For Creator of Inspector Chen, China Is a Tough Case to Crack

By Howard W. French | The New York Times
April 07, 2007

WHEN Qiu Xiaolong reflects on his life, the path has an air almost of inevitability.

The arc includes an inquisitive childhood in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution; studying poetry in Beijing, where he translated the complete works of T. S. Eliot; traveling in the early days of détente to the United States, where he eventually became a professor; and finally his status today as perhaps the most successful author of detective stories set in China.

Nothing, of course, seemed clear or preordained at the time. Not even, he says, for a single moment.

Life for Mr. Qiu (pronounced Cho) has been a series of accidents, though for him often very fortunate ones. At 54, like most Chinese people of his generation, he has been through an awful lot. But in telling his own story, there is a particular grace about this optimistic man, who pauses at the mention of great coincidences and laughs deeply at the mystery of it all.

Mr. Qiu, who teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, was ostensibly visiting the city of his youth to attend an international literary festival here, and to promote his latest book, “A Case of Two Cities.” This too, however, would be a gross oversimplification.

Shanghai is much more than his hometown. It is his muse, and it has been the one consistent subject of his fiction, the four Inspector Chen detective novels he has written so far, which have sold over 700,000 copies and have been translated into 16 languages, including Chinese.

Chinese? Yes, since leaving the country at the age of 35 in 1988 on a Ford Foundation fellowship, Mr. Qiu has written in English instead of his native language. The choice, which today sometimes displeases Chinese authorities, he said, has been forced upon him by circumstances in his own country — from the bloody antidemocracy crackdown at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, to the many restrictions on speech, especially anything construed as political speech, that have followed.

He was reminded of these restrictions during his current visit home, when he wrote an article in homage of Yang Xianyi, an aging and infirm translator of Chinese classics into English. Mr. Yang became a hero to his generation of intellectuals for his decision to resign from the Communist Party over its handling of the pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square.

When Mr. Qiu approached Chinese magazines to get it published, they were unfailingly polite but unyielding. “We’re sorry,” he said editors would announce with a smile. “It’s very interesting, but for certain reasons, we’re afraid we can’t publish it.”

Mr. Qiu’s first inklings that he might be able to write date from an experience that still looms large in his life: the hounding and humiliation of his father, a businessman who was labeled a class enemy, or tagged “black” in the language of the Cultural Revolution.

While his father was hospitalized for cataract surgery and temporarily unable to see, he was ordered to write a self-criticism. Mr. Qiu, who was in his early teens at the time, stood in for him, writing the document.

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