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At the beginning of the Cultural
Revolution in 1966, Red Guards raided and ransacked my family home. As with
many other so-called “black families” at the time, in the campaign of “Sweeping
Away the Four Olds” the Red Guards subjected my parents to revolutionary “mass
criticism,” seizing whatever they saw as capitalistic or counter-revolutionary,
such as gold jewelry, fashionable clothes, bank savings, and old books. That
night, my mother suffered a breakdown, and I turned into a “black puppy”
trembling beside her.
Weeks later, I discovered in a
dust-covered box a pile of books that mysteriously survived that campaign.
Among them, a photo magazine contained a picture taken in the early 1960s,
entitled “Mother, Let’s Go There.” The son in the picture, six or seven years
old, is scampering about in a garden, pointing toward the distant horizon,
pulling the hand of his beautiful mother in a stylish mandarin dress. Judging
by the details of picture, they, too, must have been of the “black family
background”—in the days of the Cultural Revolution. Now, even Wang Guangmei, the “ex-first lady” of China, had to stand on a mass-criticism
stage, wearing a deliberately torn
mandarin dress that served as humiliating evidence of her decadent lifestyle. What
could be in store for the mandarin dress wearer in the photo? And what
about the son—who had been about my age—beside her? Still so happy looking into
the lens, so unprepared for the disaster drawing close. I shuddered at the thought
of it, failing to find answers to those questions.
Thirty years later, after having
lived in the States since 1989, after enormous changes in China
during the unprecedented reform, I came back to a family reunion in Shanghai.
I met with a relative who ran a boutique mandarin dress store near Jingjiang
Hotel. She told me about her booming business, with the mandarin dress staging
a comeback in a collective nostalgia of the city. Unexpectedly, her talk
reminded of the picture examined so long ago, and of the questions still
unanswered. Actually, they seemed to have gained a new poignancy in a
historical perspective. Did the people in the photo survive the national
disaster? My mother never really
recovered; I did, although scarred. Once again, I succumbed to the temptation of
identifying myself with the son in the picture.
The memory of the picture haunted me. Eventually,
as I started contemplating the possibility of writing something out of it, all
the thoughts and associations came crowding into my mind: the cause of the
Cultural Revolution, the absurdities and atrocities demonstrated in those years,
the collective unconscious, the archetypes of the femme fatale in the Orient, the disastrous childhood trauma, the Confucian
discourse at the expense of romantic love… Most of the above are topics avoided,
if not exactly banned, in today’s China.
Naturally, all these converge on the background of a most challenging serial
murder case, with each of the victims wearing a red mandarin dress.
Then I knew I had a new book in the
Inspector Chen series. This time, pulled away from his academic paper on the deconstruction
of love in classical Chinese literature to the investigation, Chen investigates
further, not just into the present-day materialistic society festered with
rampant corruption and social injustice, but into the Cultural Revolution, and into
the long history that led to the disaster.
And thanks to such a picture, Chen finally
flounders to the conclusion, when he shudders and exclaims, “But for luck, what
has happed to the boy could have happened to me.”
-Qiu Xiaolong
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:
Qiu Xiaolong was born in Shanghai, China. He
published prize-winning poetry, translation and criticism in Chinese in the
eighties, and became a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association. In 1988, he
came to the United
States as
a Ford Foundation Fellow, started writing in English, and obtained a Ph.D. in
comparative literature at Washington University. He is the author of Death of a Red
Heroine (2000), A Loyal Character Dancer (2002), When Red Is
Black (2004), A Case of Two Cities (2006), and Red Mandarin Dress (2007) in the critically
acclaimed, 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.
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