Dear Readers and Friends: It is Chinese New Year today, the year of auspicious Ox. Let me wish you all a happy and prosperous new year!

Having just made phone calls to China, where people are still watching the Spring Festival Gala on TV, firing the firecrackers, and gathering together at the family reunion dinner, I start the morning writing the letter to you, my readers and friends all over the world.

The year of 2008 has been an eventful one for all of us, but for me, what our ancient master Du Fu said never fails to come back for comfort: whatever gains and losses, writing remains true to the heart.  Earlier in the year, while serving as a writer in residence at Chinese University of Hong Kong, I finished a long-delayed manuscript of linked stories, Years of Red Dust, which came out first in serialization by Le Monde, and then in a French edition by Liana Levi, and shortly afterward, a Chinese edition, which was selected by Asia Weekly as one of the “ten best books in Chinese for 2008.” I’m pleased to say that the German and Italian editions will come out for the Frankfort Book Fair in October this year.

Also in 2008, I completed revising and proofreading The Mao Case, the sixth installment in the Inspector Chen series. In early March, The Mao Case will be released, about which I’m posting separately on the website a piece originally written for Hodder’s catalogue. So you may read how I came to write the book. Here I want to repeat that it is a book written “for the people who suffered under Mao.”

In the meantime, I started working on the seventh book in the series, for which I took a trip to China in November. I’m glad to report that the trip proved to be quite productive for the purpose.

So all in all, a busy and fruitful past year in writing, of which I cannot complain. Looking to the new year, I’m sure it will be busy as before, and it is my plan to finish the above-mentioned book seven in 2009, among other things.

Here, I would like to take the opportunity to answer some of the questions frequently asked of me.
-Release of different editions. This is a question I may not be able to answer too well. It is my understanding that publishers (of different languages) have to work out the sales plans in accordance to their respective markets, and of course, also to the different time period of translation and editing. As a result, the French translations have been coming out earlier than the English for last few years.  For instance, the French edition of The Mao Case came out last year, the English edition, this year, and in German, it is actually book five, Red Mandarin Dress, that is coming out in February.
-About those years not covered in Years of Red Dust.  It is my hope that readers would enjoy, eventually, the stories about the people in the lane with their lives constructed and deconstructed in a complete yet ever-changing “blackboard newsletter history” of China after 1949. So I’ll produce more stories of Red Dust Lane.

And once again, I have to apologize for my being unable to answer all the letters from you, in the midst of my writing, traveling, and deadline-meeting, but there’s one thing I can assure you: all of your suggestions and corrections have been taken seriously, and gratefully too. Indeed, it is your support that has made writing so worthwhile for me.

Thank you and talk to you soon again.
                                                                                      -Qiu Xiaolong

Mao’s elegy for his wife Kaihui first came to me in a Suzhou opera in the early sixties. I was a kid, but I saw my aunt’s eyes brimming with teas, so touched by the “masterpiece of revolutionary romanticism.”

After the Cultural Revolution, in the trial of the Gang of Four headed by Madam Mao, it was said that she had seduced Mao onto the nuptial bed with his wife Zizhen (after Kaihui) being away, who was then locked up in a Moscow mental house. It was not difficult to deduce in whispers that Mao committed bigamy. With all the blame laid on Madam Mao, the “white bone devil” who wreaked havoc with China, my uncle defended Mao as being only human, having surrendered to one moment of weakness.

Articles and books about Mao were studied in school, as before, as part of the Communist education. Then I noticed some dates in two separate articles. In one, Mao went to Jingjiang Mountains as a guerrilla fighter in 1927, leaving Kaihui behind in Changsha, and in another, Mao married Zizhen in the mountains in less than one year. No official publication records that Mao divorced Kaihui, or that Kaihui, still waiting in Changsha, was aware of his marriage with Zizhen. So Mao committed bigamy at least on two occasions, not including his first wife Luo through arranged marriage, which he annulled after having lived with her, not counting all the known and unknown affairs.
 
The discovery regarding Mao and Kaihui particularly saddened and shocked me. Since that Suzhou opera night, I had read the poem for hundreds of times, ever so reverently in my middle school years.  

Further reading produced a more stunning revelation. In 1930, when Mao led a siege against Changsha, putting Kaihui who remained there in danger, he could have moved her out of the city. No effort was made. After the siege failed, as anticipated, the Nationalist authorities retaliated and executed her. But why Mao did nothing for her? For a possible answer, he got rid of her that way because he could not afford to let the two women confront each other.

Mao was cold-blooded—not merely to his women. With his approval, Liu Shaoqi, Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, was killed like a naked, nameless rat in secret prison without trial or medical treatment. Liu was one of millions and millions of victims in the Party struggles and political movements launched by Mao.  

 In my renewed research of Mao’s poetry, I read a Tang dynasty line, After all, things said or unsaid of a great emperor. In the light of Wigensteinian paradigm, “What cannot be said has to pass over in silence.” Little wonder in “Ode to Snow,” after listing the famous emperors in Chinese history with their shortcoming, Mao declared, “To look for the really heroic, you have to count on today!” projecting himself as a greater emperor in a new age.

Thirty years passed after Mao’s death, like a “snap of fingers” in his poem. During my recent trips back to China, I have been witnessing a revival of interests in Mao, will souvenirs or knick-knack mass-manufactured in his ever-shining image. In Beijing, another Mao restaurant opens with its honorary manager being no other than Mao’s personal secretary in his last years, then a knockout with hardly any education, yet with such power that the politburo members groveled before her.  Outside the Mao’s Memorial Hall, tourists stand in a long line, waiting to catch a glimpse of his mummy in the crystal coffin. All this may not be simply explained as nostalgia or commercialization in the socialism of China’s characteristics.

I may not be in a position to judge a historic figure like Mao, not by something in his personal life, but the personal can be really separated from a person who is said to be embodying the greatness of the Party, and of the system, with his huge portrait still hung above the Tiananmen Gate at present?

My friend Yan sent me a biography of an actress’ daughter. While the fate of the actress was more tragic, being persecuted to death by Madam Mao for having “danced” with Mao, Yan chose to leave it in the background. I understand why. But if tragedies in connection with Mao are never to be written, what happened to the actress’ daughter can happen to the daughter’s daughter too.

So I put Inspector Chen to work again, in an investigation about what’s happening to such a daughter’s daughter, in China today. Like me, Chen makes no claim to being a historian, but for his job, he has to look into something sealed in official Chinese history archives—into the closet of horror: Mao.



   


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.