Becoming Inspector Chen

by Qiu Xiaolong

  Sitting up again, he leaned over to look out the attic window. In the unfamiliar distance, a red gleam flickered like the wild burning eye against the night woods before fading into the surrounding darkness.

  He had no choice. It was a decision he had to make in the dark.

  Decision in the Dark

  Minmin, a long-time neighbor and friend of the Chen family, was heading back underneath the dark cover of the night, shivering in the chilly wind laden with a wet message against her face.

  All along the way, yellow leaves appeared to be continuously falling in fitful rustles, portentously, like drops of bamboo divination slips falling to the ruined floor of an ancient temple.

  Mr Kong, the overseas Chinese staying at Jing River Hotel, could have easily arranged a taxi for her, but he chose not to. He merely mumbled polite yet meaningless words at the parting, his shrunken face like a frost-bitten persimmon in the light of the guarded hotel exit. For a business-like deal, a shrewd businessman like him did not have to go out of the way for her before signing the contract. She had not yet made up her mind, which he knew only too well.

  But for his first trip to Shanghai in the early 1980s, Mr Kong, white-haired like a legendary wise owl flying out of a different world, might have had no idea that after cups of coffee, after the ‘inside’ kung fu movie unavailable to ordinary Shanghainese, after the room service of the dainty, delicious dim sum, she had missed the last trolley bus back home to Red Dust Lane. It was extremely difficult for her to find a taxi at this late hour, nor could she have afforded one, which would have been inconceivable to an overseas Chinese visitor after having stayed abroad for more than forty years.

  It was a long walk for her. After the rain, Huaihai Road became so slippery, she had to make careful steps, maneuvering around the tiny rain pools, but her thoughts kept wandering away.

  Minmin did not think she was exactly disappointed with the date with Mr Kong in the hotel. It had been suggested by Mrs Chen, not at all like something conveniently arranged by such a notorious matchmaker as Auntie Yang in the neighborhood. Mrs Chen had made a sincere effort, Minmin believed, in return for her ‘favor’ at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution when she had helped the Chens hide away some precious books. So Mrs Chen had gone out of her way to provide Minmin with details of Mr Kong’s background, which she had not told others, she said, not even her only son, for some of these things could have caused them trouble.

  In the early 1950s, Mr Chen had decided to take his family back to China from the United States, where he had already secured a tenured university position, bought a large house, and hired Kong for occasional yard work. An internationally known neo-Confucian scholar, Mr Chen got into trouble upon his return to China, and passed away a broken man in the early 1970s. And about four decades later, Mr Kong came back to Shanghai as a successful overseas Chinese with several high-tech companies to his name, but he did not forget to pay a visit to Mrs Chen. She then asked Minmin over and approached her with a proposal that Mr Kong and Minmin should meet.

  ‘What has happened to Mr Kong these years, I know very little,’ Mrs Chen added in earnest, hardly able to move around in the tiny room. ‘But he chose to see me with a lot of gifts and to kowtow to Mr Chen’s tablet here. He told me that my late husband had not only paid him well for the yard work, but also helped him enrol in the university with a scholarship, which I did not know. What’s more, he offers to help with my son’s job assignment upon his college graduation in Beijing. Mr Kong promises to speak to the government officials who are after his investment in Shanghai, so they may be able to do something about it. It’s really like sending a cart of coal in the snow. Such a man is trustworthy, I have to say.’

  Mrs Chen was anxious about the job location of her only son, who would be state-assigned to work next year. Whether Mr Kong’s promise to help could work out or not, Mrs Chen believed that it spoke volumes about his character. After all, Kong did not have to offer to help a present-day nobody like her, penniless, connectionless. That earned him a sort of endorsement from Mrs Chen.

  Minmin’s parents lost no time throwing in their approval for the meeting. For them, ‘an overseas Chinese’ meant someone ‘super-rich, capable of buying all the nice and wonderful things in the West, staying in a five-star hotel in Shanghai, and spending money like water for himself as well as for the people related to him, not to mention the prospect of his eventually taking his spouse abroad’. It was little wonder that the materialistic scale of theirs tipped decidedly to Mr Kong, even though he was more than twenty years older than Minmin.

  Trying to unravel these tangled thoughts seemed to add to the solitude of her walk back home. The night appeared still young. Near Huangpi Road, a ramshackle bike shot recklessly out of nowhere in the dark, with neither bell nor light, splashing up the dirty rain water around her.

  Minmin bent over to take off her shoes, which had cost more than a month’s salary for her. The shoe tassels appeared sodden, entangled, possibly damaged beyond repair. Was that another omen from the dark, rainy night? Tramping barefoot on the cold street, she felt inexplicably tired, sick to the stomach. She must have had too much coffee at the hotel, black and bitter. How could Mr Kong really enjoy that stuff, cup after cup in the luxurious hotel room?

  Mrs Chen must have seen Mr Kong as a reasonably good match for Minmin, though. Aside from his overseas Chinese status and richness and trustworthiness, what made the matchmaking scale turn more in his favor, however, was another factor Mrs Chen had chosen not to say to Minmin’s face. After all, this was possibly the best that could have happened to Minmin, a woman already close to her mid-thirties, fading like yesterday’s chrysanthemum.

  At the beginning of Ninghai Road, she found herself stepping into view of the street food market, shrouded in darkness except for the few erratic, languid lamps with long intervals between them. Along the cobbled street, the sordid stalls and concrete counters loomed deserted for the moment, sheltered or unsheltered, like crouching monsters in the night woods.

  Again, she became depressed at the thought of the possible development of the ‘arranged date’ at the hotel. She knew better than to describe herself as young or attractive, so she had to be realistic. She had no choice but to give up the dream of marrying someone of her own age, and after her own heart, with the prospect of moving out of the single convenience room in which she had been packed with her parents and brothers like sardines all these years. What’s more, with an ‘indelible stain’ in the political archive about her having been thrown into custody for kissing a young man in Bund Park – a crime of indecent bourgeois lifestyle during the Cultural Revolution – she knew she had little hope left for her future here.

  The edge of an upturned stone on the sidewalk stung her bare foot. Back at the hotel, Mr Kong had insisted on her taking off her shoes on the luxurious carpet of the room, saying that it was soft like the lawn in the backyard of his mansion in the US, and studying her shapely feet like a prize.

  ‘You have no choice.’

  She spun around, trying to locate the voice in a shadowy corner of the market. But she saw nothing there except a long line of baskets – plastic, bamboo, rattan, wood, straw, in all shapes and sizes, leading up to a concrete counter. Deserted for the moment, the counter stared back at her under a cardboard sign of ‘yellow croaker’, a not-too-expensive yet delicious fish much in demand in the city of Shanghai, and usually gone in the first fifteen minutes after the sounding of the market bell. People had to stand in a long line for hours beforehand, sometimes overnight, but it was too cold for them at this time of the year. So the baskets left there earlier stood as their representatives, and their owners would then come hurrying over in the first gray of the morning, securing their positions in the line, clutching the food ration coupons in their frost-bitten hands, their eyes still shiny with the dream scene of the happy family at the dinner table.

  A trodden bamboo basket creaked unexpectedly, its plastic-wrapped handle reaching out,
as if trying to point at an invisible projection of Minmin standing at the very spot in fifteen or twenty years.

  Was she relapsing into some nocturnal hallucination? She rubbed her eyes.

  She then began wondering if things here could turn out to be like Kong’s description of his life in the States.

  Behind the high walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, economic reforms were said to be contemplated by some senior Party leaders, but what would really happen in China, no one could tell.

  The chilly wind was sobering her. Time and tide wait for no woman, like in a half-forgotten Tang dynasty poem.

  Bang – bang – bang – she looked up to see another line, much shorter, consisting of stones, ropes, bricks, with just a couple of broken baskets in the midst, leading to another counter close to a ramshackle warehouse.

  In front of the warehouse, the silhouette of a night-shift worker – faceless with the upturned collar of a cotton-padded overcoat – was cracking a gigantic frozen fish bar forcefully with a heavy hammer, before chopping off the fish heads with a long cleaver.

  She stood transfixed, as if under a spell. The sign over that counter said ‘Beheaded Carp’.

  Shanghainese loved the carp head pot, taking the fish cheeks and lips as the most delicious parts. With the fish heads chopped off for the special pots in restaurants, the bodies were considered less desirable, though edible, for a cheaper price, which accounted for the shorter line in contrast to that for the yellow croaker.

  So that’s what she was.

  She was on offer in another market, with her youth gone, still likable but no longer that delicious, desirable to the palate of a much older man like Mr Kong, who was waiting at the luxurious hotel for her decision.

  She shuddered at the realistic realization in the dark.

  SIX

  Under a murderous sky woven with snarling black bats, he is trying to cross a muddy river by stepping on large or small stones scattered in the swift eddies, not at all sure of the wet, slippery footholds. Most of them appear to be barely visible above the water’s surface. It is a highly risky attempt, but he keeps telling himself that he has no choice.

  Behind him, a torn red flag flares up into a huge fireball engulfing the scarlet horizon. Sweating profusely, he feels the summer heat remaining steady, relentless like an iron grasp with these bats flipping, shrieking horrors all around him. He starts lurching, balancing himself precariously, flailing his arms in panic. Hurrying for another foothold in the water, he slips and falls face-down—

  He woke with the thought that he again found in the vanishing dream a sort of relevance, albeit symbolically, to the social realities of the mid-1980s. The period just before his becoming a chief inspector in the Shanghai Police Bureau. It was perhaps no coincidence. They were now at another turning point, not just for him, but for the whole country. No one could tell, however, in which direction the wind was blowing in China, like in a poem he had read those days when he had been first assigned to the police bureau after college graduation.

  At the time, an editorial in the People’s Daily had made an intriguing analogy about China’s unprecedented reform in the post-Mao era, comparing it to wading across the turgid, uncharted water of a river and reaching a point of no return. Whatever might happen in the course of it, ‘We have to cross the river by stepping on one stone after another in the water.’

  It was so mystifying for the trouble-plagued inspector that his dreams should keep shifting back to those scenes at the beginning of his police profession. Was it because of a full circle it had just made, with him now toward the very ending of it?

  Or it was because of something else? For one, he had not slept in the old attic for years, and it induced his subconscious mind to repeated digressions into the past, what with the cobwebs of memories clinging there and with the dog barking in the depth of the night.

  Or was it because China had drastically regressed in the last five or six years? The case about the ‘anti-Party poem’ was one such example. After a period of off-and-on ‘opening up’, during which books like Animal Farm and 1984 had been translated into Chinese, it was closing up again. Initially, a lot of people had believed that with the economic growth, political reform would prove to be the order of the day. But that did not happen. The Party government simply claimed the materialistic progress as the legitimacy of its authoritarian rule, and tightened ideological control again, shifting back to the practices characteristic of the Mao time. As officially announced, it was a crime to think or talk about any things said or done by the CCP government, and particularly by the current Party President – the Pig Head.

  That might have accounted for the appearance of the dangerous river-crossing scene in his dream. It looked backward to the days when the economic reforms were initially launched by Deng Xiaoping, like the hazardous wading across the uncharted water. Or even worse. Now, with the help of new technology, the omnipresent government surveillance and propaganda were heightened like never before, and a poem like Reading Animal Farm inevitably turned into a thoughtcrime to the Webcops – just like the Thought Police in 1984.

  As for the background of the sky woven with those black menacing bats, which were missing in the propaganda in the official newspapers at Deng’s time, but it became understandable when juxtaposed with the present-day political landscape of China.

  The presence of the bats was not just spooky, but realistic too. In the Chinese language, the bat is pronounced fu, like the character meaning wealth and happiness. So the image of a bat was used as a symbol of good fortune in the old days, particularly in the traditional red paper door posters in celebration of the Chinese New Year. Also, the flitting bats were capable of making the sound of shou – like the Chinese ideogram for longevity. So they were considered lucky as well. It was said that because of that absurd superstitious belief, the Qing dynasty Empress Dowager Cixi spared no trouble to keep a sky full of bats over the magnificent Summer Palace.

  He had even read of Big Bucks in today’s China feasting on bats – presumably for the same reason, even though the bats could have carried deadly viruses with them. In fact, China had recently suffered a pandemic because of the bats in the wet market. But some people went on devouring them, which was totally beyond him. In spite of his being called a gastronome by some, he would never touch a bat. For him, bats simply meant something unpleasant, repulsive, unhealthy.

  But could the bats have served as a bad omen for what he was going to do in Red Dust Lane? After all, his first case – the murder of the old gourmet – that started his journey to the chief inspectorship had taken place in Red Dust Lane, though he did not think the victim had ever had anything to do with bats. He checked himself. Whatever had happened to him since then, he did not want to dwell on it too much at the moment.

  In the present moment, he needed to focus on the possible case waiting for him in Red Dust Lane, ominous as it might have appeared, like the menacing bats in the dream.

  Being and Becoming

  Once again, Chen Cao looked up from the translation of the US police procedure on his desk, the job he had been working on for a couple of months – and perhaps a couple of months more – in the so-called reading room of the Shanghai Police Bureau.

  Already more than halfway through the project, he still had no idea as to who was going to read it in the bureau when it was done. But what choice did he really have? He could do nothing else here, a cop in name only among all the other cops.

  How could it have happened?

  He stared at the incomplete translation, which stared back at him. He still felt so disoriented with the abrupt change in his life.

  Upon graduation from Beijing Foreign Language University in the early eighties, Chen had been state-assigned to work in the police bureau through a conspiracy of circumstances. Perhaps like in a proverb, it takes coincidences to make a story. A straight-A student with his file sent in to the Foreign Ministry, Chen came to view a diplomatic career as acceptable, though not as
ideal as one in creative writing, when the unexpected surfacing of a ‘Chinese uncle in America’ in the political screening messed up his chance. Politically disqualified for a sensitive position at the Foreign Ministry as a result, Chen was pushed over to an unexpected opening in the Shanghai Police Bureau.

  As the overseas Chinese uncle, whom he called Mr Kong, used his connections to push for Chen to be assigned to a job in Shanghai, the arrangement seemed not to be so unacceptable. On the contrary, that’s what his mother had prayed for.

  With the practice of college graduates being state-assigned declared as a benefit of the socialist system, there was no way for young people like Chen to choose for themselves. All job decisions were justified with the rationale that the Party authorities knew better in terms of the economy, despite the problems in the arbitrary state quota system.

  In his case, the Shanghai Police Bureau happened to get its annual quota of college students because of the new propaganda wave about the importance of intellectuals in China’s reform. As a college graduate, Chen was supposed to infuse new blood into the police system, so he could not say no to the assignment. Otherwise, he would be politically stigmatized, and rendered unemployable for years. No company would come to hire a man who had turned his back on the command of the socialist system.

  But a problem faced the bureau too, which had no real need for one with an English major instead of proper police training. In the interpretation of Party Secretary Li, however, there was a reason for everything done in socialist China. So he came up with the idea of having Chen translate a booklet of American police procedure.

  ‘With the great reform launched forth by Comrade Deng Xiaoping, it’s necessary for China now to open up to the world. Of course, we don’t have to follow the Western models, but it won’t hurt to see how other people are working in terms of procedure in their country. So it’s an important job for you to translate the materials for the bureau. You’re one of the first college graduates on our police force. Welcome, Comrade Chen Cao.’