Sometimes I feel bad giving a bad review for a book. This is one of those times, because Yuan-tsung Chen obviously poured her heart into writing the book. But, in her own words, sometimes the things I composed in my mind were very lively; but as soon as I transferred them onto paper, they sounded dull and even not quite intelligible. The author can’t quite decide whether she wants the book to be a history or a biography, jumping between broader issues of the Chinese past and more intimate details of individual people, usually with a transition that left me wondering which was which. It lacks organization. And more than once Chen wrote different facts that logically cannot be reconciled.

Return to the Middle Kingdom is the story of Joseph, Eugene, and Jack Chen. Joseph fought in the Taiping Rebellion, afterward living in exile in the Caribbean. Eugene Chen grew up in the Caribbean, established a law practice, but eventually moved to China to participate in Sun Yat-sen’s republic. There he became a confidant of Yat-sen and served in several regional governments that had designs on ruling China during the warlord period. Jack Chen also grew up in the Caribbean and London, but converted to Marxism during and shortly after a trip to China when his father was foreign minister in the Wuhan government. He became a cartoonist and communist propagandist. The author, Yuan-tsung Chen, was Jack Chen’s third wife.

The bulk of the book, and the most coherent, is the part that follows Eugene Chen. It’s also the period about which I had the least knowledge of Chinese history. So I learned a lot, though I suspect a lot of the inside details written in the book are guesswork. Neither Yuan-tsung nor Jack were present for most of the events of Eugene’s life. The other big problem is that I have no context for the Chinese situation during that period, and the author rarely provided enough. The events in China prior to Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat in 1949 were chaotic, so it’s tough to make sense of them. The big picture stuff I got: Sun Yat-sen set up a rival government in Canton opposed to Beijing. His Kuomintang allied with the Communists and with Russia at first, and slowly built up their influence. After Yat-sen’s death, they launched a military offensive and after some success consolidating territory moved the capital to Wuhan. The successes proved to be temporary and the Wuhan government failed. The book includes lots of little details like the menu for some of the dinners between officials. But it neglects more important details like why the Wuhan government fell.

Even more puzzling is that there is little about Eugene Chen after his first stint as foreign minister ended in 1927. There’s brief mention that he served as foreign minister in a Nanjing government, and that he died in Japanese captivity in 1945 after residing in Hong Kong. But pretty much nothing more for the last 18 years of Eugene Chen’s life.

There are puzzling gaps in the life of Jack Chen as well. At a young age his father thrust him into the limelight as a cartoonist and artist to profile the state of the Chinese people. After Russian training he continued this work during the 1930s, but the book barely covers the time from the start of World War II in 1939 until Jack Chen’s arrest in the Cultural Revolution in 1968. He supposedly heads to London to start an overseas Chinese news bureau to propagandize for the Communists, but it’s never said what came of that. Just that the outbreak of war prevented him from returning to China until years later. And no mention of what he did in China after he returned, other than working for the Foreign Language Bureau. Then suddenly he’s on the outs during the Cultural Revolution but there’s no explanation as to why.

For being a family supposedly at the center of three revolutions, it feels quite a bit like they were somewhat big fish only in trash time (to use a basketball term) after the direction of the revolutions were decided. Eugene Chen only moved to China after the overthrow of the royal line, and neither he nor Jack played any part in the key parts of the Chinese civil war of the 1940s.

I just can’t recommend this book.

A publicist for the author requested I review this book and provided me with a free copy.

Title: Return to the middle kingdom: one family, three revolutionaries, and the birth of modern China
Author: Yuan-tsung Chen
Imprint / publisher: Union Square Press / Sterling Publishing / Barnes & Noble
Format: Hardcover
Length: xxx, 401 p.
Publication date: July 2008
ISBN-10: 1-4027-5697-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-4027-5697-9
Subject: China — History — 20th century — Personal narratives
LC classification: DS774 .C3815 2008

There’s a sad similarity in most of the war novels I’ve read. Naive recruit goes to the war. Naive recruit fights. Naive recruit has to scramble to survive. Jaded veteran witnesses things he’d rather not see. There’s a lot of that vibe to Ha Jin’s novel War Trash. For connoisseurs of war novels, I suppose they can see through the sameness to the novel parts of these stories. I know I can do it with Science Fiction. But I’m not so good with this for war novels.

The plot is this: Yu Yuan is a former Nationalist conscripted into the Communist Army and sent to Korea. By former Nationalist, I mean he was enrolled at the military university because his family couldn’t afford to send him to another school. In Korea, his unit is under-trained, understaffed, and under-equipped. Very quickly, they are reduced to scrambling the countryside with no food. Instead of harassing the Americans and South Koreans, they are running from them. Soon he is captured.

This is where the book gets interesting. The prisoners of war aren’t uniformly united. Some profess allegiance to the Nationalist government in Taiwan. Some profess allegiance to the Communist government in Beijing. Of course, the U.S. gives a preference to the Nationalists. The Nationalists use whatever methods of coercion they to convince the other prisoners to agree to be repatriated to Taiwan rather than mainland China. Though not a Communist, Yu Yuan wishes to return to mainland China because he has a frail mother and a fiancé there.

Rather than siding with one group or another, Yu tries to avoid taking sides. He cooperates with whoever has power over him at the time, whether it’s the Nationalists in the main camp, or Commissar Pei in a later camp for Communist P.O.W.s. Consequently, no one trusts him very much and he constantly has to prove his loyalty.

To me, his vacillation is what makes him war trash to me. Not the fact that he allowed himself to be captured and didn’t throw himself on the American’s bayonets. The man rarely takes much of a stand at all.

There are also some interesting cultural differences between the prisoners of war here and, say, those in King Rat or the soldiers in All Quiet On The Western Front. In particular, the Chinese seem to be much more tuned in to leadership. Without the appointed leader, they fall back to rote. And they express relief, joy, and all sorts of other emotions when contact with their leaders is restored.

Anyway, this wasn’t a bad book. I’ll probably read more by Ha Jin, but I am learning I don’t think I want to read too many novels which are primarily about soldiers in wartime.

Title: War trash
Author: Ha Jin
Imprint / publisher: Vintage International / Random House
Format: Trade paperback
Publication date: 2004 (May 2005 in trade paperback)
Length: 352 p.
ISBN-10: 1-4000-7579-3
Subject: Korean War, 1950-1953 — Prisoners and prisons — Fiction
Subject: Korean War, 1950-1953 — Fiction
Subject: Chinese — Korea — Fiction
Subject: Prisoners of war — Fiction
Subject: Translators — Fiction
LC classification: PS3560.I6 W37 2005b

John Irving is one of those American novelists that I’ve always been afraid to read. Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, John Updike, John Irving. I knew I’d read through a whole book and not get it. Mostly this impression comes from seeing people who read these novelists. Well, now I’ve read one.

I have to say, there’s something about the novel that I just don’t get. It’s a good story, albeit on the long side. But it feels like there is some purpose for which Irving wrote the story, other than it being a good story. And I’ve missed it.

The overwhelming thing that kept hitting me while reading the book is that it’s like watching Lost. Through the first 400 pages or so of the books I think only a little over a day passed in time. The bulk of the story through that point is told through reminiscing to points in time past, mostly to a period about 25 years prior to the beginning of the book. I found that a trifle annoying.

The main character is Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, a Parsi Indian who doesn’t really feel at home in India, or anywhere for that matter. He returns to India periodically to run a charity hospital, and also to write screenplays for bad Indian crime drama about the policeman Inspector Dhar. As a doctor for a movie filmed in Bombay some 25 years ago, he got the film bug and began writing the screenplays. Not so coincidentally, the starlet of the film became pregnant while filming and had twins. Secretly. She returned to America with one of them, entrapped the drunken screenwriter of the film whom she believed had fathered the child into marrying her, and began an unhappy and fruitless Hollywood career. Meanwhile, Farrokh’s brother Jamshed raised the other twin in Austria. By the time of the beginning of the story the second twin John D. was returning to India a few times a year to star as Inspector Dhar for his uncle Dr. Daruwalla.

Do you follow that? The thing is, Inspector Dhar (as he is mostly referred to in the book) isn’t really Indian though he sort of passes for one. His movies are hated. That’s why they are successful. Everyone goes to see them so they can talk about what a despicable anti-hero Dhar is. Consequently the actor Dhar has to be pretty careful not to get assaulted by the various people the movies offend.

All this is thrown in to disarray when the first twin, Martin Mills, decides to visit India. He doesn’t know he has a twin. He’s a confused apprentice Jesuit. He does get assaulted and assumes it is God testing him.

And the other wrinkle to be thrown in to this is the appearance of a serial killer who murders prostitutes and draws elephants on their stomachs after he kills them. One of the reasons why everyone is mad at Dhar is that the latest Inspector Dhar movie features a serial killer who draws elephants on the bellies of his victims. The public assumes that a copycat has taken the gimmick and run with it, but they blame Dhar for giving him the idea.

Except that Daruwalla isn’t really that imaginative of a writer. Twenty years ago he was a doctor called to a scene where two bodies were found with elephants drawn on the stomachs. He incorporated the device into a movie much later. And, unbeknownst to any of them at the beginning of the book, the killer isn’t really a copycat, but actually the original killer. It’s been his signature as he’s killed throughout the years. But some of the killings happened in other countries, and the ones that occurred in India weren’t particularly well-publicized because of India’s system and culture.

Oh, and the circus fits into all of this when Daruwalla’s driver attempts to rescue children from the streets by getting them employed as performers in the circus, where he met Daruwalla years before when he was a circus clown.

Okay, got all the sub-plots in order? Yeah, there’s a lot of them.

Even if tedious sometimes, I mostly enjoyed watching Daruwalla’s interactions with the other characters. He’s very passive, but also fairly judgmental. I suppose this is part of why he doesn’t feel like he belongs to India. There’s a scene at the end in Toronto (a couple of scenes actually) where Daruwalla takes a much more forceful role, for want of a better term. Forceful isn’t quite the right word, as he is quite capable of vehemently arguing in many places in the book. But in the scenes at the end he shocked me by doing something that was reactive. Just conversational things. I don’t know if that was intentional or not, but it seemed out of character even compared to other things in the same chapter.

I also liked the concept of a film property that is popular precisely because everyone hates it. Something like Jean Claude Van Damme but more popular. I want to see the Inspector Dhar movies now.

Anyway, it seems I don’t really have much to say after all. The book is not for the faint of heart. There are enough problems with the writing that it can be a bit difficult to read, and it is overly long. But it has great characters and decent intertwined plots.

Title: A son of the circus
Author: John Irving
Imprint / publisher: Random House
Publication Date: 1994
Format: Hardcover
Length: 633 p.
ISBN-10: 0-679-43496-8
Subject: India — Fiction
LC Classification: PS3559.R8 S64 1994

It’s hard to classify Ted Rall’s new book, Silk Road To Ruin. The subject is clear: the central Asian countries ending in -stan. But the presentation doesn’t fit one single format. Part of the book is travel writing; Rall has made at least five trips to the region and each trip gets some coverage here. But another part of the book is a state of the region overview of each country, as well as a couple of chapters on the environment and geopolitical context. Not only that, sprinkled liberally throughout are some of Rall’s editorial cartoons and short graphical stories about the region and his trips. The local Barnes & Noble classifies this as current events but no single category seems sufficient to me.

My own knowledge of the region comprising Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, and the Xinjiang Uyghur (Uighur) Autonomous Region of China is pretty limited. There was a Kyrgyz student at the University of Idaho in 1994-1995 that I knew. I know that Tashkent was at one point a sister city to Seattle, though I have no idea if that relationship continues today. I’ve heard the names of each of the local dictators at one point or another. There are a few other random facts I probably knew. But all in all, pretty limited.

Nevertheless, my attention is drawn to this area. I’ve had a fascination with trying to learn about lesser known areas of the world for a long time. Let other people visit France, England, Ireland, Italy and the other forebears of American civilization. I want to see India, South Africa, and central Asia, among other destinations. I’m not a glutton for punishment. I’ll not likely go to central Asia anytime soon. But I want to know what’s there.

Central Asia will be geopolitically important for some time, despite the relative lack of prominence in American news. Several countries in the region sit on substantial oil and natural gas fields. The others sit on the landlocked routes that pipelines must take out of the region. And if you look at a map of the region, there’s a relatively small area where most of these countries tangle together spaghetti-like just north of Afghanistan. A determined insurgent group can cause havoc in all of these countries easily by gaining a foothold in this small region. And some do.

Ted Rall writes about the politics of the region, not just the geo-politics. You’ll get the meet the strongmen of each country. None of them are ruled by governments selected by truly free and fair elections. The closest is Afghanistan, and until 2005, Kyrgyzstan. Rall introduces folks to Sapamurat Turkmenbashi Niyazov, late (as of December 2006) of Turkmenistan, Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, Sharipovich Rakhmonov of Tajikistan, and Nursaltan Nazabayev of Kazakhstan. Of these, Karimov in Uzbekistan is particularly brutal. He personally ordered and monitored a crackdown on a demonstration that resulted in nearly 1,000 deaths by conservative estimates. The massacre received only minimal coverage in the West and only minimal protest by our supposedly attentive-to-human-rights governments. The U.S. in particular made polite paper protests so as not to disturb the use of Uzbekistan territory for Afghanistan military operations. Unfortunately for us, even that was too much and Uzbekistan terminated our use of a base on their soil. According to Rall, we are to be out of there by this month. I haven’t kept up on the latest developments, so I don’t know if Uzbekistan followed through on the eviction.

Nevertheless, we’re botching the job in those countries according to Rall. We’re not really making the dictators happy. And we’ve lost the substantial support we used to have among the peoples of central Asia. Rall predicts a powderkeg and we’ll have little influence when it blows.

Despite the attention to the geopolitical, Rall also includes a lot of travel writing. He includes a detailed set of recommendations on how to negotiate military checkpoints, set up mostly for the purpose of shaking down travelers. Foreigners with wads of cash often get the worst of these hassles: robbed, raped, and stranded miles from nowhere. Sometimes it results in even worse treatment. He also describes in detail some of the sporting events the locals play. Particularly, I liked his chapter on and descriptions of buzkashi, a vaguely polo-like sport where horsemen carry a dead goat to a goal area. There are no real teams though, and almost anything is fair game to get the player carrying the goat to drop it. Whipping your opponents horse? Go for it. Blinding your opponent (permanently)? That’s allowed! Using your whip to bloody or remove the ear of an opponent? Not a bad strategy at all. Shooting an AK-47 at the other horses or riders? It’s considered unsporting but technically allowed. People die in the games and people are frequently hurt seriously. But the winners can walk away with carpets, cars and even goats. Horsemen from multiple countries travel for these competitions.

Another slightly less bloody but no less brutal sport is kyzku. In this game, men chase a woman and try to kiss her. If one manages to do so, he wins the right to marry her, and there are even occasionally tents set up for consummating such marriages on the edge of the field. Now, this sounds fairly sexist at first, but after reading you will likely change your mind. First of all, the game takes place on horseback. That makes kissing much tougher. Second, the woman rider may use any and all means at her disposal to prevent kissing attempts. Unwanted men frequently come away bloodied and maimed from this game. Rall writes of one woman who had fended off 100+ attempts in a row over the years. The men come out of this much the worse for wear! Coincidentally, I read this book in a coffee house in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. A man sitting in the chair next to me saw the title and asked if it was about central Asia. He’d spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan. So when I reached this part of the book, I asked him if he’d witnessed this sport. He said he had and that it was quite amazing. However, he did say that most kyzku bouts are pre-planned these days. The men don’t enter the arena if they don’t have an idea that the female competitor will let them have their kiss. I suppose that takes a bit of the excitement away for random spectators, but it’s still a hell of a way to effect a proposal. You might think she’ll say yes, but if not you get much worse than a slap in the face! That’s a hell of a risk and in a way, I think a lot more romantic than getting on one knee in a swanky Italian restaurant in a posh urban neighborhood.

Title: Silk road to ruin: is central Asia the new middle east?
Author: Ted Rall
Imprint / publisher: NBM Publishing
Publication date: August 2006
Format: Hardcover (9.3 in. x 6.4 in.)
Length: 304 p., including bibliography
ISBN-10: 1-56163-454-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-56163-454-5
Subject: Rall, Ted — Travel
Subject: Asia, Central — History — 1991- — Comic books, strips, etc.
Subject: Asia, Central — Economic conditions — 1991- — Comic books, strips, etc.
Subject: Asia, Central — Politics and government — 1991- — Comic books, strips, etc.
Subject: Asia, Central — Description and travel — Comic books, strips, etc.
LC Classification: PN6727.R35 S56 2006

In 2004, Born into Brothels won a well-deserved the Best Documentary (feature) Oscar®. The movie is slice of life of Zana Briski working with children in Kolkata’s red light district Sonaguchi. Briski started a class teaching the children photography. By the time I watched the movie though, I only vaguely remembered this fact, so when the film opened with a number of stunning photographs, I was amazed and wondering who took them. Minutes later it was clear that these young children (I believe around 10 or 11 years old) took them. Taking photographs and getting support for taking photographs obviously had a pretty profound effect on the kids. More so than the tragedy of the week parts which focused on their lives, this affected me. The kids had talent and showcasing that made them better people.

After her three year workshop was over in 2003, Briski founded the non-profit Kids with Cameras to start similar workshops in multiple countries, capitalizing on the success of the movie to kick-start the group. And that brings me to the book.

An initial book was titled Born into Brothels: Photographs by the Children of Calcutta and is still available on Amazon and in other bookstores. Kids With Cameras is self-published by the organization and is an updated, longer version of the earlier work. To purchase it, you’ll need to go to the Kids With Cameras web site. Cost is fairly pricy, $65 plus shipping ($12 to Seattle), but the money is used to fund the kids’ educations, and it’s not much more expensive than other photography books.

Click on the picture to purchase a print.

Anyway, the book features 223 pages of photographs, almost all by the kids. A few are by Zana Briski and Ross Kaufman (who filmed the documentary). All nine children features in the movie are featured in the book. Avijit, who had the most skill, gets the largest number of pages. And some of the photographs are truly stunning. My favorite picture Girl On A Roof by Sujitra is in the book (and a smaller version is below the paragraph). It was the cover photograph for the 2003 Amnesty International Calendar. A shot that Avijit took on the beach (Bucket), pouring sand and water out of a bucket in the foreground with people running on the beach in the background is also included. In the film, Avijit studiously composed this shot. Other pictures are book size snapshots, particularly the photos of animals at the zoo. But by and large Briski has picked some wonderful photos.

Click on the picture to purchase a print.

If anyone on your holiday gift list is a liberal lefty save the children kind of person, this is a great gift for them.

Title: Kids with cameras
Editor: Zana Briski
Imprint / publisher: Kids With Cameras
Format: Hardcover
Length: 224 p.
ISBN-10: ISBN 0-9772957-0-2
Subject: Children of prostitutes — India — Calcutta
Subject: Children of prostitutes — India — Calcutta — Pictorial works
Subject: Children — India — Calcutta — Social conditions

While down at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, I overheard the proprietor recommending this book to another customer who sought books by local authors. So I grabbed a copy for myself. This isn’t a bad book, but it’s not a great book either.

The primary problem with the book is that it uses quite a few of the mystery clichés out there. Superior warns the investigators not to work on a case, but they do anyway. Investigators take short-cuts because they don’t want to go through proper channels. Bad guy starts the whole thing off by with an improbably attempt to get the investigators involved by framing them in the conspiracy. Investigators try to hide their involvement rather than come clean. Sitcom-like misunderstandings where each person things the other person did something.

The good part is that there are two new cultures in the book (Soho likes international mysteries), the Korean culture and the military culture. The Korean culture isn’t as deeply intertwined in this as the communist Chinese society is in Qiu Xiaolong’s books, but you do get a good taste.

The stars are Army C.I.D. investigators. A prostitute pays them to pass along a note to a British soldier who shortly thereafter ends up dead. Their investigation leads them to the slicky boys, a criminal gang that steals from the armed forces and sells their wares on the black market. It’s incredibly well-organized and the theory is that they’ve killed the soldier because he was free-lancing with his own army thievery. The slicky boys don’t want the attention and so they kill him. Which doesn’t make much sense cause that would just bring more attention to them. Soon it becomes clear that there is yet another player in the game, an A.W.O.L. Navy S.E.A.L. who is also stealing.

Not a bad book overall but the use of lots of clichés tags this solidly in the first novel category for me.

Title: Slicky boys
Author: Martin Limón
Imprint / publisher: Soho
Format: Paperback
Length: 387 p.
Publication date: September 2004
ISBN-10: 1-56947-385-4
Subject: Americans — Korea — Fiction
Subject: Military intelligence — Fiction
Subject: Black market — Fiction
Subject: Seoul (Korea) — Fiction
LC classification: PS3562.I465 S58 1997

Next weekend is the Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale. I mention this because it’s a great place to pick up books for cheap, and books like this one can be found aplenty. I grabbed The Modern History of Japan because I knew very little about Japan. The schools I attended in Seattle covered European history to death, but little of other areas of the world.

I have no idea if this book is accurate or not, though I have little doubt it gets its basic facts correct. But I’m not sure how good it is with the context. What was the reason why Choshu joined up with other daimyo to overthrow the Shogun and place the emperor in a position of paper supremacy? I don’t know. It’s my first book on Japan and so all I have is the perspective of Beasley, and I have no recourse to original material either.

Still, I thought the book was a steal at $1, because even the basic facts of Japan’s history were unknown to me. I’d heard the term Meiji Restoration before, but I had no idea to what event it was referring. Now I know. I knew that Japan had colonized Korea, but I didn’t know when this happened. Was it immediately before World War II? Or was it something that went back as far as time? Turns out neither, but definitely closer to World War II.

Title: The modern history of Japan
Author: W. G. Beasley (William Gerald Beasley)
Publisher: Praeger Publishers
Format: Paperback
Length: xi, 352 p. (includes index)
Publication date: 1963
Subject: Japan — History
LC classification: DS881 .B4 1963

The previous novels in Qiu Xiaolong’s Chen Cao series, Death of a Red Heroine and A Loyal Character Dancer were both wonderful. This entry continues that trend. As always, the interesting thing is not so much the mystery itself, but instead the glimpse of life in Communist (but changing) China. And in the book, Xiaolong writes even more about the effects of the Cultural Revolution on academics. It’s a favorite theme of his. First they are in vogue, then they are sent to the countryside to rehabilitate themselves, then the Cultural Revolution is over and they are back in vogue again.

The mystery centers around a Red Guard who was sent to the countryside. There she married an academic, labelled as a rightist. He died at the hands of the authorities, more or less. Years later, the Red Guard, Yin Lige, writes a novel about the experience, and is labelled a dissident because it doesn’t show China in the best of lights. Only now she’s murdered, and the Communist Party doesn’t want to look like it’s murdering it’s dissidents, so the political case group (Chen Cao’s) is brought in to clear them, essentially. Chen Cao is on vacation though, so his deputy, Detective Yu Guangming runs the case.

The second story is of Chen Cao, who has taken a translation case on his vacation. He is to translate a 50 page business proposal into English for an exorbitant amount of money. Enough to make things much better for him for a long time. This plot highlights the new capitalist version of China, and sets it to be compared against the previous versions as shown in the detective case. Chen helps on the political crime by phone while he’s doing his translation.

The crime turns out to be much less than you would think, but how to acceptably prove it. And the business proposal turns out to be a lot more than you would think, with Chen getting a little secretary from the businessman to help him do the translation. The term is often used to describe mistresses, and Chen is not sure what to do. In the end, the whole thing puts him in an awkward position.

First rate characters and story. I haven’t even described half of it. There’s just so much that Xiaolong packs into this.

Title: When red is black
Author: Qiu Xiaolong (裘小龙)
Series: Chen Cao book 3
Publisher: Soho
Format: Paperback
Length: 310 p.
Publication date: 2004
ISBN-10: 1-56947-396-X
Subject: Chen, Inspector (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Police &mdash ;China — Fiction
Subject: Translating and interpreting — Fiction
Subject: Real estate developers — Fiction
Subject: Shanghai (China) — Fiction
LC classification: PS3553.H537 W47 2004

The Royal Palaces of India is a glorified coffee table book on the subject. Though better. A lot of history and anthropology of Indian culture is included, though mostly about the various rulers of India since 1300. And of course, they only cover things connected to the palaces, not other history or culture. Still, learning the layout and influences was cool. And the pictures are gorgeous. A number of the ones featured are on my itinerary to India in November. Unfortunately, I don’t get to keep the book; it was on loan from a co-worker. Otherwise I would probably have gone back to it again and again prior to my India trip.

Title: The royal palaces of India
Author: George Michell
Photographer: Antonio Martinelli
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Length: 232 p.
ISBN-10: 0-500-27964-0
Subject: Palaces — India
Subject: Architecture — India
Subject: Historic buildings — India
Subject: India — Kings and rulers — Homes and haunts
LC classification: NA1501 .M54 1994

Mystery novels are fun and easy to read, but usually devoid of any depth or meaning. Happily, Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong has much depth, yet still retains the quick reading style common to most mystery novels.

Chief Inspector Chen Ciao heads the special crimes unit, which is charged with handling political crimes. These are crimes that might reflect badly on the Communist Party of China. Corruption. Baby stealing. That sort of thing. Normal crimes normally don’t land on the desks of this unit. But on one night, the discovery of a body in a canal lands in the unit. Normally, the case would be handed off shortly. But an old Communist Party Cadre, Commissar Zhang, feels the crime has political ramifications, and so it stays.

But Chen Ciao is not just a policeman, he is also a published poet and translator. He has been placed into the police bureau because it is a useful job. He struggles with his purpose. He enjoyed the academic life, but feels drawn to doing the job of a policeman well. One of the pleasures of the book are the literary sidetracks that the Inspector delves into.

Eventually, the body is discovered to be that of a national model worker. This is a person who is set up by the Communist Party to be a role model in a relatively ordinary job. Her job is to live up to the ideals of the Communist Party, and to do so publicly. In addition to her duties as the manager of a department at a large store, she spends much time at various conferences throughout China, representing the perfect Chinese Party worker.

Initially, she is believed to have been so devoted that she never partook of normal rituals of life such as finding a husband. However, the police soon learn that she had been the mistress of Wu Xiaoming, the son of a prominent (but old and dying) Party cadre, and a rising star himself. It becomes apparent to the inspectors that Wu has committed the crime. But how do they prove this under China’s Party policies and with Wu’s family influence fighting them every step of the way?

When I picked up the book, I wasn’t really sure how a mystery novel set in China would read. In addition to the normal police procedural, the book is a vivid portrayal of life in Communist China shortly after Tian An Men. If the book is even a remotely accurate picture of the country, I have learned much. Everything from who gets to drive cars, to what happened to young intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, to what brings one into disfavor with the Party in the early 90s.

Check out the book. It’s the best mystery novel I have read in a long time. And apparently others agreed as well. It was nominated for an Edgar award for Best First Novel in 2001.

Title: Death of a red heroine
Author: Qiu Xiaolong (裘小龙)
Publisher: Soho
Format: Paperback
Publication date: 2000
Length: 463 p.
ISBN-10: 1-56947-242-4
Subject: Police — China — Shanghai — Fiction
Subject: Chen, Inspector (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Shanghai (China) — Fiction
LC classification: PS3553.H537 D43 2000