A Case of Two Cities

long period, and eventually, it would have lost all its flavor.
     
    It was a long list. Xing had an incredible reach of social contacts. Some of them, however, were hardly connections. “Nodding acquaintances” would perhaps be a more appropriate phrase. They were the people of little relevance to his business.
     
    As he took a sip of the fresh coffee, going through the list again, a name jumped out as if printed in red.
     
    Qiao Bo.
     
    Qiao had met Xing only once the previous year. Their meeting was mentioned in local newspapers, for Xing donated twenty thousand yuan to Qiao. Not a large sum. Like a single hair from an ox, but it was much reported, as an “entrepreneur’s generous support to a patriotic project.” It was all because of a book entitled China Can Stand Up in Defiance, of which Qiao was the author. Not an academic book, it appealed to popular sentiment and became a national best-seller.
     
    Chen happened to know Qiao, however, against a totally different backdrop. In the early eighties, a self-styled postmodernist poet, Qiao put his works into a manuscript and approached Chen for a preface. His poems attracted a number of young students, but postmodernism was not considered politically acceptable. As a member of the Writers’ Association, Chen declined to write the preface. Qiao later attracted far more attention when he went to jail for his “corrupt bourgeois lifestyle.” Newspapers came up with lurid stories of his seducing girls in his dorm room. According to his roommates, however, it was those girls that went after him—a young, handsome, romantic poet. Nothing but consensual sex. But Qiao was sentenced to seven or eight years.
     
    Chen was then an entrance-level police officer, and there was little he could do about it. Afterward, he heard nothing about Qiao until the early nineties. Out of jail, Qiao became a bookseller. A poet no longer seemed like a prince on a white horse riding into the dreams of young girls. Poetry, if anything, became synonymous with poverty. Selling books in a store converted out of his one single residential room, Qiao wrote China Can Stand Up in Defiance, with a subtitle, The Strategic Choice in the New Global Age. It was a project developed out of his business sensibility, for he sensed a need in the market. The book received favorable reviews, and Qiao knew how to “stir-fry”—how to attract public attention. With the forever-turning wheel of fortune, Qiao came once more into the limelight, only it did not last long this time. When the waves of nationalism gained too much momentum, the Beijing government intervened. The book was not banned, but once all the official media was hushed, it soon fell from the best-seller list. Then numerous new books on similar topics came out, quickly overwhelming Qiao’s.
     
    Xing had met Qiao before the book had fallen out of the market’s favor.
     
    Chen stood up, searched the bookshelf for a long while, and dug out a dust-covered book. It was Qiao’s poetry collection, for which he could have written the preface. He turned over several pages to a love poem and skipped to the last two stanzas:
     
    A drunken swan flushes
    out of the canvas, carrying
    my body to the sea, where
    the coral was my eyes shining
    in yours. How can I feel
    the waves without your breath,
    the waves seaweed-tangled, rising
    and falling in me?
     
    A blaze in the late autumn woods.
    Dawn or dusk vomits blood again.
    When you light a candle, will you
    blow it out gently, for me?
     
    Not a bad poem, written through a female persona. Rereading it, Chen thought he could understand Qiao’s popularity among those girls in the eighties.
     
    Chen decided not to approach Qiao in a conventional way. It was not easy for an ex-poet—or an ex-convict—to survive, and an investigation in the name of the Party Discipline Committee would not make things any easier for his business. So instead of a bureau car, Chen took a taxi to go and visit him.
     
    The bookstore was located on Fuyou Road, one of the few remaining pebble-covered streets in the Old City area. Chen told the driver to stop one block away. Fuyou was a street lined with booths, kiosks, stands, barrows, and shabby stores on both sides. Several stores appeared to be makeshift extensions, or conversions, out of the former residential rooms. A few peddlers did business on wooden tables or white cloths set out on the sidewalk.
     
    It was an age when everything could be put up on sale,