No easy answer for crime writer
Print Edition
FOR an unexpectedly long period from 2014 to 2015, I stayed in San Francisco, trying to complete a stubbornly incomplete project — “Becoming Inspector Chen,” Book 10 in the Inspector Chen series.
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 a cop’s. What’s more, he is a character torn by the developing conflicts and contradictions of Chinese society in dramatic transition, in which he happens to find himself. The evolution into such an identity was “no stroll through a field.”
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.
During my last trip to Shanghai, I visited my elder brother Xiaowei who was 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 have 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?”
This 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 misplaced yin and yang. Some of them, seemingly so irrelevant at the time, were converging onto the moment.
The same could be said of “Becoming Inspector Chen.”
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 1960s, Xiaowei was a “model student” in spite of his infantile paralysis, full of hopes for his future in the socialist China. 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 our father being a “capitalist.” His schoolmates dumped him like dirt. Disabled physically and politically, Xiaowei gave up fighting…
He never really recovered from that night.
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 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...
In a postmodernist way of speaking, alternatively, one’s being and becoming materialize through the ramifying interrelation and interaction with others...
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.
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