Qiu Xiaolong - Enigma of China

“That’s incredible. But it didn’t work out between them?”

“No, but I don’t know the details. Her name is Wang Feng and she left for Japan. Which is all I know. He’s really something, an enigmatic Party cadre.”

“Isn’t he? As an official of his rank, I expect he can pick and choose when it comes to girls. He must have quite a number of them waiting around. By the way, do you remember the title of those poems?”

“I think I still have a copy of the newspaper somewhere.”

“Great. If you can find it, take a good photo of the text and send it to my phone.”

“Certainly, but why?”

“So I can talk to him about it.”

“I see. No problem, then. It might be a plus for you to publish his work in our newspaper. He’s now the deputy Party secretary of the city police bureau, but it’s just a matter of time before he’s the number one, according to Ji,” Yaqing said, nodding. “What a glutton you are! You have one full bowl in front of you, and you have your eye on another.”

“Come on, Yaqing. I’m merely interested in his poems.”

“But he’s a wild card,” Yaqing said, accompanying her out to the elevator. “And complicated too. You never know what he will come to you for. Your present boyfriend Xiang is a safer bet.”

Lianping, too, started to wonder about the reason behind Chen’s visit as the elevator started to go down. He didn’t have to come to the office to talk about his poems. A phone call or an e-mail would have been more than sufficient. And any of the official newspapers in the city would be eager to publish his work.

* * *

Five minutes later, she spotted him as she stepped into the lobby hall of the Wenhui Office Building.

“I have to show my ID and sign the register here,” he said. “I thought it might be easier for you to bring me through security as one of your authors.”

That was considerate of him. An official visit from the police might cause speculation, but no journalist would worry about having a professional connection such as Chief Inspector Chen.

He was wearing a light gray blazer, white shirt, and khaki pants that morning. He certainly didn’t look like a cop, but he didn’t look like one of those long-haired romantic poets, either.

“I’m so glad you could make it over today, Chief Inspector Chen. Let’s go on up. It’s much quieter, and it has a better view.”

“Thanks. Please just call me Chen. For one thing, having a cop around might not be so popular in your office.”

“But a high-ranking policeman like you is certain to be popular anywhere, particularly so at our Party newspaper.”

“Well said,” he remarked, apparently appreciating the repartee.

They took the elevator up to the café on the fifteenth floor, where they chose a table by the window.

He ordered a cup of freshly ground coffee. She ordered herself a cup of fresh jasmine tea, breathing onto the water, making the white petals ripple out against the green, tender tea leaves.

Everything is possible but not necessarily plausible, she reflected, a jasmine petal between her lips.

“I really appreciate your support of literature, Lianping. It’s an age when few people read poetry,” he started, taking a sip of coffee. “But my pen is rusted. I happened to be passing by the Wenhui building this afternoon and I thought of you. So I decided to drop in and discuss it with you.”

She couldn’t help feeling flattered. At least he’d taken her request seriously.

“So what poems have you brought me today?”

“Sorry, nothing yet. I have a special case on my hands, so I’m really busy at the moment. But I would like to talk to you about what topics would be appropriate for Wenhui. ”

“Let me see, I may still have the poems you wrote for us earlier.”

She pulled out her phone and pressed a button. Sure enough, Yaqing had sent over the text. She then turned the phone over to Chen.

He took a quick look at the screen and handed it back with an embarrassed expression on his face.

“Wow, that was written years ago,” he said.

It was a group of poems entitled Trio , which she hadn’t read. She started reading the first piece, entitled “Tenor”:

Straw-stuffed, caught in the rain, too / saturated to shake in the wind, to be / is to be constructed: plastic buttons / for your eyes to keep the horizon / high-buttoned in a shroud of drizzling mist, / a carrot nose, half-bitten by a mule, and a broken ancient music box for your mouth, / wet, eccentric, repeating / Ling-Ling-Ling / to the surrounding crows at dusk. / Setting afire a straw-yellow / photograph, murmuring “Let bygones / be bygones,” as if whistling alone, / in the dark woods, I open / the window to the sudden sunlight. / Another day, when it begins to rain, / I am you again-

“Please don’t read any more, Lianping.”

She found it hard to juxtapose the persona in the poem with the Party cadre sitting opposite, stirring his coffee with a spoon. Could it be the poem that was written for Wang Feng, or was it for another girl, perhaps named Ling? Stories about the chief inspector circulated among her circle, and it would be difficult for people not to speculate.

“You are so romantic,” she said, looking up from her phone.

“That is a too-sentimental piece,” he said, seemingly self-conscious. “But it will never do to mistake the persona for the poet. To use T. S. Eliot’s words, poetry is impersonal. I dashed off those lines after watching a Japanese movie, conjuring up the agony of the protagonist, and saying what he does not say in the movie. An objective correlative, so to speak. With creative writing, using such a persona may have a liberating effect.”

“I see. What about an ordinary cop’s persona, then? Of course, you are an extraordinary one. But you could choose to focus on an unextraordinary cop, like one of those working under you, where there is a lot of sacrifice but no flower or limelight. That would be a subject appropriate for a Party newspaper like Wenhui , and naturally you are familiar with the details.”

He didn’t respond immediately, but he seemed genuinely intrigued, nodding and sipping at his coffee again.

“Yes, you’ve made a good suggestion, and a politically correct one too. I’ll definitely think about it, Lianping. So, have you been in charge of the literature section for a long time?” Chen asked.

“No, it’s actually not my section. I normally edit the finance section.”

“You majored in finance?”

“No, in English.”

“Oh, that’s interesting,” he said, though he chose not to follow up on it. “Finance is far more popular today.”

“What do you mean, Chief Inspector Chen?”

“According to a novelist who was popular in the eighties, it’s far more popular nowadays to be a businessman, so he’s become a prosperous CEO and no longer writes.”

“Oh, that’s Tieliang. I watched that TV interview with him. What a shame! He made a fortune running a chain of clubs for officials-all in the name of literature and art.” She added more hot water to her cup and said, “But he’s not alone. You might remember a sentence in Dream of the Red Chamber : ‘Except the two stone lions crouching in front of the Jia mansion, nothing else is clean.’”

“Well, you simply need to swap ‘the Jia mansion’ with ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’”

“Wow, that’s quite something for a Party cadre to say.”

“May I smoke, Lianping?”

“Go ahead,” she said, realizing she’d been carried away by the conversation. After all, it was a senior police officer who was sitting opposite her, and she wondered what he really wanted to talk to her about. “Oh, I heard that you’ve published a collection of poetry, and it sold out.”