Red Dust Lane is based on a real lane located on the corner of Fujian and Jinling Roads, in an area once in the French Concession, now in Huangpu District, Shanghai.
In my childhood, all the neighborhood kids went to the one and same school. With my home being only one-minute walk from Red Dust, where lived most of my schoolmates and friends, I spent more time there than anywhere else.
Decades later, I was surprised to find my thoughts travel back, time and again, to Red Dust, through the memories spanning all these years. So I started thinking about writing some short stories about the lane.
But I was not so sure about an overall structure for them. For a story happening in China’s nineties, for instance, if you want to do a thoroughgoing narrative, it is more likely than not that you’ll have to follow a long chain of cause and effect behind, all the way to the seventies, sixties, or even earlier, with the Cultural Revolution and numerous other political movements shaping and reshaping the lives of people. However, a short story cannot afford the lengthy flashbacks. What could I do?
Inspiration came from The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry, a brilliant book written by my late friend M. L. Rosenthal. According to him, poetry cannot but be short because of its lyrical intensity, particularly with the challenges from other genres. So modern poetic sequence makes a resonant response to the increasingly complicated modern society. In other words, the short, fragmented poems succeed in forming into an organic, continuous whole in a spatial form, like Eliot’s Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s Cantos.
And I attempted to arrange the stories in a chronological order, with a short piece in every two or three years, from 1949 to the present. They are independent, but interconnected; behind each and every one of them stretches on the history—not fragmented, but continuous, which materializes through a concrete narrative locale—Red Dust Lane. There, I remembered vividly, in many a summer evening, people would tell stories, sitting out in front of the lane, smoking, laughing, drinking. The stories could be related to the lane, though not always so. Then I also recalled, near the lane entrance, there was a blackboard newsletter that would sum up the major political and social events at the end of a year. In Years of Red Dust, I too place a blackboard newsletter in front of a story. The contents of the newsletter may not necessarily have a direct bearing on the story, but it provides the then socio-political discourse, in which the story is contained. Such a device could have been reversely influenced by New Historicists, whose academic discussion is usually preceded by a anecdote or story.
I began to be aware of something else. When a story of one time period is put aside that of another, a sort of tension arose among them. It appears as if they were commenting, illustrating, and contesting one another. From a story, people usually try to find the meaning or moral. In modern China, however, the meaning is determined by the given historical-political background. The problem is: with the background ever shifting through one political movement after another, the meaning, too, has been constantly constructed and deconstructed. Not only with the meaning of the story, it also involves that of the people in the narratives, as well as the people narrating them. For so many years, such “class” labels as landlord, rightist, five black groups, rebels, capitalist roader, red guards and what not, have been ruthlessly imposed onto the people, and then torn away—in juxtaposition, so full of Kafkaesque absurdity and despair. A story, narrated in the fifties with the revolutionary fervor of the Big Leap Forward, can turn out to be ironical in the discursive context of the seventies, or totally negated in the ideology of the nineties. Also, in the real life of Red Dust Lane, there is no such formula as “happily ever after.” You may think you have told a story to the end, but in several years, things have changed so dramatically, a sequence pops up, whether you like it or not. So in the collection, some of the stories consist of two parts, not always a continuation, but possibly a contradiction of the earlier one. Indeed, “we’re all made of dust,” as one lane resident says, “and the Chinese epithet ‘red’ lends a world of difference to it in all the connotations: human passion, revolution, vicissitude, sacrifice, vanity…”
In the official Chinese history textbooks, all the “dust” may have been easily written off. But it is here that literature differs from history. Literature focuses on people—the tragedies or comedies of individual human being. What may serve merely as an inconsequential footnote for history is enough to seal the fate for a man or woman in Red Dust Lane.
The writing of the stories went on for several years, in the midst of the Inspector Chen series. Thanks to the push of Le Monde, I finally managed to put the stories together into a collection which was serialized first in that French newspaper, and thanks to my friend Cordula Paetzel, who supplies these wonderful pictures taken of the lane (seen here) when we shot the German documentary in Shanghai.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:
Qiu Xiaolong was born in Shanghai, China. Hepublished prize-winning poetry, translation and criticism in Chinese in theeighties, and became a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association. In 1988, hecame to the United States asa Ford Foundation Fellow, started writing in English, and obtained a Ph.D. incomparative literature at Washington University. He is the author of Death of a RedHeroine (2000), A Loyal Character Dancer (2002), When Red IsBlack (2004), A Case of Two Cities (2006), and Red Mandarin Dress (2007) in the criticallyacclaimed, award-winning Inspector Chen series; two poetry translations, Treasury of Chinese Love Poems(2003) and Evoking T'ang (2007); and his own poetry collection, Lines Around China (2003). He lives in St. Louis with his wife and daughter.
Red Dust Lane is based on a real lane located on the corner of Fujian and Jinling Roads, in an area once in the French Concession, now in Huangpu District, Shanghai. 
Inspiration came from The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry, a brilliant book written by my late friend M. L. Rosenthal. According to him, poetry cannot but be short because of its lyrical intensity, particularly with the challenges from other genres. So modern poetic sequence makes a resonant response to the increasingly complicated modern society. In other words, the short, fragmented poems succeed in forming into an organic, continuous whole in a spatial form, like Eliot’s Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s Cantos. 
I began to be aware of something else. When a story of one time period is put aside that of another, a sort of tension arose among them. It appears as if they were commenting, illustrating, and contesting one another. From a story, people usually try to find the meaning or moral. In modern China, however, the meaning is determined by the given historical-political background. The problem is: with the background ever shifting through one political movement after another, the meaning, too, has been constantly constructed and deconstructed. Not only with the meaning of the story, it also involves that of the people in the narratives, as well as the people narrating them. For so many years, such “class” labels as landlord, rightist, five black groups, rebels, capitalist roader, red guards and what not, have been ruthlessly imposed onto the people, and then torn away—in juxtaposition, so full of Kafkaesque absurdity and despair. A story, narrated in the fifties with the revolutionary fervor of the Big Leap Forward, can turn out to be ironical in the discursive context of the seventies, or totally negated in the ideology of the nineties. Also, in the real life of Red Dust Lane, there is no such formula as “happily ever after.” You may think you have told a story to the end, but in several years, things have changed so dramatically, a sequence pops up, whether you like it or not. So in the collection, some of the stories consist of two parts, not always a continuation, but possibly a contradiction of the earlier one. Indeed, “we’re all made of dust,” as one lane resident says, “and the Chinese epithet ‘red’ lends a world of difference to it in all the connotations: human passion, revolution, vicissitude, sacrifice, vanity…” 
