Becoming Inspector Chen

by Qiu Xiaolong

‘If you have no other plans for the day, how about taking a walk in the North Sea Park?’

  ‘Today?’ she said with hesitancy in her voice.

  He decided not to push. It was a suggestion made on the spur of the moment. And he was already beginning to wonder whether it was appropriate, feeling almost like the diffident Prufrock.

  ‘But I have to go home around eight. A relative from …’ She glanced at her watch without finishing the sentence. ‘I’ll make a phone call first. How about us meeting at the Jing Mountain Park?’

  That he thought he understood. After the lunch, she might not want to be seen again in his company by her colleagues. The North Sea Park was too close to the library.

  ‘The Jing Mountain Park will be nice.’

  ‘Then I’ll see you at the back entrance around five thirty.’

  At five twenty, he arrived at the back entrance to the park. Outside, it appeared quite deserted, except for an old man selling colorful paper wheels stuck along a straw-wrapped bamboo pole, and a peddler hawking sugar-covered haws from a large cloth bag strung across his shoulder. Chen stepped over to an engraving on the wall about the history of the park.

  The Jing Mountain Park, like the North Sea Park, used to be part of the imperial outer compound during the Ming and Qing dynasties. After 1949 it became a public park, close to the Central South Sea, where the top Party leaders might look out the window to the verdant hills in the park.

  After reading through the park introduction, he took out a bunch of the note cards he had made in the library. According to several critics, Vivienne did not make an ideal wife for Eliot. What particularly puzzled him was a story that Vivienne, while still on honeymoon with the young poet, went away with the philosopher Bertrand Russell for a vacation.

  But before he succeeded in finding any clues about the romantic mystery, he saw Ling moving light-footedly down a bamboo bridge partially visible through the gate, hurrying toward him.

  ‘I have the monthly pass for the parks in the city. So I stepped into it from a side entrance and took a short cut to the back gate here. Sorry about that, Chen.’

  ‘Nothing for you to say sorry about. I’m just reading the history of the park.’ He stuffed the cards back into his pocket in haste. ‘Really interesting.’

  ‘The park is known for the man-made hills. The “Mountain” part of its name is an exaggeration, just like the “Sea” in the name of the other park. The imperial hyperbole.’

  He started to stroll along with her. The park was large, but with not too many visitors for the time of the day. After making several turns, he came to a green hillside. It was not high, nor steep, so they climbed up to a secluded spot.

  There he seated himself beside her on a long slab of rock under an old tree, in view of the evening spreading out against the glazed eaves of the splendid palace. Beneath the hills, waves of buses were flowing along the gray road, of which he was trying to recall the name, but without success.

  ‘It’s possibly part of a moat hundreds of years ago,’ she said, looking at him. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘You are looking at the view from the hillside, / and the view-seekers are looking at you …’ he improvised in a half-teasing way. It was an imitation after the fashion of Bian Zhilin’s Fragment, which was commonly taken as a love poem written for his girlfriend, paying tribute to her beauty in a characteristically roundabout way. Chen only changed the view-taking location in the two lines.

  ‘I like the poem too,’ she said, with a suggestion of blushing, ‘especially the next two lines. “The moon adorns your window, / and you adorn another’s dream.”’

  ‘I have tried to translate the poem into English, but the deceptively simple lines can be the most difficult to come out in another language.’

  ‘Yes, it’s difficult. Not just a love poem, but also one about the relativity of things and people at the same time.’

  She knew the poem well. The two of them began speaking some words in Chinese, then in English. That was another advantage of being in her company. It might be so hard to say something in one language, but surprisingly easy in another.

  By a dragon-shaped rock several steps behind them, a bronze stork seemed to be reaching out from a turn up the hill, harking to the talk between the two of them. It could have once watched the Ming Emperors, and then the Qing Dowager, and was still staring ahead at this moment, infinitely, across time.

  ‘Last night I dreamed of becoming the gargoyles gurgling at Yangxing imperial in the Forbidden City,’ she said quietly, ‘babbling all night long in words comprehensible only to us.’

  He was more than intrigued with the plural ‘gargoyles’ used in her sentence. Grammatically incorrect, he detected. But he chose to say nothing about it in the mist of silence that ensued peacefully around them.

  With the hill now enveloped in the dusk, they started to slowly descend. Turning at the foot of the hill, he came to an unexpected view of a withered tree hung with a small white board saying, ‘It’s here that Emperor Chongzhen of Ming dynasty hanged himself.’

  He slowed to a stop, wondering whether it was the same tree, or just another one planted hundreds of years later at the very spot. In 1644, Chongzhen, the last emperor of the Ming dynasty, had committed suicide on the hill as the then capital was falling to the peasant rebels led by Li Zicheng. In the official history textbooks, the rebels were invariably represented as the positive, revolutionary force in the light of Mao’s class struggle theory. Hence the lone, ignominious board at the foot of the hill.

  All of a sudden, he started to shiver at the sign’s weird resemblance to the blackboard hung around his father’s neck in the Cultural Revolution. The unmistakable sign of humiliation and denunciation in the revolutionary mass criticism held by Red Guards.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ she said abruptly, without noting his mood change. ‘I have an opportunity to go to Australia for one year. For an exchange program between the Beijing and Canberra Library.’

  ‘What! Congratulations, Ling. That’s fantastic.’

  ‘Thanks, Chen. But what about you? You’re graduating the next year.’

  What was implied in her question?

  It soon began to dawn on him, the white pagoda still shimmering in the failing light.

  What about him in relation to her?

  It was hardly a ‘date’ for the two of them, nothing but an evening out in the park, an accidental meeting prompted by the loss of electricity in the library.

  ‘Yes, the next year,’ he echoed meaninglessly, like a hollow man filled with straw from Eliot’s poem.

  She looked at her watch again.

  How could she make it back home for eight? It was already seven forty. She lived quite a distance from the library, he knew.

  ‘Oh, here is something for you, I almost forgot,’ she said, leading the way to the front exit of the park.

  It was something like a blue plastic-covered notebook. He read the words printed in gold on the cover, ‘Beijing Library Card’; it looked quite different from the one he had seen at the college.

  ‘You may use it when you need to check books out for your paper, but I certainly look forward to seeing you here.’

  It was not her library card. The first page showed a picture of a middle-aged, serious-looking man in a Mao jacket, with a fine line underneath saying that the card holder was entitled to check out ten books at one time – in either Chinese or foreign languages. That was unbelievable.

  ‘That’s my father’s card,’ she said in a low voice.

  Then he recognized the card holder in the picture on the first page, other pictures of whom he had actually seen in the Party newspapers. A Politburo member who was still rising, possibly on the way to the very top. So the maximum of ten books for him made perfect sense.

  ‘He is too busy to read much, so you may use it for a good reason. By the way, people here won’t question you about the card.’

  Because of her, and to be more exact,
because of her Politburo-member father.

  What had struck him as mysterious about her was becoming transparent. Her position in the library, the privilege of taking him to the staff canteen, the key for the rare book section – and now the opportunity for her to go to Australia in an exchange program.

  How could all these things have been possible for an ordinary librarian? He should have suspected, detected from the very beginning.

  Whatever you are, you don’t have the making of a cop. That’s probably why Eliot had conceived the original title ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’ for the long poem which was eventually changed to The Waste Land.

  Chen was not unaware of her being so nice to him, and of the possibility of her going on like that upon her return from Australia as well. With her walking beside him, he would have access to a lot of things otherwise inaccessible to him. Much more than what she had already made possible for him. To say the least, he wouldn’t have to worry about getting books out of the library. And about having a good job assigned to him after graduation. It was more than likely he might also have opportunities like hers, for an all-expenses-paid trip to the United States, perhaps even to the city of Saint Louis, where the poet Eliot was born.

  But all this would come to him not because of his own efforts, but because of her – of his being with her, or his becoming someone else because of her.

  ‘Thank you so much for your help.’ He uttered the words abruptly, realizing he had not yet said so, clutching the library card tight in his hand.

  They walked on in another spell of silence, like the scroll of traditional Chinese painting he had just seen in the rare book section, in which the blank seemed to contain more than what was presented.

  There is always a loss of meaning / in what we say or do not say, / but also a meaning / in the loss of the meaning. He had thought of the lines too while gazing at the scroll of the ancient painting in the rare book section.

  At the end of a somber park trail, he turned round with her, following a sign pointing to an exit of the park. She slowed down, her steps hesitant at the sight of a luxurious black limousine waiting outside for her.

  ‘It’s my father’s car,’ she said with a suggestion of embarrassment. ‘I have to hurry back for dinner at home, a visitor from—’

  ‘I understand, Ling.’

  After all, it was because she had not wanted to say no to his invitation to the park that she now had to hurry back to the family dinner.

  ‘Perhaps your family is moving soon.’ He made a comment out of nowhere.

  ‘What makes you say so?’ she looked up, catching the hint of sarcasm in his voice.

  ‘It will then be really close to the library.’ He refrained from going on, but she must have guessed something, a fleeting frown across her forehead. He was referring to the Central South Sea, the Forbidden City in today’s China, where her father would soon move as one of the top Party leaders, and from where she could walk to the library.

  Parting outside the park, she reached out her hand to him. The moonlight through the pale sky fell chilly on her bare arm.

  ‘“I’m only afraid it can be too cold / in the jade and crystal palace so high.”’

  ‘What do you mean, Chen?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I’m just thinking of some lines in Su Shi’s poem—’

  A uniformed chauffeur hurried out of the limousine to pull open the door respectfully for her.

  He did not think the chauffeur would open the door for him, and wondered if anyone would ever choose to do so.

  FIVE

  Again, he woke with a sudden jerk of his head. This time, perhaps no more than five to ten minutes after he had closed his eyes. Another horror-filled dream that drenched his body in clammy sweat.

  A headless corpse is swimming against the turgid currents in a large river, his nipples looking daggers, his navel sucking in air desperately, his right hand still grasping a cleaver shimmering against the night, and all around him, dead fishes drifting with their ghastly pale bellies reflecting in the sallow moonlight. Something about the corpse strikes him as oddly familiar – something so stubbornly determined to fight on despite its being beheaded.

  It was not because of Georges Simenon’s Maigret and the Headless Corpse, which he had recently reread, he observed in confusion. More likely it was Xingtian, a Chinese giant who remains defiant after being beaten and beheaded by the Yellow Emperor in the classic mythology collection The Classic of Mountains and Seas—

  He felt the phone vibrating again under the pillow, like a fallen leaf trembling in the autumn wind.

  It was from Peiqin. This time, the phone screen showed another web link, its contents saved in a PDF file. With sensitive posts deleted or blocked in no time under the twenty-four-hour governmental Internet control, experienced netizens had to save them in different files so they could read them later if needed. He clicked it open to see a poem titled Reading Animal Farm.

  Notwithstanding the title that looked like a book review, it was a sonnet, though not strictly following the metric pattern. The poet had a WeTalk name, ‘Dragon Brother’, which did not immediately ring a bell for him. But it was a common practice for seasoned netizens to have a number of pen-names. With a post under one name blocked, another could have popped up and enabled the resurfacing of the post for another short while, and then possibly still another name for one more round.

  In your dirty pigsty, stop the squeaking!

  Fed, more than full, you pigs mill around,

  then dream your big dream – sty-bound –

  of a moment of freedom, peeking

  around the stall. Refrain from any comment

  criticizing the Party for any reason.

  Bathing in the light of his Majesty Napoleon,

  you may wallow to your heart’s content.

  What – a swine pandemic with fever high?

  Even the possible has to be spun

  into the impossible. Search the sty,

  seal and sear the squeaking tongue.

  Who cares about the blood flood drowning the sky

  afterward? I’m the Emperor, the only one.

  It was so cleverly done. Revolving around the contents of Animal Farm by George Orwell, it would have appeared as nothing too suspicious to readers knowledgable about the novel. In the name of a book review, however, it made a scathing satire against the current totalitarian regime – particularly against the new number one Party leader in the Forbidden City. For something like that in contemporary China, a netizen/poet had to write in a very cautious way – though from time to time, they were still detectable under the radar of the Webcops.

  After all, the name of George Orwell could itself have triggered the alarm for the Webcops. And what the poem was driving at, Chen contemplated, appeared to be quite obvious once the alarm started going off. China was suffering from a widespread swine flu. In spite of the government effort at a cover-up, people were complaining about eating the bad meat with the soaring price. Coincidentally, the new number one Party boss was nicknamed ‘Pig Head’ by some netizens in reference to his stubborn stupidity, and the nickname immediately became a more highly sensitive word, with ‘pigs’ in intertextual association as well. But more than anything else, it was the word ‘Emperor’ in the poem. Shortly after the ‘Pig Head’ came to power, he changed the part of the constitution specifying the term limit of the presidency, so he could rule on as long as he pleased – like an emperor. As a result, the word ‘emperor’ had become an extremely sensitive word in the eyes of the Webcops.

  That was why Internal Security wanted the police bureau to join forces for the case of the ‘anti-Party poem’. It was such a serious ‘thoughtcrime’ that they were really anxious to get hold of the netizen under the pen-name of Dragon Brother.

  But that did not add up. Chen frowned. In China, people had to register with their ID cards for access to a social network website like WeTalk. So the Webcops should have had no problem tracing the identity of the
netizen.

  A couple of years earlier, he had been involved in an investigation in which a netizen had succeeded in covering up the IP address for a comment posted online by using a fake ID in an Internet café. Nowadays, with such places closely monitored by plainclothes cops and numerous surveillance cameras, it was a mission impossible for someone to post online there without being caught – fake ID or not. As it was whispered, the number of surveillance cameras was catching up with China’s population, and with the increasingly bigger Big Data, the government was boasting of a ‘Heavenly Net’ – that anytime, anywhere, the Governmental Net could catch people in violation of its regulations. Chen was well aware of that because he knew he himself had been closely watched of late, and he had made a point of moving around with extra caution.

  And what could have brought the man named Huyan in Red Dust Lane into the picture? If he had been connected with Dragon Brother, the Webcops could have easily made Huyan spill out everything he knew about the poet. It would have taken a much higher stake for the Webcops to contact Internal Security, and then the police bureau, for help.

  If the case had been assigned to him, he could have tried to interpret the poem as nothing but a book review. Some sensitive words, that’s true, but they all came from the novel. After all, the pig emperor is the very protagonist, and the description of Napoleon is not too far off the mark. In short, nothing really to raise the alarm about.

  But it would be a totally different story as to whether Internal Security would accept his interpretation. On the contrary, they could interpret his reading as a cover-up of the true intention of the anti-Party poem.

  So why should the soon-to-be-ex-inspector try to put his finger into such a messy pie?

  Confucius says, ‘At fifty, one knows about his destiny as determined from the above.’ There was no point his bumping around like a headless fly any longer. Indeed, ‘Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?’

  The dire complications of the case aside, could it have been a devious trap set up by the government? As Party Secretary Li knew only too well, the bookish chief inspector might not be able to resist the temptation of a case involving poetry interpretation, as well as someone in Red Dust Lane—