This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, May 18, 2012 - It’s a classic murder mystery set-up: A once-pristine lake is being choked by pollution, and the nearby business responsible for the polluting is planning an IPO and doesn’t need its boat to be rocked.
Then a top executive of the firm is murdered, and a range of possible suspects is quickly drawn up by a resourceful police detective who just happens to be visiting the area on vacation.
The twist? The scenario takes place in a rapidly changing China, whose move from Communist control to more of a market economy has brought with it some of the same capitalist problems that used to be the target of the party’s sharpest criticism.
The newly published book is “Don’t Cry, Tai Lake,” the incisive detective is Chief Inspector Chen Cao and the author is Qiu Xiaolong, who was born in China but came to study at Washington University in 1988 and has stayed in the St. Louis area ever since.
Besides writing the series of well-reviewed novels featuring Chen, Qiu also has written and translated several volumes of poetry, a passion he shares with his detective.
The mix of poetry and politics gives Qiu’s writing a texture that moves beyond pure whodunit escapism, providing readers with a glimpse into a society being transformed but still influenced by and honoring ancient tradition.
Like Chen, Qiu both translates and writes poetry, and his unique perspective of a Chinese native who has lived in the United States for more than two decades puts his stories into an informative context.
In one of the novels, “A Case of Two Cities,” Chen actually travels to St. Louis, but local tourism officials aren’t likely to be very pleased with the tale of his visit. The downtown area is depicted as a dangerous place, with few things for tourists to do, and one member of Chen’s party is actually murdered there.
But he also gets to visit the city where his poetic hero, T.S. Eliot, was born – a writer that is one of Qiu’s favorites as well.
Qiu also has written other books, including “Years of Red Dust,” an interlocking series of sketches that traces Chinese life from the takeover of the Communists in 1949 to the present day. It depicts the fortunes of various characters in an area of Shanghai, Qiu’s home town, as society is transformed.
Asked if the residents of the lane could be compared with those of William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi, Qiu was pleased and said he intended the book to be an example of various stories told from different points of view. He is working on a second volume from Red Dust Lane, where he hopes to fill in gaps and eventually have one story for every year.
After teaching at Washington U. for several years, Qiu now writes full time. He spoke this week with the Beacon from his home in west St. Louis County the day before leaving for France, where he was going on a book tour for his newest Inspector Chen novel, which will be published in the United States next year.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Beacon: How did you end up in St. Louis from Shanghai?
Qiu: I got a Ford Foundation fellowship in 1988 that allowed me to choose a place to study. I chose Washington University. All I knew at that time was that St. Louis was the city where T.S. Eliot was born, and Washington University was founded by his grandfather, so for me there was almost no choice. I had to be here.
That’s why I came to Washington University. The next year, the Tiananmen Square tragedy occurred, and I had to stay on. For that reason, I switched my writing from Chinese to English, and one thing led to another.
Beacon: What do you see in the poetry of Eliot and in the writing of another Missourian, Mark Twain, who also is popular in China, known as Master Ma?
Qiu: In the mid ‘80s, when I was in China, Eliot was introduced to Chinese readers for the first time. He was much discussed, and it was fashionable to talk about T.S. Eliot. One of the reasons he was important to me and a number of young poets at the time was because he did not talk about personal feelings. Poetry is not simply self-expression. It’s not just romantic poems.
He said you need to work on it like a piece of art, and you cannot identify yourself with the persona in the poem or with the speaker of the poem – you have to separate the two. You need to work on the personal feelings to make the poem universal. It’s like in “The Waste Land” – it’s not just about his life, but it’s also about society and civilization.
I would say he appeals not to Chinese society in general, but also to a number of people. Traditionally, if you talk about Chinese poetry, you also talk about poems with an “I” and poems without an “I.” We do have poetry similar to that of T.S. Eliot. It’s not something totally new.
Mark Twain is very popular in China. Before the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, and even shortly after that, only a number of Western writers were translated into Chinese. Mark Twain happened to be one, I think because he was critical of American society. So he was very popular. Nowadays, he is still popular among the American writers, but he was popular earlier.
Beacon: Do you consider yourself an Amerian writer or a Chinese writer? Do you think and write in English or in Chinese?
Qiu: I would probably say an American-Chinese writer. If you want to be more specific, I go back to China once a year, sometimes twice a year, and nowadays, with the internet, I follow what is happening in China quite closely. In China, if you want to do internet research, a lot of websites are blocked, so it’s a lot more convenient here. You can find more information than a Chinese writer can.
At first, I think my writing was a little bit of translation – a little bit of thinking in Chinese and then translating it into English. But now, for the novels, I think in English. When you are translating into English, you can do that, but they are not necessarily good sentences in English. That takes too much time and effort. But for poetry, I still do it in Chinese.
Beacon: What has the reception been for your books in China?
Qiu: Some of my books have been translated into Chinese, I think four of them now. But there are lots of cuts and changes. Even Shanghai has been changed into the English letter H. They change the names of the streets, so they believe people won’t be able to recognize them, but of course they know. When the books do come out, reviewers and readers all say it’s a story about Shanghai. Censorship officials don’t read the reviews.
The books are about what is happening in China right now, not the China that people used to know. I purposely try not to say the exact year.
I think I was well known in China even before I started writing novels because of my translations of poetry, of Eliot, of W.B. Yeats, of collections. I did a lot of translations before I came over to the United States.
Beacon: Did you expect the Chen novels would become a series? How much longer do you expect to be writing them?
Qiu: I really did not know. That is probably why the first book is thicker than the other books. Even so, my American editor cut about 80 pages. She said you don’t want your first book to be that thick. Then she suggested I write a second one, and one thing led to another.
If someday I feel there is nothing new, nothing else worth writing, maybe I’ll stop. Right now, there are so many things happening. It’s different from ordinary mystery books. I don’t want to just write about murders, but with all these things happening in China, I’m thinking I will go on with the series now, but also with other things.