“For Melong, the search that started with Zhou’s picture might have been intended as a smart protest, but what it then led to went way beyond his expectations or imagination,” she said. Then she added, “Perhaps I could make some inquiries for you in financial circles.”
“That would be a great help, Lianping. I’d really appreciate it. I’m still a layman, standing outside the door of the Web world.”
“Oh, I also keep a blog. Nothing official, you know,” she said, writing down the blog address on a Post-it. “It’s called Lili’s Blog.”
“Why Lili?”
“That’s my real name, the one my parents gave me. But for a journalist, it sounds too much like a pet name. So I changed it to Lianping.”
“I’m going to read it,” he said. He drained the coffee, which was already getting cold, and stood up. “And I’ll send you my poems as soon as possible. Thanks for everything, Lianping.”
TWELVE
Chief Inspector Chen went to the bureau the next morning as usual.
Being a special consultant to the Zhou case didn’t absolve him of his responsibility for the Special Case Squad. He was still the head of the squad, though Detective Yu was, effectively, in charge.
After taking a quick look at an internal report, Chen put it down with a lingering bitter taste in his mouth. It was about a dissident artist named Ai, who was said to be stirring up trouble with some of his postmodern exhibitions, which consisted of distorted nude figures done in an absurdist fashion. Chen decided not to take it on as a potential case for the squad. Not because he knew anything about Ai’s work but because he didn’t think it was justifiable to open an investigation of an artist like Ai simply for the sake of “a harmonious society.”
There was a message from Party Secretary Li about a routine meeting around noon, but Chen chose not to return the call.
Instead, he kept brooding over the suspicious circumstances of Wei’s death. An abandoned brown SUV had been found in Nanhui. It had been stolen from a paper company several days ago. The abandoned SUV added to the possibility of its having been a premeditated assault, but at the same time, it was also a dead end. Despite his hunch that Wei’s death was connected to his investigation into Zhou’s death, Chen knew better than to discuss it around the bureau, not even with Detective Yu. The chief inspector felt utterly abysmal about not helping more with Wei’s work. He had a splitting headache coming on.
Then he remembered that Lianping had given him the address of her blog. Taking a break from thinking about Wei, he turned to his computer and typed in the address.
What she had posted there seemed to be quite different from her articles in the newspaper. The title of a recent piece immediately grabbed his attention: “The Death of Xinghua.”
Xinghua was a poet and translator of Shakespeare who died during the Cultural Revolution. He was little known among the younger generation, so Chen wondered why she chose to write about him.
A first-class poet and scholar, Xinghua translated Shakespeare’s Henry IV, edited and annotated the complete translation. That’s about all that people would learn about him if they happened to turn one or two pages in the Complete Works of Shakespeare. What could be more tragic than a forgotten tragedy!
As early as the Anti-Japanese War in the forties, Professor Shediek at Southwest United University considered Xinghua one of his most promising students, as gifted as Harold Bloom. Xinghua soon made a name for himself with his poems and translations, but his career was abruptly cut short. In 1957, he was labeled a rightist during the nationwide antirightist movement. He was condemned and persecuted in the subsequent political movements, and he died in his midforties at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. When an article about him appeared in the official newspaper in the late seventies, the circumstances of his final days were not mentioned at all, as if he had simply died a natural death.
I happened to get in touch with his widow, who told me about all that he had suffered toward the end of his life. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he was subjected to the most humiliating mass criticism and punishment. His home was ransacked by Red Guards, and his almost completed translation of The Divine Comedy was burned on the street. That summer, he was forced to work in the rice paddy field from six in the morning to eight in the evening for “ideological transformation through hard labor.” Xinghua was sweating all over, thirsty, and hungry, but he wasn’t allowed any water or food; toward the end of the day, he had no choice but to wet his lips with a handful of water scooped up from a dirty creek. At the sight of that, a Red Guard rushed over and fiercely pushed his head into the contaminated water, holding it under for several minutes, while another Red Guard kicked him violently in the side. Soon Xinghua fell sick with a swollen belly and fainted in the field. Less than two hours later, he died there of acute diarrhea. The Red Guards insisted, however, that he had committed suicide, and required that an autopsy be performed. Why? Because suicide was said to be another crime-a deliberate act against the efforts of the Party and people to save him. Xinghua’s family begged, but to no avail. His body was cut open; fortunately, the autopsy report proved that he had died of having swallowed contaminated water, and his family was spared the posthumous label of counterrevolutionary.
But why did the details of his tragic death never come out in the official media? Why were the Red Guards never punished? It is said that the Red Guard who pushed Xinghua’s head into the creek was from the family of a high-ranking cadre, and the one who kicked Xinghua became a high-ranking Party cadre himself. It was said that they simply, passionately believed in Mao, and with Mao’s portrait still hung high on the gate of Tiananmen Square, what really could be done? Although the Cultural Revolution was officially declared a well-meant mistake by Mao, there is still an unofficial rule that all writing about the Cultural Revolution should be “contained.” In other words, vague, short, euphemistic, and as little as possible.
After all, who remembers Xinghua?
It’s by chance that I came across a poem by Xinghua. A stanza of it reads:
Trying to grasp a blade of grass, a piece of wood, to secure / the present moment, to avoid the flight of time, / to hold on, to fix oneself, / but in the distant mountains, autumn spreads out at the peaks, / storing infinite joy and sorrow. / After failure comes a stroke of luck.
It is a sad poem. Not only because one’s self has to be maintained by grasping a blade of grass or a piece of wood, but contrary to the heartrending wish in the last line, no stroke of luck came to the poet in the end.
Chen lit a cigarette, waving out the match forcefully. It wasn’t perhaps one of the blogs that would appeal to a large number of people. Most of them had probably never heard of Xinghua. The number of hits on the page spoke to that. But Lianping nonetheless did her research and wrote emotionally. It wasn’t just about one man’s suffering during the Cultural Revolution, it was also about today’s society.
Chen liked the poem quoted at the end of the article.
Now, what about his own luck as a policeman? Chen picked up the phone and called Jiang at the hotel.
At his insistence, Jiang confirmed one thing. The original post that landed Zhou in trouble appeared in a Web forum managed by a man named Melong, though Jiang appeared to be surprised that Chen had learned this through his own channels.
Chen then called Lianping.
“I want to thank you for your blog post on Xinghua. It’s a good piece. It’s a pity few remember him today.”