Book Report: 'Death of a Red Heroine', et al

Death of a Red Heroine

When Red is Black

A Case of Two Cities

And others in the ‘Inspector Chen’ series, by Qiu Xiaolong

I don’t know how to pronounce it either, but that’s not important. I came across the author after hearing something on the local public radio station, or perhaps it was in the Post-Dispatch, I don’t recall exactly. What drew my attention is that he lives in St. Louis and has written a series of Shanghai-based detective novels. It sounded intriguing, certainly worth a try.

From his bio on Amazon.com:

“He originally visited the United States in 1988 to write a book about T. S. Eliot, but following the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 a newspaper reported on his previous fundraising efforts for Chinese students, and he was forced to remain in America to avoid persecution by the Communist Party of China.”

As for the 'Inspector Chen' series:

“All books feature Chief Inspector Chen Cao, a poetry-quoting cop with integrity.”

Poetry-quoting? Really?  Better yet, he most often quotes ancient Chinese poetry*.

From ‘Death of a Red Heroine’:

“He went to the balcony, but failed to catch a glimpse of her slender figure retreating into the night. He heard only a violin from an open window above the curve of the street. Two lines from Li Shangyin’s “Zither” came to his mind:

The zither, for no reason, has half its strings broken,
One string, one peg, evoking the memory of the youthful years.

A difficult Tang dynasty poet, Li Shangyin was especially known for this elusive couplet. Certainly it was not about the ancient musical instrument.”

The novels are liberally sprinkled with these somewhat confounding bits, it might seem distracting, but really, it’s not.

What it does, brilliantly, and beautifully, is help wedge your mind out of the typical western-based procedural crime novel formula.

But there are indeed crimes to solve. Murder.

The place is Shanghai, population around twenty three million. Yeah, twenty three million. Roughly ten thousand people per square mile.  That’s more people in one city than in the entire states of New York and New Jersey, combined.  Yet another thing to wrap your head around.

The timeframe starts in the 1990’s. This is important. Culturally, politically, economically, China, with Shanghai at the forefront, was in often-turbulent transition. Youth trying to be modern, older folks still stuck in a past under Mao, the oppressive Red Guard and the brutal cultural revolution. The all-powerful central party struggling to stay in total control, to remain relevant, yet at the same time trying to evolve. Old institutions, shadows of their former selves, clamor to hang on to a mythological, never-fully-realized ideal.
This era of turbulent transition has jaded many of the characters Chen comes across. Many are pensive, shy, reluctant to engage in conversation at all. I got the sense that the culture, for so long held accountable for every syllable, for every action, spoke only, when at all, in layered dialog. Rarely direct, nearly always suspicious of how their words would be received or possibly used against them.

The books also highlight the world’s largest analog social network, family and individual connections being the most powerful force in that society. Favors are meted out like currency, social niceties come at a price and have tangible value. Every hello and fare-thee-well is weighed and measured by the recipient. Even more powerful than the central party itself, it is here that Chen struggles the most, yet yields the highest return.

Chen walks the narrow lanes and visits the crammed, cramped housing to investigate the crime. You get a sense of the very, very rare and confined personal space afforded the common denizens of this city. Housing is assigned, when available, unless you have means other than your official stipend. Street level capitalism is spewing out between the trembling, tight-wrapped knuckles of the old, faltering socialist system. Street venders sell anything they can get their hands on to supplement their sub-poverty income. Chen notes that his official, executive-level government income is less than that of a waiter at a private restaurant. He supplements his with English-Chinese translations of American novels and the occasional contract work for successful businessmen.

An even more tantalizing and fascinating trip into this foreign, alien culture is provided by Chen’s love of common, traditional foods. He spends a lot of time tasting and describing local, pedestrian meals from the streets to dingy one-table noodle shops, then occasionally to upscale, modern establishments. We dine on pork noodles, (best served early, before the noodles cook too long), green-onion cakes and thousand year-eggs.

All the while on this culturally unfamiliar journey, we are still trying to solve a crime. Few clues, no obvious motives or suspects. You will recognize the crime solving techniques as rather typical and familiar. Questioning witnesses, gathering and analyzing evidence, and a strong, intrusive and all-powerful political machine standing at every corner.

As a special treat in “A Case of Two Cities” Chen travels to the U.S., to St. Louis specifically, where a young translator in his group is inexplicably murdered. We get a glimpse of the city as viewed from the unique perspective of foreign academics.

The pacing in the books is not quite as high-speed and action driven as you will find in popular western fiction, but that’s quite okay. The cases themselves are not as twisty and complex either. The fun of the books is the journey to a far-distant, and thoroughly unfamiliar place, walking in the shoes of someone straddling both worlds. We learn as we go, and after a while it starts to become more familiar and comfortable. We become  aware that regardless of vast differences in politics and culture, at the street level, people are still people.

The writing style, though different, is splendid, engaging and compelling. We spend a lot of time in Chen’s head as he tries to balance the east with the west, the old with the new, the logical reasoning of a police detective combined with the mind and free spirit of a poet.

Patterson, Lehane, Connelly, Grisham, this is not. This is more like Stieg Laarsen’s works in that you get to peek into the world of a different culture, a different pace, a different palette of people, places and history.

As any of my writer’s club buddies can attest; a book riddled with poetry that I still enjoy? It must be really, really good.
I've read the three books listed above already. I plan to read the rest of the series as soon as I get them.  Highly recommended for a break from the same-old summer blockbusters.

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Tang Dynasty Poetry, a primer, written by a guy that doesn't like poetry, usually.
Having read  many lines, couplets, and had them somewhat explained over the course of the novels I've read so far, I was curious. So I looked it up.
The Tang Dynasty (618-907) was a period of relative peace, with a few short interruptions. This peace saw the rise of the arts in the great kingdom. During this period a structured form of poetry arose, rules were set in place to match the forms. Poets, even then apparently enjoy imposing strict, somewhat superfluous rules on themselves. The most prevalent forms of Tang poetry dictated the number of characters per line, and the number of lines per poem. For example:
錦瑟無端五十弦，一弦一柱思華年。
莊生曉夢迷蝴蝶，望帝春心托杜鵑。
滄海月明珠有淚，藍田日暖玉生煙。
此情可待成追憶，只是當時已惘然。

See how pretty that is? How great it would look artfully caligraph'ed on silk?  (as it often is)

This is typical of the seven-character form, in this case the formerly mentioned Tang poet, Li Shangyin. In fact this is his work about the zither, the couplet that appears in the quote from the book is the first line of this poem.
Translating into English is no small task. Of course the visual appeal breaks down immediately with our clunky alphabetic script rather than symbolic form of writing. And of course any rhyming, which was also common in Tang poetry, is lost as well.

So translations, and there are many, many attempts, are pretty tough, and obviously, you lose a little. So rather than 'translations' it is better said that these English versions are 'interpretations.'

But if you read enough of them, you start to get a feel that it's not just about the rhythm, the meter, or the rhyming. There's a beauty, a flow. The imagery is other-worldly, but there's an almost misty, surreal, dare I say Kafkaesque, quality to them.  I also felt that the poems were a little familiar, though I could not figure out why.

Until I Googled'd the poet's name and on the second or third page of results I found a link to this:

Little by little the night turns around.
Counting the leaves which tremble at dawn
Lotuses lean on each other in yearning
Under the eaves the swallow is resting

The thing was though, this was not written in China, nor even in the Tang dynasty. It was written by a living Brit by the name of Roger Waters, of the group 'Pink Floyd'.

Mr. Waters borrowed quite a bit from Tang poets. Consider the following line from a Li He work: "Witness the man who raved at the wall as he wrote his questions to Heaven" Which appears, pretty much intact, in Waters' lyrics for the song "Set the Controls": 

"Witness the man who raves at the wall
Making the shape of his questions to Heaven"

I've been a huge fan of Pink Floyd for many, many years. The lyrics often haunting, obscure, surreal, symbolic. I never fully understood them, but I liked them.

If all poets, ancient and contemporary wrote more like this I'd probably like poetry more than I do.

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*** A preemptive apology: I do not pretend to be an expert of any level, on China, its culture or its geography, people or art. I certainly do not mean any offense. I became more and more fascinated with the culture as I read these books and began a little novice research, and wished to share my findings, thus far. That's all.