A LOYAL CHARACTER DANCER
By QIU XIAOLONG
New York: Soho Press, 2002. 368 pages, $25

reviewed by Jeffrey C. Kinkley

A multicultural genius, seemingly born to please lovers of Asian culture, Qiu Xiaolong has already moved on to a general readership, largely American. Think of Ha Jin (b. 1956), who came to America in 1985, when he was almost thirty, and won a National Book Award in 1999, after just twelve years' practice writing in English. Qiu Xiaolong (b. 1953) came to America in 1988, and after twelve years' residence won an Anthony Award in the category "best first novel" for Death of a Red Heroine (which was also nominated for an Edgar). Qiu teaches at Washington University, St. Louis, and has won many prizes in the United States for his English-language poetry, as he has in China for his Chinese poetry. He also translates; his latest work is the bilingual Treasury of Chinese Love Poems.

China is the setting of both Qiu's and Ha Jin's fiction. As in so many novels by their former compatriots, it is contemporary China, but visualized sociologically, with politics underlying virtually all human activity. To some readers, this approach may seem quaintly "socialistic." Qiu still visits China annually, so in his case the effect is deliberate and precise. In effect, he writes recent-historical novels: Red Heroine, based on a real case, reflects China of about 1991-92; A Loyal Character Dancer takes place about 1995. Equally intriguing, Qiu, like Ha Jin, writes lively English prose that readers and critics seem to appreciate more than any translation from the Chinese, yet many of both authors' phrases and expressions seem directly traceable to Mandarin speech. It's a paradox.

But, wait, Qiu Xiaolong writes mysteriespolice procedurals. His chief protagonist, Shanghai's Chief Inspector Chen Cao, has all the usual shticks of a pulp-fiction hero. He is a scholar, poet, and gourmet, as well as a clue-sifter and an enforcer, sensitive and conflicted about his role in a dirty "system." A salt-of-the-earth subordinate of lower social origins buoys him up, and Chen has difficult relations with the opposite sex, including a daughter of a Politburo member in Beijing, and, in this novel, his new case partner, Catherine Rohn of the U.S. Marshal's Service. Her job is to escort to America Wen Liping, the pregnant wife of an illegal alien from Fujian, who has promised to turn state's evidence against the people-smuggling ring that transported her husband in the Golden Hope (read, Golden Venture), which tragically capsized off the U.S. coast. The plot seems tailor-made for Americans, with its odd-couple cop "buddies"; Fujian people-smuggling; the triads who carry it out and co-opt local communist officials; the stereotypes of bullying Americans and paranoid Chinese that the cop heroes must overcome if they are to cooperate; police bugging of hotel rooms and even their own chief inspectors; brothels disguised as karaoke houses; the dislocations of the new economy, from the new urban unemployed to whole back-street markets filled with counterfeit and pirated goods; even forced abortions. (After Wen mysteriously disappears, Chen and Rohn track down a pregnant rural migrant who fits her description, but it's a false lead; she's just a refugee from overzealous birth control policies. As gangsters tailing them repeat the detectives' mistake and then beat the innocent woman to a pulp, Chen and Rohn argue over human rights.)

The miracle is that, while he provides good suspense, Qiu Xiaolong has transcended his genre and all this topical "information," and provides, as well, a deep and subtle commentary on the current Chinese malaise. Qiu conjures up a new "gray bureaucracy" to go with the "gray economy." Chief Inspector Chen is simply prohibited from speaking undiluted truthabout himself, his cases, or Chinato anyone, particularly a foreigner, and he is conscious of how this shapes his life. Nor can he trust anyone, not an American, which would be against his professional code, and dangerous, since Internal Security is spying on him; not his boss, who may be linked to the gangsters; not even the party bosses in Beijing, who favor Chen with direct communications, perhaps because they suspect his boss. Moreover, the party bosses embody Chen's nascent self-hatred as part of a privileged elite. Still a man of law, an observant cop, and a pervasively critical scholar, when he revisits a neighborhood he never misses the fact that "all the illegally parked bicycles were still there." A Loyal Character Dancer fulfills all genre expectations by solving and linking two triad-related crime cases at the book's end. The question of whether the police were in on them is left unresolved. The book's title refers to Wen Liping, who as a Red Guard danced for Chairman Mao, using a cut-out character for "loyalty" as a prop. By the end of the novel, Chief Inspector Chen has looked into his own "character" and realized that his pledge of loyalty has made him "dance," tooalone and with partners.