystery. For a police raid like that, however, the less said the better – that much people knew only too well. So all they did was try to console the inconsolable Mrs Ma, who remained in tears all the time, repeating over and over that she knew nothing about the cause of her husband’s trouble.

  When the news came that Mr Ma would be sentenced as a current counter-revolutionary, the lane was immediately shut up like shivering cicadas in the approaching winter. They knew better than to talk about it openly in the ‘evening talk’ in front of the lane, where the lane residents would gather during the warm or not-cold weather, talking, cracking jokes, gossiping, telling stories related directly or indirectly to the lane.

  Then, along came a middle school student surnamed Chen, who wasn’t a resident of the lane, but was occasionally in the audience of the evening talk. It was not uncommon for people to gather there from nearby neighborhoods. He was known to have once been a regular customer at the bookstore in the days before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. As Mrs Ma later recalled, Chen must have read all the Chinese translations of Sherlock Holmes available in the store without buying a single copy. So he was perhaps eager to find out more about what had happened to Mr Ma, and to try his hand at gathering information like a ‘private investigator’.

  Such an unofficial investigation by a kid could have appealed to the collective curiosity of the lane. A file about Mr Ma was soon gathered, not just with contributions from Chen, but from the neighbors in the lane, too. According to the file:

  Mr Ma had grown up in the lane. In 1948, just one year before the Communists took over power, he inherited from his father a small bookstore consisting of a front room opening onto Fujian Road and a back room leading into the lane. With the new class system that came into effect in the early fifties, he was classified as a ‘small business owner’, merely one shade less black than a ‘capitalist’ in the classification of the new socialist China. It was such a tiny bookstore, however, where he worked by himself, incapable of exploiting anyone – not even in light of the Marxist surplus value theory.

  He renamed the bookstore ‘Mr Ma’s’, in a subtle allusion to a poor, idiosyncratic scholar in Stories of Scholars, a classical Ming dynasty novel. An equally poor, idiosyncratic bookseller, Mr Ma kept extra-long business hours, sometimes as late as eleven or twelve at night. He was fond of quoting a proverb: ‘It always benefits you to read books.’ So he made a point of not driving away those penniless customers who would stand and read for hours, a group that included Chen.

  Mr Ma was amiable to his neighbors, despite the fact he did not mix too much with them. To their questions about why he did not try to find a state-run company job, he would simply quote another old saying: ‘There’s a beauty walking out of books, and there’s a gold chamber appearing in books.’

  For Mr Ma, at least the first part of the maxim proved to be true, as a beauty came to him, literally, out of books.

  One late May evening at the beginning of the 1960s, a young girl fainted in the store, still clutching a book in her hand. As it turned out, with its price unaffordable to her, she had stood there for hours reading the poetry collection. She had recently dropped out of college because of her poor health, and she collapsed there after the long reading hours without taking in any food. He made her a bowl of hot beef noodles on a gasoline stove in the back room, and gave her the copy of the poetry collection for free.

  Several months later, to the surprise of the lane, he married her in the same back room – now a wedding room for the two – with space just enough for a double bed, yet with a row of golden-ridged books shining above their headboard.

  As the one and only decoration for the occasion, Mr Ma chose to have a long silk scroll of calligraphy hung on the white wall: ‘To hang on in a dry rut, two carps try to moisten each other with their saliva.’ It was a quote from Zhuangzi, an ancient Chinese philosopher about two thousand years earlier.

  The bookstore then developed into a sort of husband-and-wife business. The two eccentric yet contented bookworms enjoyed every minute of their working together, wrapping themselves in a cocoon of bookish imagination. Their neighbors regarded the two with a touch of tolerance, and of superiority too. After all, their small private business was nothing compared to the state-run enterprise that boasted all the benefits of the new socialist system.

  Because of their passion, the small bookstore with a well-chosen selection of books began spreading its name out of the neighborhood. Some college professors and newspaper reporters were said to be among the regular customers, including a well-known writer who brought a white-bearded foreigner with him. Mr Ma knew a bit of English and stocked a small number of foreign language books. Mrs Ma was a gracious host, serving a pot of Dragon Well tea for the special customers. The business appeared to be steadily picking up, which added to the visibility of the lane.

  As in a Chinese proverb, however, there is no forecasting a change in the weather – and especially in the political weather. The Cultural Revolution changed everything, including in the tiny bookstore, where they could stock only the red-covered Chairman Mao books. They knew nothing except books, but those days few customers came to the store. The red-covered books were more often than not given out by the government for political studies. It was hard for the two of them to keep the wolf from the door. And two or three years into the Cultural Revolution, the bookstore was closed.

  Then came the special police force pounding on the door of Mr Ma’s bookstore that summer night.

  There was something inexplicable about Mr Ma’s case, the neighbors mostly agreed, discussing the file in a stealthy way, with possible clues assembled and analyzed in the evening talk in front of the lane.

  While confounded like the others, Chen went on conducting his investigation, inspired by all the Sherlock Holmes he had read, collecting bits and pieces here and there. It was not an easy job for him. For a ‘current counter-revolutionary’ case, Chen could not afford to appear to be too nosy, or he would have gotten himself into big trouble. So he adopted an ‘approach of exclusion’.

  One possible cause for Mr Ma’s catastrophe, Chen speculated, could have been that of business tax evasion. The government authorities had been hard on the private business sector. Even in the days before the Cultural Revolution, a considerable number of private business owners had been targeted and punished. But it was such a tiny neighborhood bookstore, which carried only Mao’s books in addition to some political propaganda booklets specially ordered by the government authorities during the first couple of years of the Cultural Revolution. Hardly any profit or tax to talk about, or it would not have been closed. And several neighbors confirmed that Mrs Ma actually had to do laundry for others to support the family.

  Another possibility, though quite remote, was that of Mr Ma’s ‘bourgeois lifestyle’. A happy couple to all appearances, the Mas did not have a child – possibly because of her health problem. According to Confucius, one of the most unfilial things imaginable would be for a man to go without offspring, and for a bookworm like Mr Ma, that could have been a matter of crucial significance. But the neighbors also testified that it would have been out of the question for Mr Ma to carry on behind Mrs Ma’s back; the two of them stayed together practically all the time, in the store, or in the tiny room at the back.

  Partially because of Chen’s unwavering effort, the people in the lane approached Comrade Jun, who refused to give out any straightforward information, simply reiterating that Ma had been arrested as a current counter-revolutionary, with the bookstore serving as ‘a secret black center of anti-socialism activity’.

  But with the location of the bookstore in the lane, whatever Mr Ma might have been doing there could have easily been seen by the neighbors through the open door at the front, and through the half
-open door at the back. So they pressed Comrade Jun for a more detailed explanation, who then felt obliged to deliver a speech at a neighborhood meeting.

  ‘According to Chairman Mao, the principal contradiction in our society is between the proletariat and the capitalist, and throughout China’s socialist period the danger of capitalist restoration continues to exist, so awareness of the class struggle should be stressed day by day, month by month, and year by year. In the middle of the Cultural Revolution, it’s a matter of course that the bookstore carries nothing but Mao books. But what could those bourgeois intellectuals have been doing in the bookstore before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution? Mr Ma had customers staying there for hours, talking and discussing. Think about it, comrades. There’re a lot of books anti-Party, and anti-socialism too.’

  But some lane residents remained unconvinced. It was not uncommon for people to stand browsing in the bookstore for hours. They also detected something suspicious about Comrade Jun, who looked troubled in his effort to answer their questions. What’s more, he seemed to be surreptitiously nice to Mrs Ma, who was not without a graceful charm in her early thirties. Considering Comrade Jun’s Party cadre position, however, it did not appear likely that he would make a move on her. Still, there was no knowing for sure about one’s motive, as in those Sherlock Holmes stories, Chen observed.

  As a ‘family member of a counter-revolutionary’, Mrs Ma had nowhere to turn for help. One of the feasible remedies, as suggested by her neighbors, would be to divorce Mr Ma so she could start from scratch, securing a new class status, if nothing else, for herself. Those years, it was fairly common for a woman like her to denounce and divorce her husband if he was in overwhelming political trouble.

  But she swore to wait for his return, despite all the political pressure. The front room – the bookstore – had been taken over by the neighborhood committee as a storage room for its propaganda material. Refusing to send the remaining books to the recycling center, she carried all of them into the back room, which had hardly any space left for her to move around in. Sleepless at night, she would sometimes play a simple tune from a tiny music box, her neighbors heard. Not a revolutionary song, but the music box was said to be a gift from Mr Ma in addition to all the dust-covered books.