I hated this book. It’s literary fiction of the people having affairs variety. It has three main characters: Li Jing (aphasia patient), Zhou Meiling (his wife), and Rosalyn Neal (one of his doctors). A few secondary characters appear, and some even get a little of the story told from their perspective. But it isn’t enough to relieve the tedium of the main characters’ bad behavior.

Li Jing is the owner of an investment company, a wheeler-dealer. While having lunch with his father (whose full name I don’t remember but who is mostly called Professor Li) at the Swan Hotel, a gas explosion tears through the place, embedding a piece of glass in Li Jing’s head. When he wakes up, he can’t remember how to speak Chinese. He can, however, remember some of his English from his childhood in the U.S. Rosalyn Neal is a bilingual aphasia specialist brought in from the U.S. to treat Li Jing.

Li Jing at first clams up because he is so demoralized by his loss of Chinese. Later on he not only clams up but refuses to interact with his wife unless he’s playing a victim. Zhou Meiling won’t communicate with her husband as she takes on his role as president of the investment company. Both of them treat each other like crap. Rosalyn Neal, while supposedly an aphasia researcher, spends most of her time acting like an ugly American version of a sorority girl. She blunders her way through Li Jing’s life, causing problems with her closeness to Li Jing.

All of these people make such bad choices and behave so badly I could not feel for any of them when things blew up in their faces. Leave your husband with your kid and then you are hurt when he isn’t home when you decide to come back? Throw your kid’s laptop against the floor and wall and cry when your wife won’t speak to you afterward? Lead a fellow expatriate on and then act hurt when his friends no longer embrace you? These are not things that endear your character to me. They make me actively hate them. Those are but an opening into the hollowness of these characters. I liked one character only, the interpreter Alan. When given a choice to do the right thing, he’s the only one in the whole damn book who chooses well.

You know the saying about how literary fiction is books about when bad things happen to people you don’t like very much. This is the epitome of that.

Given the blurbs for the book, I expected something more about the beauty of language and culture and what happens when a person is cut off from that. This is the same old people having affairs crap set in a city with which its American readers are less familiar.

On to better books, hopefully.

A couple other blogged reviews for balance.

• Susan Blumberg-Kason
• B.A.B.A.E.L.

Title: The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai
Author: Ruiyan Xu
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press / Macmillan
Format: Advance Readers Copy
Length: 340 p.
Publication date: October 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-58654-6

I received a review copy for this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program in exchange for a review to be published on LibraryThing. There are no restrictions on the content of the review. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I will donate $16.59 (the price of the book on Amazon) to the A.L.S.A.

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

It’s been a month or so since I’ve gotten any Sunday Salon reading in, what with trips to Seattle for Independence Day and my birthday and other distractions. Today was a lazy day on the couch, sipping tea and reading Qiu Xiaolong’s A Case of Two Cities. Unfortunately this has not been an enjoyable read.

My memories, somewhat faded, of the first books in the Inspector Chen series were of solid mystery writing set in a different culture. The fourth installment has jettisoned solid writing. Inspector Chen has jumped the shark.

Inspector Chen gets a call from a high level party cadre in Beijing. He is to head up the Shanghai investigation of Xing Xing, a corrupt businessman who has fled to the United States and sought asylum. Chen’s job is to root out the rats in Xing network based in Shanghai.

So, here’s a list of things that pissed me off or annoyed me about the book:

• Could he quote any more poetry? Chen has always loved the poetry, since Xiaolong decided to make him both a published poet as well as a police officer. This time around though every other paragraph begins with This reminded Chen of a couplet from a Hong dynasty poem. It’s nice to have something more erudite in my mystery novels, but this much is just boring.
• Chen’s investigative method is to harass someone who might know some information, not get the information from them, let them go to collect information on his behalf. Except for one brief portion in Los Angeles, Chen never does any investigating of his own.
• None of the bad guy’s plots make sense. At all.
• The book’s plot moves slower than an elderly person with a walker. My grandmother would figure this stuff out faster then Chen.
• Xiaolong can’t decide if he wants to have Chen work alone or with someone else. When he does decide to work with other people, it’s not fellow police officers except for one subordinate. It’s inappropriate people like his subordinate’s wife Peiquin. Why and how she ends up perusing transcripts of cell phone calls by the bad guys to figure things out, I don’t know.
• Speaking of cell phone transcripts, where the hell did those come from? It’s like magic. Secret authorities magically know who to tap and transcribe. I’m not even going to get into how unlikely this is legally speaking in either country. I’ll assume it’s legal. Chen gives a U.S. Marshall a phone number and the next day he receives in return a complete transcript of the calls on that number. Not just a list of numbers called. Complete transcript. Including calls made just after the pay-as-you-go phone was purchased two weeks earlier.
• The ending is nothing. It’s worse than deus ex machina. Chen sits down to think after everything has happened and, with no new information, puts together how the plot worked. It’s I could have had a V-8.

I could go on, but it’s just getting me more riled up. Right now this book is in serious contention for worst book I’ve read this year. It’s that bad. Congratulations on getting a deal with a major publisher, Mr. Xiaolong! Now please write something good.

Title: A case of two cities
Author: Qiu Xiaolong
Series: Inspector Chen; 4
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Minotaur / Holtzbrinck
Format: Hardcover
Length: 307 p.
Publication date: December 2006
ISBN-10: 0-312-35985-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35985-0
Subject: Chen, Inspector (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Police — China — Shanghai — Fiction
Subject: Shanghai (China) — Fiction
Subject: Corruption investigation — Fiction
LC classification: PS3553.H537C37 2006

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

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