Qiu Xiaolong - Enigma of China

“Don’t worry about it. I take a lot of photos, especially for the finance section. Credit or no, it’s just a routine part of the work. I’ll e-mail you the file too.”

“Thanks. By the way, you asked me about the Zhou case the other day. Have you heard or read anything about the photo of the pack of 95 Supreme Majesty? A Wenhui journalist is sometimes better informed than a cop.”

The question didn’t come as a surprise to her. In fact, it would have been a surprise if the chief inspector hadn’t asked the question.

“First, let me tell you something, Chief Inspector Chen, something that happened to a journalist friend of mine in Anhui. He wrote an article exposing a major state company’s falsified sales figures right before it applied to go public. Do you know what happened? He was listed by local police as one of the ‘most wanted’ for slander, despite the fact that the article was well researched and documented. The head of the company turned out to be the nephew of the public security minister in Beijing. Even today the journalist has to hide in another province because of his ‘crime.’

“Now, a job at a Party-run newspaper is generally considered a good one. It’s secure and decently paid, as long as you know when to shut your mouth and to close your ears. So in terms of the picture in question, what can a journalist say except what can be read in an official newspaper?”

“That’s what disturbs me,” he said.

“I’m responsible for finance and new business news. So I’m supposed to attend meetings like the one in which Zhou made his speech, and then write a story about it, whether I agree with what’s said or not. However, I didn’t go to the meeting that day. Why? I was told that the Housing Development Committee would send preapproved text along with pictures, which I could publish by simply adding some adjectives and adverbs. Which was what I did.

“People active on the Internet, and not working for Wenhui or other Party newspapers, might be able to tell you more about it,” she said cautiously. “I’ve heard that the human-flesh search was started on a Web forum run by somebody named Melong, but that’s about all I know.”

“Melong?” An inscrutable expression flashed across his face, as if he was hearing the name for the first time. It was probably a deliberate response. To a high-ranking cop in charge of the investigation, that couldn’t have been news, she thought.

“For Melong, the search that started with Zhou’s picture might have been intended as a smart protest, but what it then led to went way beyond his expectations or imagination,” she said. Then she added, “Perhaps I could make some inquiries for you in financial circles.”

“That would be a great help, Lianping. I’d really appreciate it. I’m still a layman, standing outside the door of the Web world.”

“Oh, I also keep a blog. Nothing official, you know,” she said, writing down the blog address on a Post-it. “It’s called Lili’s Blog.”

“Why Lili?”

“That’s my real name, the one my parents gave me. But for a journalist, it sounds too much like a pet name. So I changed it to Lianping.”

“I’m going to read it,” he said. He drained the coffee, which was already getting cold, and stood up. “And I’ll send you my poems as soon as possible. Thanks for everything, Lianping.”

Chief Inspector Chen went to the bureau the next morning as usual.

Being a special consultant to the Zhou case didn’t absolve him of his responsibility for the Special Case Squad. He was still the head of the squad, though Detective Yu was, effectively, in charge.

After taking a quick look at an internal report, Chen put it down with a lingering bitter taste in his mouth. It was about a dissident artist named Ai, who was said to be stirring up trouble with some of his postmodern exhibitions, which consisted of distorted nude figures done in an absurdist fashion. Chen decided not to take it on as a potential case for the squad. Not because he knew anything about Ai’s work but because he didn’t think it was justifiable to open an investigation of an artist like Ai simply for the sake of “a harmonious society.”

There was a message from Party Secretary Li about a routine meeting around noon, but Chen chose not to return the call.

Instead, he kept brooding over the suspicious circumstances of Wei’s death. An abandoned brown SUV had been found in Nanhui. It had been stolen from a paper company several days ago. The abandoned SUV added to the possibility of its having been a premeditated assault, but at the same time, it was also a dead end. Despite his hunch that Wei’s death was connected to his investigation into Zhou’s death, Chen knew better than to discuss it around the bureau, not even with Detective Yu. The chief inspector felt utterly abysmal about not helping more with Wei’s work. He had a splitting headache coming on.

Then he remembered that Lianping had given him the address of her blog. Taking a break from thinking about Wei, he turned to his computer and typed in the address.

What she had posted there seemed to be quite different from her articles in the newspaper. The title of a recent piece immediately grabbed his attention: “The Death of Xinghua.”

Xinghua was a poet and translator of Shakespeare who died during the Cultural Revolution. He was little known among the younger generation, so Chen wondered why she chose to write about him.

A first-class poet and scholar, Xinghua translated Shakespeare’s Henry IV, edited and annotated the complete translation. That’s about all that people would learn about him if they happened to turn one or two pages in the Complete Works of Shakespeare. What could be more tragic than a forgotten tragedy!

As early as the Anti-Japanese War in the forties, Professor Shediek at Southwest United University considered Xinghua one of his most promising students, as gifted as Harold Bloom. Xinghua soon made a name for himself with his poems and translations, but his career was abruptly cut short. In 1957, he was labeled a rightist during the nationwide antirightist movement. He was condemned and persecuted in the subsequent political movements, and he died in his midforties at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. When an article about him appeared in the official newspaper in the late seventies, the circumstances of his final days were not mentioned at all, as if he had simply died a natural death.

I happened to get in touch with his widow, who told me about all that he had suffered toward the end of his life. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he was subjected to the most humiliating mass criticism and punishment. His home was ransacked by Red Guards, and his almost completed translation of The Divine Comedy was burned on the street. That summer, he was forced to work in the rice paddy field from six in the morning to eight in the evening for “ideological transformation through hard labor.” Xinghua was sweating all over, thirsty, and hungry, but he wasn’t allowed any water or food; toward the end of the day, he had no choice but to wet his lips with a handful of water scooped up from a dirty creek. At the sight of that, a Red Guard rushed over and fiercely pushed his head into the contaminated water, holding it under for several minutes, while another Red Guard kicked him violently in the side. Soon Xinghua fell sick with a swollen belly and fainted in the field. Less than two hours later, he died there of acute diarrhea. The Red Guards insisted, however, that he had committed suicide, and required that an autopsy be performed. Why? Because suicide was said to be another crime-a deliberate act against the efforts of the Party and people to save him. Xinghua’s family begged, but to no avail. His body was cut open; fortunately, the autopsy report proved that he had died of having swallowed contaminated water, and his family was spared the posthumous label of counterrevolutionary.