Death of a Red Heroine

The naked body of a young woman is found in a remote canal. Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Special Case Squad, Homicide Division, Shanghai Police Bureau and his deputy, Detective Yu Guangming, discover that she is Guan Hongying, a national model worker. How could a young woman with such a responsible position have come to this end? Who might have killed her? Her coworkers and neighbors all swear that she had no boyfriend, that she lived a quiet, exemplary life, devoted to the Party and her work. Chen’s supervisors, Party Secretary Li and Commisar Zhang, insist this is a political case, but the detectives feel it must have been a personal crime.

What a fascinating look at China in the nineties – a country moving into the future, show more affected by modern technology and Western influence, but with a cadre of political leaders who hold tight to the ideals of Communism. Or at least who give voice to those ideals. For, in reality, who you know is much more important than what you know. The children and friends of high-ranking officials get the plum positions, best apartments (or mansions), sleek cars and high-end consumer goods, while the masses struggle to raise their families on less-than-subsistence wages, queuing in ever-longer lines at state outlets or paying a premium to buy at “free” markets. Regardless, everyone must watch what s/he says and does, for anyone is subject to being charged with that most serious and nebulous of infractions: crime and corruption under Western bourgeois influence.

I really liked how Qiu wrote these characters. The evolving relationship between Detective Yu and Chief Inspector Chen was particularly interesting. Working independently for much of the book, they still manage to come together as a team and to truly support one another. I loved how inventive they were in communicating sensitive information to one another without drawing further attention to their continued efforts.

Some of the minor characters were a complete delight. Old Hunter, a retired police officer and Yu’s father, is now a volunteer neighborhood patroller, checking to make sure that private peddlers adhere to the socialist ideals in conducting their commercial transactions. Overseas Chinese Lu, Chen’s long-time friend, is an entrepreneur with a successful restaurant, Moscow Suburb. Little Zhao, a bureau driver, keeps his ear to the ground and passes along helpful gossip (or warnings) to Chen. Yu’s wife, Peiqin, is a valuable sounding board and go-between. Wang Feng, a reporter with the Wenhui Daily (one of China’s most influential papers), is a good friend, a valuable source of information, and a formidable ally.

But it is Chief Inspector Chen who truly shines. Chen is a contrast: a man educated in literature, a published poet, and frequent translator of mysteries, but who is also a methodical investigator concerned only with bringing the perpetrator to justice. The reader gains increased insight into the complicated workings of the Chinese Party system as Chen is forced to consider politics and to find a way to work within and around the system. I loved the poetry he quoted and how seamlessly Qiu wove these couplets into the story, showing how a remembered passage might give Chen an idea for which direction to next take his investigation.

The city of Shanghai is practically a character, the scenes are so vivid. Qiu describes the bustle of a major metropolitan area, the squalor of tenement living, the luxurious surroundings of a major hotel or old family mansion, and the quiet pleasure of a park. And the food – crab, dumplings, rice balls, perfectly ripe fruit, hot soups, fresh fish, succulent duck, and many delicacies unfamiliar to Westerners. I think even if I had never been to Shanghai I would have a clear picture in my head of the surroundings based on Qiu’s descriptive passages.

The suspect / perpetrator is pretty clearly identified early on, but that’s not a problem here. It is not the kind of suspense/thriller/mystery that relies on secrets, violent altercations and dangerous situations. Rather, the joy of this novel is watching how Chen builds his case. I’ll definitely read more of this series. show less

Smart, great police procedural, with that cold war vibe so familiar, and something classic, maybe just in the assortment of mysterious beautiful ladies our hero seems to collect.

This book, ostensibly a murder mystery, deals with a surprising array of existential and societal issues. A police procedural mostly set in Shanghai, it also explores characters torn between their own priorities and those imposed on them by their government. We are also given a glimpse of how Western influences are starting to impact Chinese society. With a huge, culturally diverse cast of characters (nota bene: keep a list), we are provided a fascinating insight into the lives of people from a wide range of levels within the Communist Party. The Party is almost a character of its own as it pervades the story and impacts the characters’ decisions. Compelling and gritty.

Death of a Red Heroine is serviceable as a police procedural and brilliant as a look a people’s lives during a period of enormous social upheaval. The main character, Chief Inspector Chen Cao, is head of the special case squad in the Homicide Division of the Shanghai Police Bureau in 1990. When the book opens, Chairman Mao has been dead for more than a decade, only a few years have passed since China’s new leader Deng Xiaoping proclaimed “to get rich is glorious,” and the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square is still painfully fresh.

Chen must investigate the murder of a young woman named Guan Hongying who was a “model worker,” a selfless citizen dedicated only to embodying the ideals of the Communist Party. As the investigation show more progresses, it becomes clear that Guan was leading a double life – model worker by day and transgressive mistress to a vicious and dangerous married man by night.

The strength of the novel lies not in uncovering the identity of the murderer (which is clear from early in the story), but in the fascinating portrait of China during the time it was beginning to open to the rest of the world, and was on the road to becoming a global super power. Chen and his generation are disillusioned by the corruption of the Communist regime, the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and the repression of the Tiananmen incident, but uneasy about the rapid and massive economic and social changes that make their daily lives like a trip through Alice’s Looking Glass.

Death of a Red Heroine is filled with intriguing details, how you shop for dinner both at the state-run market (where prices are fixed to make delicacies available for everyone -- but you can't actually find those delicacies for sale), and the newly legitimized free market (where everything you can imagine is on the shelves, if you have the money buy it.) Men and women can dance together in public for the first time in decades. “Ordinary” people can get tickets to movies that only Party Members are supposed to see. The idea that the law applies equally to all people is gaining ground, but the State still has enormous power over what career you can follow and who you can and can’t marry.

Those who enjoy mysteries will find things to like in Death of a Red Heroine, but most of all I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the country that the US owes $850 billion (yes, billion with a “b”) and what is was like for the people of China to shift from an inflexible Communist system to the economically bounteous--but still repressive--system of today. show less

A fascinating insight into the lives of people in 1990 communist China, party politics, socialist Chinese history, and classic Chinese literature. And yes, there is a murder mystery, too.

This is the first book I have read set in communist China, and I found it a great blend of everyday detail, politics, but also an insight into the unique mindset of an honest party member trying to sort out his own integrity, loyalty to the party’s interests, his deep cultural roots in ancient China, and his personal life shaped by those influences.

Our intrepid inspector Chen is a poet in his spare time, just got a big promotion and his own apartment, which is a huge deal in a city where entire family’s live in tiny rooms, using communal kitchens show more and bathrooms. When he and his partner Yu find that their suspect in the murder case they are investigating is a high cadre’s son, the party interferes... and complicated party politics ensue, threatening both Chen and Yu’s careers, and perhaps more.

The murder case itself is pretty straightforward. The interest is in the surroundings, Chen’s own poetic musings, life in the streets, the food... oh, there is lots of food. Fried rice paddy eel, anyone? Shrimp, oysters, crabs, suckling pigs, roasted goose... and lots of tea and green onions. We learn about the daily struggles of underpaid Chinese workers, state and market prizes, the corruption, the ideologies, the state propaganda. I was shocked at the ending - not in terms of the mystery, but the political handling. That was a twist, and historically informative, too.

Perhaps a bit slow for some who expect a thriller, but I find the merit of the book in its attention to detail. I felt transported. I have enjoyed this book tremendously and learned a lot. show less

Detective Inspector Chen investigates the murder of a young woman who was a famous model citizen and slowly discovers that she may have been devoting her daytime life to the good of the Party but spent her evenings in other pursuits. Set in Shanghai in the early 90s, this first novel in a series creates a nice balance between the actual police procedural plot and an interesting social commentary on the tricky political atmosphere in China at the time. There aren't a lot of fancy twists to the mystery itself, but the characters are very nicely drawn - I particularly like Chen as an unassuming yet tenacious detective - and the details about life in China in the 1990s were fascinating.

The rain has soaked the hair
Falling to your shoulders
Light green in your policewoman’s
Uniform, like the spring
White blossom bursting
From your arms reaching
Into the gaping windows -
‘Here you are!’

About the last thing I expected from this detective novel was a poetry-spouting Chief Inspector.

Chen not only recites classical Chinese poetry but is himself a published poet – as well as a translator of western poems and even mysteries. And he is a bit of a gourmet as well.

I love when writers detail meals. All too often I read of how characters ‘sat down to dinner’ and I’m just dying to know, yes but what exactly did they eat??

So when we first meet Chief Inspector Chen as he is prepping for a housewarming dinner at his new show more apartment, I am delighted:

“For the main dishes, there were chunks of pork stomach on a bed of green napa, thin slices of smoked carp spread on fragile leaves of jicai, and steamed peeled shrimp with tomato sauce. There was also a platter of eels with scallions and ginger, which he had ordered from a restaurant. He had opened a can of Meiling steamed pork, and added some green vegetables to it to make another dish. On the side, he placed a small dish of sliced tomatoes, and another of cucumbers. When the guests arrived, a soup would be made from the juice of the canned pork and canned pickle.”

It sounds like an interesting mix of gourmet and simple homecooked dishes, which reflects on the character of Inspector Chen. An educated man and a published poet who attended the Beijing Foreign Language College, he then heads the Shanghai Police Bureau’s Special Case Squad, a job that seems to be a bit at odds with his more intellectual, thoughtful personality.

But of course his insightfulness is key to this case.

“She had been lying there, abandoned, naked, her long dark hair in a coil across her throat, like a snake, in full view of two strangers, only to be carried away on a stretcher by a couple of white uniformed men, and in time, opened up by an elderly medical man who examined her insides, mechanically, and sewed the body together again before it was finally sent to the mortuary. And all that time Chief Inspector Chen had been celebrating in his new apartment, having a housewarming party, drinking, dancing with a young woman reporter, talking about Tang dynasty poetry, and stepping on her bare toes.”

Essentially, there is a dead woman whose body has been unceremoniously dumped in a garbage bag and tossed into a canal. It turns out that she is a celebrity in the political sense, as she is National Model Worker Guan Hongying, chosen as a role model by the Party. There soon emerges to be even greater political implications in this case, and Chen – as well as his subordinate Detective Yu – is forced to choose between doing what’s right for the case and the victim, or what’s right as determined by the Party.

Politics is at the heart of this story.

“‘Everything can be seen in terms of politics,’ Chen got up, pausing in the doorway, ‘but politics is not everything.’
Such talk was possible now, though hardly regarded as in good taste politically. There had been opposition to Chen’s attaining promotion – something expressed by his political enemies when they praised him as ‘open’, and by his political friends when they wondered if he was too open.”

There are High Cadres who are at the top of the ladder, and their privileged children, the High Cadre Children (HCC), who have fancy cars and live in large mansions and all those other aspects of an extravagant lifestyle. While Chen is himself a rising star (although his artistic side leads to some doubts) and has a new apartment to himself, he ranks far below these HCs and HCCs. And all of this contrasts with the life of the victim Guan, who despite her ‘celebrity’ status lived in a dormitory:

“A closer examination revealed many signs of neglect characteristic of such dorm buildings: gaping windows, scaling cement, peeling paint, and the smell from the public bathroom permeating the corridor. Apparently each floor shared only one bathroom. And a quarter of the bathroom had been redesigned with makeshift plastic partitions into a concrete shower area.”

Death of a Red Heroine was steeped in such vivid details of everyday life in 1990s Shanghai, both the lives of regular folk and of the privileged, sometimes surprisingly seedy.

I have to add a note of warning to those expecting a fast-paced, exciting crime/mystery novel. This isn’t quite that. The case moves a little slowly, not just because of all that politicking going on, but because the detectives take buses, they do research at the public library, and towards the end, are forced to surreptitiously pass information to each other. It’s complicated, but the book still flows well despite its length (464 pages).

I had a great time with this book, reading some bits of classic Chinese poetry, learning about life in 1990s China, and best of all, learning about the diverse cuisine of China. Although I am ethnically Chinese, Chinese food in Singapore is probably different from that of China (I can’t say for sure, as I’ve never been). Like the ‘across-the-bridge noodles’ (过桥米线 or guòqiáo mĭxiàn) that Detective Yu’s wife Peiqin cooks for Inspector Chen, essentially a platter of rice noodles served along with side dishes like slivers of pork, fish and vegetables, and of course some steaming hot soup.

The story behind the noodles, according to the book, was that during the Qing Dynasty, a scholar studied on an island, his wife had to carry his meals across a long bridge and when it reached him, the noodles were cold and soggy. So the next time, she kept the noodles separate and only mixed them when with her husband. A recipe can be found here.

I’m looking forward to the next Inspector Chen book, and can only hope that there will be plenty of foodie details to chow on.

This review was first posted on my blog Olduvai Reads show less