Becoming Inspector Chen

by Qiu Xiaolong

  ‘I’ll keep the books until his return,’ she declared. ‘I can feel him in them.’

  But she could not live on them. Nor could she find a job with such a current counter-revolutionary husband shadowing her all around. So it was Comrade Jun who came up with a job proposal for her in the neighborhood. To sweep the lane for the minimum pay – no more than seventy cents a day.

  ‘It’s necessary for us to carry out the proletarian dictatorship against the class enemy,’ he said, ‘but it does not mean that their family should starve to death.’

  The job, though far from desirable, could have been seen as one created especially for her. Neither too heavy, nor requiring any particular skill. At the evening talk of the lane, some people could not help suspecting an ulterior motive behind the surprisingly ‘humane’ arrangement.

  After urging from Chen as well as those neighbors, Old Root, a respected figure in the lane, also an erstwhile reading customer in the bookstore without buying a single copy, agreed to take a look into it.

  Old Root dragged Comrade Jun out to a dumpling eatery on Zhejiang Road. There, after bowls of minced shrimp dumplings, a dish of sliced pig ears, and two bottles of nicely warmed sticky rice wine, Comrade Jun divulged that the trouble for Mr Ma could have come from his own meeting with Commissar Wen about two months earlier. Commissar Wen, a leading cadre in the district government, had held a meeting with a group of neighborhood cadres focusing on the latest trend in the class struggle emphasized by Chair Mao concerning the bourgeois intellectuals. As in the past, the new campaign during the Cultural Revolution had to meet a certain quota of class enemies for punishment. After the meeting, Commissar Wen questioned Comrade Jun about his silence during the discussion, and the latter came up with an excuse: ‘Our lane is made mostly of ordinary people. No intellectuals, they’re barely interested in anything out of the lane.’

  It was a true statement, but not what Commissar Wen would have liked to hear. He sat frowning, his back as stiff as a bamboo pole.

  ‘Not all the people in your lane could be that simple and innocent, Comrade Jun,’ Commissar Wen said. ‘Red Dust Lane is known for something called the “evening talk”. I’ve heard quite a lot about it.’

  ‘Oh, the evening talk is often for political studies,’ Comrade Jun said nervously. ‘In the summer, it’s too hot for people to stay inside, so they sit outside talking or studying Chairman Mao’s Quotations for a while before going to bed. As for any intellectuals in the lane, well, there’s only one I can think of. Mr Ma, who runs a small bookstore. But not exactly an intellectual. Self-educated. Not even with a college education. Nothing but a bookseller, and a bookworm too. He keeps saying that it always benefits you to read books, but the bookstore was closed a couple of years ago.’

  ‘It always benefits you to read books’ was an old proverb. Comrade Jun did not see anything wrong in it.

  But he was wrong.

  ‘What books?’ Commissar Wen demanded even more sternly. ‘There are books and there are books, Comrade Jun. Class struggle is everywhere, even in a bookstore.’ Commissar Wen added after an emphatic pause, ‘As Chairman Mao has said, “It’s a new invention to write a novel in conspiracy against the Party.”’

  ‘Like other state-run bookstores nowadays, Mr Ma’s tiny store had nothing but Chairman Mao books during the days of the Cultural Revolution.’

  ‘But what about the days before the Cultural Revolution? What about those books kept under the counter?’

  What Comrade Jun said in response, he could hardly remember. He was too scared. But he kept wondering afterward whether his panic-stricken response had anything to do with the subsequent development at the bookstore, though he clung to the belief that he had not said anything incriminating. Nevertheless, Comrade Jun remained secretly guilty for what had happened to Mr Ma, which accounted for his offer of help to Mrs Ma.

  Comrade Jun kept shaking his head at the end of the dumpling meal. Old Root ordered another bottle of rice wine and poured out a small cup for him.

  ‘As long as you have not done anything wrong, Comrade Jun, you don’t have to worry about devils knocking at your door at night.’

  ‘I’ve made enquiries about that raid. The special police found some books Mr Ma had had before the Cultural Revolution. Among them, a foreign language novel particularly incriminated him. According to Chairman Mao’s instruction about the class struggle in China, those should be Chinese novels. But the one in question was not a Chinese novel. That really beats me.’

  ‘What novel?’

  ‘A book about a doctor surnamed Qi … Qi Wage, not that likely a Chinese name, but then those intellectuals could have made up strange names, you know.’

  Neither of them had ever heard of the book before, or of the doctor, either. Anyway, it was said that the higher authorities had ordered Mr Ma to be jailed – a decision in the light of Chairman Mao’s class struggle theory.

  ‘No, I don’t want to cause trouble for anybody, Comrade Jun,’ Old Root said, adding a large pinch of black pepper to the remaining dumpling soup. ‘It’s just that I too read a book or two for free those days before the Cultural Revolution. Mr Ma never said anything about it. And Mrs Ma is such a pitiable woman.’

  ‘I know,’ Comrade Jun said. ‘That’s why I’ve tried to help her.’

  Days and then weeks passed like the water in the gutter near the lane entrance. At the end of the summer, the mystery remained unsolved. Far, far away in Beijing, Mao repeated his warning about the danger of capitalist restoration through literature and art. As the head of the neighborhood committee, Comrade Jun declared that it would be in everybody’s interest not to talk any more about Mr Ma. The political weather had been changing so drastically, no one could be too careful.

  Old Root concurred in the evening talk of the lane, unfolding for dramatic effect a white paper fan, which bore a line written by Zheng Banqiao, a Qing dynasty scholar: ‘It’s not easy to be ignorant.’

  ‘The line is so cynically brilliant. Indeed, an old maxim put it so well: “Once a man starts reading and writing, he gets totally confused.”’

  ‘But people have to know,’ Chen said, not yet ready to give up.

  ‘For so many things in the world, you may never find the final explanation. Why bother that much?’

  Chen’s continuous effort was not without any result, though. He learned at least an anecdote about Mr Ma.

  Mr Ma had made one request from prison: to have some books brought in for him from the closed bookstore. Another surprise considering the cause of his trouble. The warden granted it on the condition that Mr Ma could have only one book, and not a literary one.

  Then, Chen succeeded in learning something else from a schoolmate whose father was a senior officer in the city police bureau. According to the cop, the book in question had been banned in the Soviet Union. A Russian novel about a Russian doctor. Doctor Zhivago. Being a foreign language book, it must have somehow escaped the police radar before the Cultural Revolution. Chen wondered how such a novel, not yet translated into Chinese, could have harmed socialist China, but he knew better than to talk to the people about it in the evening talk of Red Dust Lane.

  Old Root had commented that Chen was ‘like a good detective’, but also tipped him off that some people had begun to pay extra attention to him. After all, he was not a resident of the lane, but just a regular to the evening talks of late.

  Chen was alarmed. And he decided not to appear again in the audience of the evening talk, at least not for a while. One late December morning, during his last visit to the lane for Mr Ma’s case, he happened to see Mrs Ma sweeping through the lane with a rough bamboo-slice broom, which loomed taller than her.

  It was a cold afternoon. He shivered. And he thought of those days of his standing and reading in the bookstore for free, taking a cup of hot tea from her. He tried to say something, but without success.

  The next moment, she vanished out of sight.

  Nothing but a fallen yellow l
eaf stuck to a wet corner of the lane.

  In a Tang dynasty poem, a fallen leaf awash in a rain pool served as a metaphor for a forsaken woman’s loneliness, but he failed to recall whether he had read the poem in Mr Ma’s bookstore.

  THREE

  He is spellbound by the sight of a blue-headed fly buzzing around a sticky stain – perhaps merely a suggestion of a stain – on the wooden dining table underneath the attic. Unable to tell what the brownish smudge really is, he keeps gazing at the dramatic scene, holding his breath as if obsessed. Every time a hand is seen raising up above the table, the fly drones away in a hurry, only to return a couple of seconds later, circling like a cliché around the same spot. Finally, it seems to somehow get stuck on the suspicious stain on the table, still insistently humming, when the hand hacks down with a bang that comes with a mysterious red fireball flickering behind a lone curtain flapping against the surrounding darkness—

  The dream was shattered by a dog barking violently in the night. Chen failed to remember other details, other than the inscrutable fly buzzing, flitting around the stain and the hand reaching out of nowhere.

  But it was strange to hear a dog barking in the neighborhood. For so many years under Mao, the concept of pet-keeping had been condemned as one of the Western bourgeois decadences. Chinese people kept cats at home, not as pets, but for the one and only purpose of catching rats. Comrade Deng Xiaoping had once made a well-known statement: ‘Whether it’s a black or white cat, it’s a good one as long as it catches the rat.’ At the beginning of China’s reform in the early 1980s, paradoxically, it was a much-quoted metaphor meaning a pragmatist approach, regardless of its being capitalistic or socialistic, in the new market economy advocated by Deng.

  But in those earlier days, people did not keep dogs at home – not in a crowded city like Shanghai. Dogs served no practical purpose, not to mention the expense of the dog food. However, things had been changing so fast in China and it now served as an emblem of one’s social status to keep pets. So a dog must have found its way into a relatively poor neighborhood like his mother’s.

  Alternatively, could he have dreamed of a dog barking in the depth of the night?

  He checked himself, rubbing his dreamy eyes, before he was hit by another thought: like the fly clinging to the dubious stain, he too could have been stuck in a job for reasons beyond his comprehension.

  Propped up against two pillows, he lit a cigarette. It was a bad idea to smoke in the attic, he knew, but he had to concentrate – hoping against hope that the nicotine might prove helpful to his thinking – on what he could do in the event of his making a visit to Red Dust Lane next morning, as Detective Yu had suggested.

  Absentmindedly, he pulled the cellphone out from under the pillow again. Sure enough, another short message had come from Detective Yu:

  ‘The Red Dust Lane resident is surnamed Huyan.’

  Detective Yu must have been working late into the night. And the message appeared to be unmistakable this time. Huyan would be the one Chen had to approach in the lane.

  With Huyan being a rare surname, he tried to recall the lane residents he had met or known during those years. To his dismay, he failed to remember anyone surnamed Huyan.

  It would not do for him, however, to tap the neighborhood committee for help, as Internal Security must have already been there. Any move on his part would only serve to alarm his adversaries.

  And even if he somehow located Huyan in the lane, the netizen must be under close watch. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for him to approach Huyan on the sly, undetected by the radar of Internal Security.

  And what would Huyan be able to tell him? He was probably just an ordinary lane resident who’d happened to read that poem online and place a like emoji before the post was blocked, and then detected by Webcops.

  Besides, how could a poem have turned out to be such a big deal in an age when few people were interested in poetry?

  ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Inspector Chen, / Than are dreamed of in your poetry.’ What was behind the case of the anti-Party poem, he had no clue. He had not even read the poem.

  So could the stain in the dream have predicted something?

  In Chinese folk literature, dreams could sometimes point out the direction for people like Judge Dee or Judge Bao to follow in their investigations. He had read a number of dreams like that in Gong’an stories in classical Chinese literature. So was he meant to return to that same spot, Red Dust Lane, without knowing why and how, just like the thoughtless fly against the backdrop of the enigmatic curtain illuminated with a red fireball?

  The night was sinking deeper into silence. He tried hard one more time to focus his thoughts on the possibilities waiting for him in Red Dust Lane, to no avail.

  For all his efforts, his mind was a total blank.

  Perhaps he should make a visit to Bund Park next morning, before heading to the lane. In the early 1970s, the park had witnessed a crucial turning point for him as he started studying English there. According to his friends, the park was an auspicious feng shui place for him. He had since visited and revisited it a considerable number of times. It was not just out of nostalgia, for it helped him to think more clearly during difficult investigations. He would review the details of cases in his mind while walking around the park, breathing in the tangy air characteristic of the river, just like during those days of his English studies.

  Those days, had he ever heard a dog barking on the way to the park, he wondered again, suppressing a yawn with his fist.

  Bund Park

  Chen was the youngest in the audience at the evening talk in front of Red Dust Lane. He knew many of those in the lane did not know much about his black family background, so he did not have to worry about it there.

  The contents of the evening talk had to change with the times, of course, particularly so in the middle of the Cultural Revolution in the early 70s. It was out of the question for people to say anything remotely ‘feudalist, bourgeois and revisionist’. In fact, the time-honored convention of the lane would have been banned but for the intervention of Old Root, one of the most experienced narrators there, who managed to keep the evening talk alive by tailoring it into a sort of political studies class, waving a Little Red Book of Quotations of Chairman Mao in his hand. Being a worker in his class status, Old Root was capable of pulling a trick or two with impunity.

  For instance, he made a point of choosing the stories mentioned favorably by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin or Mao as a sort of political endorsement, so the Red Guards in the neighborhood had to think twice about finding fault with it. That evening, after declaring that Marx quoted from Dante’s Divine Comedy on the front page of Capital, he recounted a romantic episode from the masterpiece.

  ‘Marx could read Italian?’ Chen asked.

  ‘Of course he could. For Capital, Marx had to conduct research in more than ten languages. “Follow your own course and let others talk,” that’s exactly the quote from Dante. And Marx said on another occasion, “A foreign language is a useful weapon for your battle in life.”’

  Afterwards, when most of the audience had left, Chen remained sitting on the bamboo stool, looking up to see the night clouds floating aimlessly across the sky like a scroll of the traditional Chinese landscape.

  He was not such a young boy any more, he told himself. He came to the evening talk because of the exciting stories told there, but more because he had no idea about what to do with himself at the moment.

  He had just graduated from Yaojin Middle School. It coincided with the onset of the national movement of ‘educated youths going to the countryside for re-education from the poor and lower-middle class peasants’, a political campaign launched by Mao to send millions of young people from the big cities to the poor rural areas, where they were supposed to reform themselves through hard labor. Still, a certain number of young people remained in the city because of health problems – real or not real – including Chen, who happ
ened to be suffering from bronchitis. They were consequently classified as ‘waiting-for-recovery youths’, which meant they still had to leave the city upon recovery for the far-away, impoverished countryside.

  Now, out of school, out of a job, waiting, with no light visible at the end of the long, long tunnel, he worried himself sick.

  Later that evening, he had a talk with Yingchang, a resident in Red Dust Lane. Two or three years his senior, Yingchang was not counted as an ‘educated youth’ and had been assigned to a job in a state-run factory in Shanghai before the movement began.

  Yingchang suggested they go to Bund Park in the morning to practice tai chi, a popular exercise, and ‘politically OK’ too. The park was not far from the lane. Chen jumped at the suggestion.

  As it turned out, several other young people in the lane were also interested in the idea. The next morning saw Chen joining them and setting out for the park.

  It was a small group. Yingchang was eager to find an outlet for his young energy, which was being laid to waste in the dead-water-like factory. Sissy Huang joined simply because he followed Yingchang everywhere like a tail. Meili, an attractive woman in her early thirties, having recently divorced and turned in her immigration application to Hong Kong, had nothing else to do for the moment in the city of Shanghai, so she also joined them. Weiming, another waiting-for-recovery youth like Chen, who looked like the eldest of the group because of his premature white hair, tagged along as well.

  As they were filing out of the lane, Chen heard several cocks crowing in succession. It was against the government policy to raise chickens in the city, but facing the severe food shortages, those capable Shanghai housewives managed to keep chickens out of sight in the secret corners of their shikumen houses. After all, there were far more important things for the neighborhood committee cadres to worry about those days.