Qiu's corner
Multiple city book tours and festivals in France, September to October 2023.
I have to apologize for the long-overdue newsletter, whatever reasons or excuses I might have had during those turbulent days.
Since the last update, I have five books published: (Hold Your Breath, China; Becoming Inspector Chen; Inspector Chen and The Private Kitchen Murder; The Shadow of the Empire : A Judge Dee Investigation; Love and Murder in the Time of Covid.) Among them, four belong to the Inspector Chen series. Hold Your Breath, China is about a serial murder case set in China's disastrous air pollution, which leads to the heart-breaking tragedy of a young couple, and to a serial murder case in consequence; Becoming Inspector Chen traces the different links from his childhood, youth, eventually to his development into an inspector, these links interrelated as if in a poetic sequence; The Shadow of the Empire: A Judge Dee Investigation was originally meant to be a part of Inspector Chen and the Private Kitchen Murder, as an experimental effort to compare the judicial system in China's past and present, only to arrive at an inconsolable conclusion that China changes and does not change, as there is still no independent judicial system in today's China. At the insistence of my publishers, the two parts were expanded and published as independent yet interrelated books. The storyline of Inspector Chen and the Private echoes from The Shadow of the Empire. The latter is now an Amazon pick. Love and Murder in the Time of Covid is the latest Inspector Chen installment, about which you can read more in the essay titled "The Genesis of Love and Murder in the Time of Covid."
Last but certainly not the least, I was so honored to write a foreword for the 100th Anniversary International Edition of The Waste Land and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot. I have been indebted to the great poet through all these years, I cannot pay too much tribute to him.
The Genesis of Love and Murder in the Time of Covid.
In 2019, after having participated in a literature festival in Thailand, I traveled with a group of tourists and met with an old Buddhist monk / fortune teller in a magnificent temple. He told me that I could not travel anywhere the next year. I did not believe him, though having paid him an exorbitant fee like fellow travelers. A couple of European literature festivals had already been arranged for me during the next year, not to mention a long-planned trip back to China.
(Speaking at Leeds University in England)
At the beginning of 2020, however, news about the outbreak of the Covid in China as well as the Beijing government's desperate cover-up came crowding over to America. Watching the Chinese New Year Eve TV Gala, I got so revolted at the scene of a Hollywood / Hong Kong movie star dancing, singing about the blessed life of Chinese people under the CCP. The next day, the whole city of Wuhan, which I had just visited months earlier at another literary conference, was precipitated into a deadly lockdown.
But I was not yet ready to pen an Inspector Chen investigation in the background of the pandemic ravaging all over the world. Paradoxically, with the suffocating lock-downs enforced at every nook and corner in China, the spreading of the virus seemed to be more or less slowing down, and the CCP propaganda machine was going all out, bragging and boasting of fighting Covid under the leadership of the great, glorious CCP, and claiming it as a proof of "the socialism with China's characteristics superior to the western capitalist countries hit hard by the virus."
With more reports about the inhuman policy of zero-Covid trickling in, I tried to write a couple of chapters of a new Inspector Chen investigation, but then put it down. As a Shanghai-born American writer, though horrified, sickened with the Beijing's surveillance and suppression in the politicization of the pandemic, I hesitated least interpreted by others as capitalizing on it.
It was not until early 2022 when the city of Shanghai too thrown into lockdown, April is the cruelest month in the waste land. What with the new virus strain Omicron rushing to the fore, with the state policing pushing to the extreme, things in China became even worse than in 1984.
In addition to Big Data, face-and-back-and-gait recognition systems, omnipresent surveillance cameras, omnipotent tapping on the phones, and all the new technologies unimaginable even to the Big Brother, the govern-funded grass-root organizations such as neighborhood committees, Big White, Little Red Guards, and Internet Cops popped up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. People turned into naked rats running amuck in a glass cage under a huge magnifying lens, being continuously monitored and tested at every nook and corner. In short, not a single fly can escape through the "heaven and earth net" of the surveillance state. The whole China become a Panopticon prison as defined by Michel Foucault
People were unable to go to hospital without a valid Covid test done within 24 hours, in consequence, pregnant women bleeding to death after being rejected from one hospital and another, the old and week dropping dead like flies on the street; people jumped out of windows because they were forbidden to move a single step out their apartment for weeks and months, their doors sealed and nailed, no food nor medicine nor hope; people were put in quarantine camps because of the "companionship through space and time," i.e. their cell phones installed with governmental Covid code would signal in the event of their moving within several meters of a possible Covid positive; people were followed by drones like insistent bats in the sky (I myself have had such a horrible experience even before the pandemic); people were snatched out of a certain area so that the government could announce a "successful mobile zero-Covid," and buses moving for that purpose under the cover of the night fell into a fathomless valley, killing so may passengers...
Countless Chinese people suffered and perished in the collateral damage of the zero-Covid policy. It turned into such a convenient excuse for the CCP to control and suppress, a ready justification to maintain the political stability through politicizing the pandemic. Indeed, Death had undone so many. Professor Li Wenjun, a mentor in my graduate student days, died miserably, so did my then schoolmate Professor Guo Hongan, needless to say, the list can go much, much longer.
So I came to the decision. I have to throw myself into the writing of Love and Murder in the Time of Covid. Confucius says, there are things a man has to do. This part of Chinese history cannot and should not be erased or brain-washed. It is out of the question for the writers in China to write such a book. I understand the dire situation facing them. Censorship and self-censorship, they have to struggle for survival within the Party system. During the days of the frenzied zero-Covid campaign, some young people walked out on the street holding white papers in their hands. To paraphrase Wittgenstein's paradigm, "Whatever cannot be spoken about, has to be presented as an unwritten paper." In China, such white papers landed the protesters in prison, and no one can tell where they are, not even today. On the other hand, I happen to be a bilingual writer living in America, capable of saying what I want to say, truthfully. I have no choice but to pick up my pen, whatever danger may be involved, and I'll take the consequence.
In The Shadow of the Empire, I wrote that "China changes and China does not change." Among what remain unchanged, just to name a couple of them: the "literature prison" and the "emperor's dream." "Literature prison" refers to an ancient but still contemporary practice in China. People are thrown into prison for what they have said or written. Four or five years ago, I wrote an Chinese essay in memory of Yang Xianyi, a well-known Chinese translator and poet, who declared in a BBC interview that those opening fire on the students in 1989 are fascists. (In the essay I did not quote his courageous statement, or it would not have come out at all.) A newspaper published the article, but the Internet cops reviewing the post online instantly deleted it and gave me a warning for "violation of the government regulation." For a long while, even words like "pig head" and "emperor" become too sensitive in the cyber space, because Chinese netizens nicknamed the current CCP leader as a "pig head" and an "emperor," who changed the constitution to rule forever. For having called him "emperor" in a WeChat post, a brave entrepreneur was sentenced for more than ten years.
In a Chinese sonnet titled "Reading Animal Farm," I therefore put in "pig" and "emperor" and posted it online—according to a friend in China, poetry would not that easily trigger off the alertness of the Beijing government and then rewrote it in English and inserted it into Love and Murder in the Time of Covid.
"Reading Animal Farm"
Stay still in your sty, stop squeaking!
Fed more than full, you pigs mill around,
then dream your big dream-- sty-bound--
of a moment of freedom, peeking
around the stall. Refrain from any comment
criticizing the Party for any reason.
Bathing in the light of his Majesty Napoleon,
you may wallow to your heart's content.
What—a swine pandemic with fever high?
Even the possible has to be spun
into the impossible. Search the sty,
seal and sear the squeaking tongue.
Who cares about the flood drowning the sky
afterward? I'm the Emperor, the only one.