Qiu Xiaolong - When Red is Black

“So what do you think of the book?”

“When I read it for the first time, I had mixed feelings about it. I liked some parts, but not others. And to tell the truth, I used to be such a fan of Yang’s work, so I was more or less disappointed.”

“Really! You have not told me about that.”

“I read most of his poetry in the early seventies, and it was not that safe, you know, to discuss such writing.”

“But I still don’t see why you were disappointed. It’s her book, not his.”

“Well, don’t laugh at me, but I thought he deserved someone better, and my first reading could have been affected by my bias.”

“You mean someone better than the woman in the picture on the back cover of the book-a withered, middle-aged, bespectacled woman?” Yu asked.

“Not exactly. It could also have been a better book,” Peiqin said. “I did not like the overly detailed introduction about Red Guard organizations. It’s almost irrelevant. And then some of the descriptions of the affair put me off.”

“What was wrong with them?”

“Some parts were really touching but some were a bit too melodramatic. It was almost like a teenage infatuation. It’s hard to imagine that a scholar of his age and caliber would have been so naive.”

“Well, in those years, people clung to anything,” he said. “They would grasp at any straw to preserve some semblance of humanity. This might have been true for her-and for him too.”

“That might be so,” she agreed. “Perhaps I was too much of a fan of his writing. This time, after having gone into their backgrounds, and having read the book more closely for a second time, I realize that she must have really cared for him. Too strong an emotion might have not been good for her writing. She was such a pitiable woman.”

“I think so, too,” he said, reaching for a pack of cigarettes on the nightstand.

“Please don’t,” she said, turning to look at the alarm clock on the nightstand. “We have talked such a long time about others.”

Under the quilt, he felt her toes touching his shin. It was just like in their Yunnan years, with the brook gurgling behind their hut.

He saw the message in her eyes and removed the pillow propped against the headboard. It was one of those rare nights of privacy on which they did not have to try to hold their breath, or to make as little sound and movement as possible, as they clasped each other tightly.

Afterwards, he still held her hand, peacefully, for a long while.

To his surprise, Peiqin started snoring a little, though ever so lightly. It happened sometimes when she was overtired. She must have stayed up late reading for the last few nights. For his sake.

After all these years, he still found Peiqin full of surprises.

He sometimes wondered whether she should have lived a different life. Pretty, talented, she might not have crossed his path but for the Cultural Revolution, to which Yu actually had a reason to be grateful. So many years after the national disaster, she was still with him, even joining him now in an investigation.

Despite all his disappointments, Yu considered himself a lucky guy. But all of a sudden, he also felt disturbed. It was not just about Yin and Yang; it was something more vague, yet personal. He realized that there was no telling whether another Cultural Revolution might befall China.

In the moment before he went to sleep, strange ideas came crowding into his mind. Fortunately, Peiqin is not a writer -that was one of his half-formed thoughts as he finally fell asleep that night.

Chief Inspector Chen woke up with an unpleasant thought, as annoying as the shrill ringing of the alarm o’clock on the night-stand. He was going to give in, although he was still too disoriented to tell what he was conceding.

He got up, rubbing his eyes. It still appeared gray outside the window.

It was not his case, he told himself one more time. Yu had been doing all that could be done. Any interference by him would not make a difference, not at this stage. His priority must be the translation of the New World proposal sitting on his desk.

Gu had not pressed him for the translation the way Party Secretary Li had urged him to head the investigation, at least not as directly, although it occurred to him that White Cloud might have been assigned to him not just as a helper but also as a subtle reminder that he was to concentrate on the translation.

Still, Chen felt that he had to do something with respect to the investigation. There were a number of reasons for him to do so. He ought to pitch in for the sake of Yang, if for nothing else, a writer whose career had been tragically cut short, and whose works Chen should have read earlier.

In his middle school years, Chen had read Martin Eden, a novel translated by Yang, and knew Yang was one of the best-regarded translators of English fiction, but then Chen started studying English and reading books in their original language. When he himself started writing poetry, Chen did not read any of Yang’s poems-they were not easily available at that time. By the time Yang’s poetry collection came out, Chen was already busy as an emerging Party cadre, too busy to do as much reading as he wanted.

In fact, his own writing career had now reached a critical stage, Chen knew. There were too many books waiting to be read. In the middle of one homicide investigation after another, however, he did not know how he could ever manage to keep up.

He felt an affinity to Yang, a poet as well as a translator. But for the dramatic reversal of politics, what had happened to Yang could have happened to Chen.

Chen did not know that Yang had translated from Chinese into English, an attempt Chen had never made before, except for a few fragmented lines for a friend from the United States. He started to brew a pot of coffee, a Brazilian brand, a gift from her, that faraway friend.

He took out Yang’s poetry translation manuscripts that Yu had given him. Instead of studying the computer printout, he focused on the handwritten manuscript. The two were practically identical. In his research for a paper he had written years earlier about The Waste Land, he had learned that a handwritten manuscript might be a useful entree into the mind of a creative writer.

A general impression he had gotten of Yang’s manuscript was that he had made a conscientious effort to make the text readable to contemporary English readers, but what caught Chen’s attention were some abbreviated notes left in the margins.

“Chapter 3,” “C 11,” “C 8 or C26,” “C 12 if not C 15,” “For the conclusion.”

Apparently, these references had meaning for Yang alone.

Perhaps they indicated the books consulted for the purpose of the translation, Chen speculated. Classical Chinese poems could be open to endless interpretations. As a renowned scholar, Yang might have done a lot of research before settling upon one particular rendition.

But that did not make much sense. For that purpose, Yang should have jotted down page numbers, not chapters. It would have been much easier for him to check his citations afterward.

The collection included a number of poems Chen recognized immediately, even in English, but a few of them offered no clue as to what the original might have been. It was possible that Yang had selected these poems from earlier or less-known collections. That might be an explanation for the abbreviated references. But then, why all the “Cs” instead of editors’ names?

The lack of an introduction or conclusion gave Chen a different idea. He, too, had written conclusions for different projects, in which he sometimes quoted a line or two. Yang might have been in the process of writing a conclusion for his poetry translation, but had died without having finished it.