FOR an unexpectedly long period from 2014 to 2015, I stayed in San Francisco. Instead of working in front of the familiar desktop at home in St. Louis, I spent more time in a quaint courtyard near Stanford, reading and thinking. In a late May afternoon, I was rereading Ricard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, with a pot of Dragon Well tea on the small folding table. There’s something disturbingly elusive in its argument, but the solitude seemed to be lending itself to the difficult perusing. Tired, I put the copy down amidst the leaves and petals falling in fitful rustles.

Among other things there, I tried to complete a stubbornly incomplete project, Becoming Inspector Chen, book number ten in the Inspector Chen series. A retrospective volume with a number of chapters done or partially done, and with the outline revised and re-revised, but it refused to click into an organic whole, at least so it seemed to me.

For the construction of a “flat character” like Mrs. Micawber in Dickens’s David Copperfield, she can be summed in one sentence that “I will never desert Mr. Micawber,” and there she is, conveniently. But not so with Inspector Chen. In his college years, he dreams of a poet’s career, not of a cop’s. What’s more, he is a character torn with the developing conflicts and contradictions of the Chinese society in dramatic transition, in which he happens to land himself. The evolution into such an identity, to echo from “Hamlet” in Doctor Zhivago, may be “no stroll through a field.”

Before I came to the States, in a poem originally written in Chinese, the persona begins with a sigh: “I understand, I understand, / but a man is summed up, / after all, only in what / he has chosen to do—” At the time, I was so engrossed in existentialism, according to which, making choices and taking consequences, people become what they are. But things are far more complicated. Choices can be pushed over to Chen, like the state-job-assignment for college graduates in the eighties despite his existential angst, and choices can also be made by others in direct or indirect relation to him, and that without his knowledge or awareness.

In the light of Thackeray’s theory in Vanity Fair about fictional characters being the author’s puppies, however, there is no point analyzing the construction of a character like Chen.

The tender green tea leaves unfolding in the cup, I tried to disengage myself from the speculation. Nevertheless, it came back to me like an insistent fly, buzzing away at the wave of my hand, but only to return to the same spot—perchance to a sticky stain invisible to me.

Then the thoughts shifted to a question that had been raised by my elder brother Xiaowei during my last visit back to Shanghai. With his staying at a care hospital in Nanhui, I had not told him anything about my writing in the States for fear of worrying him, but he must had learned about my work from a Shanghai newspaper. So the moment I stepped into the ward, he asked me, “How have you come to write crime stories?”

It’s came close, to my surprise, to the question regarding how Chen becomes Inspector Chen.

That afternoon, I failed to give Xiaowei a satisfactory answer. So many plausible clues came crowding into mind, as if flashing up, of a sudden, from a long chain of causality in terms of misplaced yin and yang, with links such as an afternoon supporting my blindfolded father like a human crutch during the mass criticism in the mid-sixties, a bowl of mandarin fish soup prepared by a middle school friend in spite of the revolutionary slogans from the Red Guards beneath the window, a mysterious phone call that should not have been picked up in the university dorm corridor from a Beijing hotel, a Prufrockian parting with a dear friend against the glazed eaves of the Forbidden City shimmering in the backdrop, a poem being reported in the night to the higher authorities… Some of them, seemingly so irrelevant at the time, were converging onto the moment.

The same could be said of Becoming Inspector Chen.

At Xiaowei’s bedside, I could have pointed out to this or that in response to his question, but deep down, I knew none of them in itself made a convincing, comprehensive answer.

For that matter, Xiaowei too is related to my choice of representing Inspector Chen, unbelievable as it might have appeared. One of the most unforgettable nights in my middle school years came in the Renji emergency room, where Xiaowei started talking deliriously with sudden brain hypoxia: “The Cultural Revolution did me in.” I hastened to cover his mouth lest it could get him into trouble, and he bit my hand in the dark.

In a flash, darkly-illuminating memories flickered.  In early sixties, Xiaowei was a “model student” in spite of his infantile paralysis, full of hopes for his future in the socialist China, and in the campaign to “Learn from Comrade Lei Feng,” his schoolmates vied with one another to carry him on their backs to the school, but at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he became a “black puppy” because of my father being a “capitalist,” and his schoolmates dumped him like dirt. Disabled physically and politically, Xiaowei gave up his fighting…

He never really recovered from that night.

And more than two decades later, I dedicated Red Mandarin Dress to him, “But for luck, what happened to Xiaowei during the Cultural Revolution could have happened to me.” I was so haunted by the memories of the national disaster, I had to write the book.

In a Buddhist way of speaking, people and things are preordained through karma, even for an act as insignificant as a pick at the grain, a drink of the water. Whatever one does to others, and vice versa, eventually fall into the omnipresent causal connection, though more likely than not, beyond one’s comprehension at the time. With a further stretch in terms of incarnation, one becomes more or less than human in consequence, which is more than dreamed of in Chen’s poetry or philosophy, though.

And in a postmodernist way of speaking, alternatively, one’s being and becoming materialize through the ramifying interrelation and interaction with others. Instead of happening like a metamorphosis at a given point of time, it emerges out of a long process with a lot of happenings seemingly irrelevant until later in hindsight.

So, there is no easy, convenient, one-single-perspective answer to the question about how Chen becomes Inspector Chen, like in my struggle to come to terms with Xiaowei’s question in parallel.

I picked up Ricard Rorty’s book again, and came across a paragraph in the dimming light. “The process of coming to see other human being as “one of us rather than as “them” is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like...”

Sipping at the tea, I looked up to see the sun set on the darkened wings of a solitary blue jay. An afternoon’s gone in the still courtyard, the fallen leaves and petals piling up against the door, a scene reminiscent of the lines by Liu Fangping, a celebrated Tang dynasty poet,  “Pear petals scattered all over the ground, / too much to push open the door.”

And I thought I had a new idea for the structure of Becoming Inspector Chen.