Enigma of China Page 9

  “But what about your journalist career? It’s hard for me to imagine an intellectual like you living the life of a full-time wife. For a couple of months, perhaps, but in the long run, wouldn’t it be boring?”

  “No, not at all. At least, not for me. With his business expanding, Ji has a lot of social obligations that require my attention and company,” Yaqing said, and then changed the subject. “Your boyfriend Xiang has an even bigger family business. Remember that tide and time wait for no man—or no woman.”

  “There you go again.”

  “I’ll tell you what. I just received the officially approved list of 170 new expressions compiled by the Beijing Education Ministry. According to it, if a girl hasn’t married by the age of twenty-six, she’ll be called a ‘leftover.’ And at age of thirty, a ‘senior leftover.’ And after thirty-five, ‘a leftover saint,’ which is a sarcastic reference to the Monkey Saint from Journey to the West.”

  “That’s so cruel.”

  “But so realistic. Even our Education Ministry has approved the phrases. What’s the use of saying anything against it?”

  “Well, not everyone is as lucky as you,” Lianping said, trying to change the subject again.

  “You can say that again. On the day of our son’s birth, Ji bought me a Lexus SUV. But you aren’t doing so bad, either. You got a Volvo from Xiang, right? You definitely deserve it. You’ll make a perfect match for him. You’re pretty, highly educated, and intelligent.”

  “Come on, Yaqing. Xiang just loaned me the down payment. I have to pay all the installments and repay the loan from him as well.”

  Actually, Xiang had tried to insist on buying the car for her, but he wasn’t exactly her boyfriend, and she declined his offer. She hadn’t made up her mind about the relationship. Neither had he, apparently. He was traveling with his father on business in Guangdong. She’d been expecting a phone call from him but hadn’t heard anything so far.

  Because of his family background, she’d been keeping the budding affair secret, except among close friends like Yaqing. She was concerned what people might say in this materialistic age. Perhaps, as a newly popular saying went, finding a good husband was far more important than finding a good job.

  She did not consider hers a good job, though it was secure, with a decent salary, and extra income when her writing was reprinted elsewhere. Wenhui had a contract with Xinhua Agency, syndicating news articles to foreign agencies, with the only requirement being that everything had to be politically acceptable. That requirement was what bothered her.

  For a girl from outside of Shanghai, she was considered to be doing fine for herself in the city. Thanks to a down payment made by her entrepreneur father, she’d been able to buy an apartment just a couple of blocks behind Great World, a well-known entertainment center in the middle of the city on Yan’an Road. Still, she was feeling the increasing pressure of the mortgage payments. It was the same with her car, not to mention the other necessary expenses required for her to maintain a “successful” image in her professional circle.

  “Come on, I know he offered to buy the car for you,” Yaqing said, “but you insisted on accepting the down payment only as a loan. Actually, that was so clever of you—”

  Lianping’s phone rang, which prevented her from explaining, though she wondered why Yaqing thought she’d been clever. She picked up the call.

  “Hello, this is Lianping.”

  “Hi, I’m Chen Cao. We met at a meeting of the Shanghai Writers’ Association not long ago. You later called about some poems for your section in Wenhui. Do you remember?”

  “Oh, yes, of course I remember, Chief Inspector Chen. Do you have your poems ready for me?”

  “Well, I haven’t forgotten your request.”

  “I knew you would write for us.”

  The fact was, however, she hadn’t thought he would. The high-ranking cop was far too busy, and she’d asked for his poetry perfunctorily, only because of her temporary position.

  But she’d heard about him, as far back as her college years—not about him as a professional writer but as the legendary chief inspector. When she started working for Wenhui, she heard even more about him, particularly from her colleagues covering crime or politics in Shanghai. When she met him at the Writers’ Association, though, she wasn’t exactly impressed. He seemed to be a bit too reserved, not at all like the romantic poet she’d once imagined. For an emerging Party cadre, however, such a pose made sense, and she thought she could understand it.

  “I tried to dig out some of my old poems.”

  “Please send them to me. You have my e-mail address. I can’t wait to read them.”

  “Actually, I’m in the lobby of your office building right now. I’d like to discuss with you—”

  “Really, Chief Inspector Chen! I’ll meet you there in five minutes,” she said. “How about meeting me in the café on the fifteenth floor? It’ll be more comfortable for us to sit talking there.”

  As she flipped the phone closed, she saw Yaqing eyeing her incredulously.

  “No wonder,” Yaqing commented. “You have Chief Chen Cao waiting for you in the lobby—no, in the café.”

  “I saw him the other day at a meeting of the Writers’ Association. It was all just to cover your section, you know.” She stood up in a hurry, “Sorry, I have to get back to the office.”

  “He’s surely a character! A rising Party official with several major investigations to his credit, and connections to the top echelon in the Forbidden City. Not to mention that he’s a poet in his own right at the same time. We’ve published his work in the Pen column. Believe it or not, he’s said to have dated one of our journalists years ago, written poems for her, which she then published in the newspaper.”

  “That’s incredible. But it didn’t work out between them?”

  “No, but I don’t know the details. Her name is Wang Feng and she left for Japan. Which is all I know. He’s really something, an enigmatic Party cadre.”

  “Isn’t he? As an official of his rank, I expect he can pick and choose when it comes to girls. He must have quite a number of them waiting around. By the way, do you remember the title of those poems?”

  “I think I still have a copy of the newspaper somewhere.”

  “Great. If you can find it, take a good photo of the text and send it to my phone.”

  “Certainly, but why?”

  “So I can talk to him about it.”

  “I see. No problem, then. It might be a plus for you to publish his work in our newspaper. He’s now the deputy Party secretary of the city police bureau, but it’s just a matter of time before he’s the number one, according to Ji,” Yaqing said, nodding. “What a glutton you are! You have one full bowl in front of you, and you have your eye on another.”

  “Come on, Yaqing. I’m merely interested in his poems.”

  “But he’s a wild card,” Yaqing said, accompanying her out to the elevator. “And complicated too. You never know what he will come to you for. Your present boyfriend Xiang is a safer bet.”

  Lianping, too, started to wonder about the reason behind Chen’s visit as the elevator started to go down. He didn’t have to come to the office to talk about his poems. A phone call or an e-mail would have been more than sufficient. And any of the official newspapers in the city would be eager to publish his work.

  * * *

  Five minutes later, she spotted him as she stepped into the lobby hall of the Wenhui Office Building.

  “I have to show my ID and sign the register here,” he said. “I thought it might be easier for you to bring me through security as one of your authors.”

  That was considerate of him. An official visit from the police might cause speculation, but no journalist would worry about having a professional connection such as Chief Inspector Chen.

  He was wearing a light gray blazer, white shirt, and khaki pants that morning. He certainly didn’t look like a cop, but he didn’t look like one of those long-haired romantic poets
, either.

  “I’m so glad you could make it over today, Chief Inspector Chen. Let’s go on up. It’s much quieter, and it has a better view.”

  “Thanks. Please just call me Chen. For one thing, having a cop around might not be so popular in your office.”

  “But a high-ranking policeman like you is certain to be popular anywhere, particularly so at our Party newspaper.”

  “Well said,” he remarked, apparently appreciating the repartee.

  They took the elevator up to the café on the fifteenth floor, where they chose a table by the window.

  He ordered a cup of freshly ground coffee. She ordered herself a cup of fresh jasmine tea, breathing onto the water, making the white petals ripple out against the green, tender tea leaves.

  Everything is possible but not necessarily plausible, she reflected, a jasmine petal between her lips.

  “I really appreciate your support of literature, Lianping. It’s an age when few people read poetry,” he started, taking a sip of coffee. “But my pen is rusted. I happened to be passing by the Wenhui building this afternoon and I thought of you. So I decided to drop in and discuss it with you.”

  She couldn’t help feeling flattered. At least he’d taken her request seriously.

  “So what poems have you brought me today?”

  “Sorry, nothing yet. I have a special case on my hands, so I’m really busy at the moment. But I would like to talk to you about what topics would be appropriate for Wenhui.”

  “Let me see, I may still have the poems you wrote for us earlier.”

  She pulled out her phone and pressed a button. Sure enough, Yaqing had sent over the text. She then turned the phone over to Chen.

  He took a quick look at the screen and handed it back with an embarrassed expression on his face.

  “Wow, that was written years ago,” he said.

  It was a group of poems entitled Trio, which she hadn’t read. She started reading the first piece, entitled “Tenor”:

  Straw-stuffed, caught in the rain, too / saturated to shake in the wind, to be / is to be constructed: plastic buttons / for your eyes to keep the horizon / high-buttoned in a shroud of drizzling mist, / a carrot nose, half-bitten by a mule, and a broken ancient music box for your mouth, / wet, eccentric, repeating / Ling-Ling-Ling / to the surrounding crows at dusk. / Setting afire a straw-yellow / photograph, murmuring “Let bygones / be bygones,” as if whistling alone, / in the dark woods, I open / the window to the sudden sunlight. / Another day, when it begins to rain, / I am you again—

  “Please don’t read any more, Lianping.”

  She found it hard to juxtapose the persona in the poem with the Party cadre sitting opposite, stirring his coffee with a spoon. Could it be the poem that was written for Wang Feng, or was it for another girl, perhaps named Ling? Stories about the chief inspector circulated among her circle, and it would be difficult for people not to speculate.

  “You are so romantic,” she said, looking up from her phone.

  “That is a too-sentimental piece,” he said, seemingly self-conscious. “But it will never do to mistake the persona for the poet. To use T. S. Eliot’s words, poetry is impersonal. I dashed off those lines after watching a Japanese movie, conjuring up the agony of the protagonist, and saying what he does not say in the movie. An objective correlative, so to speak. With creative writing, using such a persona may have a liberating effect.”

  “I see. What about an ordinary cop’s persona, then? Of course, you are an extraordinary one. But you could choose to focus on an unextraordinary cop, like one of those working under you, where there is a lot of sacrifice but no flower or limelight. That would be a subject appropriate for a Party newspaper like Wenhui, and naturally you are familiar with the details.”

  He didn’t respond immediately, but he seemed genuinely intrigued, nodding and sipping at his coffee again.

  “Yes, you’ve made a good suggestion, and a politically correct one too. I’ll definitely think about it, Lianping. So, have you been in charge of the literature section for a long time?” Chen asked.

  “No, it’s actually not my section. I normally edit the finance section.”

  “You majored in finance?”

  “No, in English.”

  “Oh, that’s interesting,” he said, though he chose not to follow up on it. “Finance is far more popular today.”

  “What do you mean, Chief Inspector Chen?”

  “According to a novelist who was popular in the eighties, it’s far more popular nowadays to be a businessman, so he’s become a prosperous CEO and no longer writes.”

  “Oh, that’s Tieliang. I watched that TV interview with him. What a shame! He made a fortune running a chain of clubs for officials—all in the name of literature and art.” She added more hot water to her cup and said, “But he’s not alone. You might remember a sentence in Dream of the Red Chamber: ‘Except the two stone lions crouching in front of the Jia mansion, nothing else is clean.’”

  “Well, you simply need to swap ‘the Jia mansion’ with ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’”

  “Wow, that’s quite something for a Party cadre to say.”

  “May I smoke, Lianping?”

  “Go ahead,” she said, realizing she’d been carried away by the conversation. After all, it was a senior police officer who was sitting opposite her, and she wondered what he really wanted to talk to her about. “Oh, I heard that you’ve published a collection of poetry, and it sold out.”

  “I, too, thought it sold quite well. As it turned out, however, a Big Buck bought a thousand copies from the publisher, and then gave them out as gifts to his business associates. While it was done as a favor to me, and without my knowledge, it came as a blow to my self-esteem as a poet. And as a cop, too, since I failed to detect that trick with the sales. But then again, I didn’t graduate from the police academy, so perhaps that can be counted as a factor in my defense.”

  She enjoyed his subtle touch of self-irony. At least he knew better. Then it was her turn to speak in a self-deprecating way.

  “I didn’t major in finance. But for a girl from Anhui, any job in Shanghai was worth grabbing. My major in English did give me one advantage, though. In today’s financial world, a lot of new terms have to be translated from English. For instance, mortgage and option. These terms were nonexistent in the state economy. So I was offered the position at Wenhui.”

  “That is quite a coincidence. I was assigned to the job at the police bureau due to similar considerations—I was needed to translate a handbook of police procedures.”

  “In my situation, there’s also a material difference between a literature journalist and a finance journalist.”

  “Enlighten me, Lianping.”

  “For example, at the meeting at the Writers’ Association, what I was given there was a cup of tea. And not high-quality tea, for that matter. But at a meeting of real estate professionals, a journalist might be given all sorts of things. One time, I was even given a laptop.”

  “No wonder Tieliang no longer writes,” Chen said. “But still, your job is important. It helps people understand the financial world in which they live, a world that would otherwise make no sense to them.”

  “Well, it might be necessary for us to make sense of it in a politically acceptable way. As Zhuangzi put it, ‘He who steals a hook will be hanged; he who steals a country will be made a prince.’ Our job is to justify the practice of country-stealing.”

  “Yes, corruption runs like an unbridled horse through this one-party system of ours.”

  “People all know about it, but can we write about it? For instance, consider all the shady deals in the housing market. One of the developers of the Xujiahui, Mr. Tao, used to be a dumpling peddler, but now, three or four years later, Tao is a billionaire. How? It’s said that a high-ranking official in the city government took a fancy to Tao’s wife after he saw her ladling out dumplings in their curbside stall. Needless to say, the official both gave and took
in an incredible amount from her dainty hand—money for access—after they enjoyed cloud and rain in the dark night.”

  “You know a lot about these things, Lianping.”

  “I’m a finance journalist, and I have a friend whose father is a developer. I hear about all the manipulations and fluctuations of land prices done in the interests of the Party,” she said, with an embarrassed smile. “Sorry, I’m getting a bit carried away.”

  “No, I’m grateful for your insight. I have to admit, by catching the ‘last bus’ during the housing reform, I was assigned to a three-bedroom apartment. Supposedly I got such a large place because of my mother, even though she refused to move in with me.”

  “You don’t have to say that. For a Party official of your rank, a three-bedroom apartment would be nothing. Nor has there been anything like ‘last bus.’ Just half a year ago, the head of Wenhui got a villa rent-free, the theory being that he would then be able to work better for the Party newspaper.”

  “Well, in terms of social Darwinism, it’s the successful—whether businessmen or Party officials—versus the unsuccessful, the ordinary people.”

  “But can we write about or report on them? No. That’s why Party newspapers, like Wenhui or Liberation, are really struggling. They only survive because of the mandatory subscription policy in the city. That also explains the popularity of Internet blog writings. They’re watched by the government, but not that strictly or that effectively.”

  “Well, I happened to be in the neighborhood,” he said, abruptly changing the subject. “One of my colleagues had an accident on the street corner around here.”

  “Oh,” she said, slightly disappointed. He wasn’t here because he’d thought of her—or about the poems he’d promised her. “Those reckless drivers are impossible.”