50books_poc | When Red Is Black, by Qiu Xiaolong

A friend sent this, the third in a series of police procedurals set in Shanghai, China. I haven't read the first two yet, but it's quite conscientious in giving all the background you need to read it as a standalone. In fact, one of the peculiarities of the novel is an unusual stolid, plodding style that's oddly suited to the subject matter of contemporary communist China, with its combination of traditional (losing face, what people will think) and modern (party enforcement, recent loss of socialist guarantees) fears, edge-of-survival poverty and extreme crowding -- all taken for granted as what you have to work with in everyday life. How all these impinge on crime, particularly via the rise of a state-sanctioned affluent minority and the still omnipresent memories of the oppressions of the Cultural Revolution (and even the Mafia-like Triads are, believe it or not, still around) makes for a constantly intriguing local color that takes the place of the genre's usual rising body-count and sharply drawn personalities to keep you reading. The three main recurring characters are Inspector Chen, his colleague Inspector Yu, and Yu's wife, Peiqin. Chen is on vacation to do a lucrative translation job for a wealthy contractor. But he keeps being drawn back into Yu's handling of the murder of a controversial novelist and former Red Guard found smothered in her miserable one-room apartment. She lived in a small building housing fifteen different families, all cooking on separate little charcoal stoves in the one communal kitchen area. Was it personal? Political? There's a basic assumption by the police that it could even have been done by the government -- usually the last and most far-out possibility in a Western mystery. Only slogging police work, interleaved with much cultural history, poetry, and Chinese food, can provide the answers.

One mystery the book adds to this is a complete lack of information about the author. However, we are on the Internet here, and there's plenty out there on Qiu (including how to pronounce his name), as in this interview. Studying in the U.S., Qiu decided not to return to China after Tiananmen Square, now teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, and (one of my big questions) yes, he writes in English. These days he visits Shanghai regularly, so his settings are up-to-date. "Black", incidentally, in the title, was a term used for "politically outcast", which covered a huge range of people, from capitalists and dissidents to the Red Guard itself after its heyday; the murder victim had spent years in a re-education camp. The current Chinese swing toward "trickle-down" Reaganomics is a constant ironic note among the baffled disappointments and humble hopes of the novel's ordinary people.

I avoid depressive reading, and though this may sound like it has all the ingredients of a downer, I didn't find it so. Maybe because the characters are mostly sincere and well-meaning, and even have moments of ordinary happiness in a good fast-food stand or a bit of clever research, amid their worries. I'd gladly read the other books in the series, and I expect they would give even more insight into that fourth of the world's population.