Red Alert in Shanghai

Death of a Red Heroine

Qiu Xiaolong

Soho, New York, 2000

Price: $15,  Pg: 464

Ratna Raman Delhi

This book caught my eye during the course of an eclectic book-buying expedition. The title was sufficiently intriguing and the blurbs on the front and back covers announcing 'Anthony Award Winner' and 'Edgar Award Nominee' for 'Best First Mystery Novel' motivated me to read it through. Its Shanghai-born author Qiu Xiaolong has been living in the US since 1989 (where the eligibility for and the availability of abundant prizes will always be an incentive to write), presumably, in the aftermath of Tiananmen.

The book wastes little time in furnishing the mandatory dead body, a prerequisite for any kind of mystery. This dead body, the subject of the opening lines of the narrative, is found in 1990 in Bailli Canal, 20 miles to the west of Shanghai. However, Death of a Red Heroine is not a modern day Agatha Christie murder mystery. Nor does the narrator mesmerise us with the delicious, languorous prolonging of terror that Mary Higgins Clark has now patented to perfection.

The narrative detail and the preoccupation with the female body and its graphic descriptions are reminiscent of Peter Robinson, but Inspector Chen Cao, poet-policeman and hero of the tale is different from the avuncular, overweight cop who calls the shots in Robinson's narratives. One's reading interest is sustained by the leisurely unfolding of Shanghai and Guangzhou in front of our eyes, the unhurried descriptions of its streets, inhabitants, culture and cuisine.  This narrative parallels the systematic monitoring and intervention by the State which is captured in painstaking detail through the everyday lives of several characters in these bustling cities.

Chief Inspector Chen Cao is an avid literophile, with a Masters in English and American Literature. He chronicles Chinese poetry, translates poems and novels and visits local markets and libraries in search of older books and poems, apparently of little value in the market-driven China of the 1990s. Like his author, Chen too is a member of 'The Writer's Association' and is a published poet.

Xiaolong vies with PD James in layering his story with literary associations, poetic and prosaic. The impressionistic haikus and the haunting stories that Chen Cao or his assistant Yu bring up in the course of a conversation, seamlessly establish connections and continuities between modern Shanghai, en route to morphing into an efficient western city; and an older sepia tinted silhouette, more ancient, more earthy and even more exotic, with its own codes, taboos, customs and hungers.

When we meet Chen Cao, chief of Homicide Division, in his new one bedroom apartment, he is preoccupied over his guest list and menu for a house-warming party. While drawing attention to the hero's culinary expertise, the narrative deftly highlights his privileged position as an apartment allottee. Shanghai was originally a small fishing village during the Ming Dynasty. It is now a city with major residential housing crisis that was exacerbated by the populist policies of Mao's communist China that encouraged large families with provisions of free food and free nurseries but paid no attention to adequate housing. This led to the chaos we see in the 1990s, where longwinded preferential quota systems are the order of the day.

Much of the narrative offers insights into the unsettling lives lived by Chen's generation and their parents at the time of the Cultural Revolution. Chen, providentially escaped a mandatory trip to the countryside and compulsory re-education “by poor and lower-middle peasants”. As part of Deng Xiaoping's cadre policy, he was designated a cop in the 1980s regardless of his own preferences.

The dead body is identified as that of a single woman, an exemplary citizen, 31 years old, a national model worker, employed as a section manager in the Shanghai First Department Store. Her name puns on both the title and the contents of the book. Her murderer is the son of an ailing  and hospitalised minister of propaganda.  Married to a well-placed but bed-ridden wife, the murderer is a photographer for high profile fashion journals and leads a life of drink and debauchery. 

His story is pathological. His modus operandi involves the seduction of young women he encounters during photo-sessions on the pretext of striking a personal rapport with them.  If any of the women wants more than fun and games, he fixes them with sleazy, pornographic photos he has contrived to take of them. An extremely unappealing villain, he represents the rampant decadence and abuse of privilege that is characteristic of the lives lived by children of high cadre officials (HCC).  We are meant to feel little sympathy for him when the long hand of inner-party surveillance catches up with him. Yet, this is not a simple whodunit and Xiaolong's narrative provides a lucid journalistic overview of the political machinations.

Chen Cao's effort to uncover the truth are intelligent and sensitive. The party and its directives flummox him and eventually ground him, putting him in charge of city traffic in lieu of 'Homicide', when he is seen to exceed his brief.  He is, I suspect, the Orient's alternative to James Bond. In place of the swashbuckling, flamboyant, non-monogamous western spy who makes the rules as he goes along, we have the chaste, gourmet poet Chen Cao: idealistic, respectful of tradition, wary of cultural dinosaurs and prescriptive policy, open to external influences and assimilating the best of modernity.

He can shop for groceries and set a table, allow you to savour epicurean delight through exotic, well decorated meals, arrange for a passport, or tickets to an evening concert and be a loyal friend.  He is a serious cop,   a romantic lover of women, not licentious at all, adored by  female journalists and the reading public, his assistant's wife, his own mother, and of course Ling, his old love interest from the past. All these women enrich and contribute to Chen's life. Ling, a HCC herself, restores him to his public office while assuaging the reader's faith in Chen's heterosexuality with an intensely passionate private encounter.

What of the women in the narrative? They are important consumers, as subjects and objects. They are celebrated in poetry, splashed across billboards and photographs. All of them live hard-working lives, alone or as wives. They are devoted to their husbands and although their feet are no longer bound, they are still shackled to the culturally prescribed roles allotted to women. Individuality, free thinking and sexual freedom are frowned upon and any assertion in these spheres is seen as a meretricious western influence.

This holds true for men as well. This is a patriarchal society with camaraderie and male bonding and Chen easily strikes up a rapport with people in his own profession and outside of it. Yet, all the characters are driven by a system that makes all their choices for them. Anybody who opts out is marginalised.

The perpetrators of Guan's murder are brought to book by the Chinese Communist Party's central committee, which absolves itself of any personal responsibility by citing “western bourgeois influence” as the main reason for corruption and crime. Chen's concluding reflections indicate otherwise.

Disillusioned with the strategy to recoup political legitimacy and to minimise discontent and stem public protest, Chen reflects that he is living under a dictatorship, one in which the only choice the individual has “is to make no choice”. The world he inhabits is not a socialist paradise, it is an existentialist hell. Sharply critical of the directions outlined by an inflexible communist State, the narrative indicts the new power elite, the HCC who live corrupt lives — how they have replaced the monsters their predecessors had once sought to vanquish. 

The narrative ends with Chen's quiet resolve to continue with his job and take on the system, as best as he can. This heralds the coming of the new hero, the small private individual grappling with unyielding political determinism.