The Mao Case

being considerate of Xie. Parting outside the restaurant, they shook hands, and he
     had a feeling that her hand lingered in his for a moment. He saw a wistful smile flick across her face, as if touching a string,
     a peg in a half-forgotten poem.
    But that wasn’t enough for Chief Inspector Chen, far from the breakthrough he needed, as he concluded as he got up from the
     bed.
    He checked the cell phone first. No message. The information from Old Hunter so far, including the little indirectly from
     Detective Yu, didn’t appear promising.
    So he decided to sally out onto his second front, a move first contemplated after his talk with Jiao in the garden, supported
     in his thoughts about Eliot’s poetry, and necessitated by his unsuccessful approach at the restaurant.
    For the first attempt along that new front, Chen had actually done his homework. Before and after the dinner the previous
     day, he’d come up with a list of scholars’ works on Mao’s poetry. Though it could be said he had done some of the homework
     long before: He had read a number of books on the subject as early as his middle school years, when
Quotations of Chairman Mao and Poems of Chairman Mao
were his textbooks. Upon graduation, he had copied several lines in his diary as self-encouragement: The mountain pass may
     be made of iron, / but we are crossing it all over again, / all over again, / the hills stretching in waves, / the sun sinking
     in blood. After the Cultural Revolution, Chen, like many others, chose not to think too much about Mao or his poems. It was
     a page finally turned. Besides, Mao wrote in the traditional verse form, different from Chen’s free verse. Now, those poems
of Mao’s came crowding back, fragmented more or less in the mind of the worn-out cop.
    Most of Mao’s were “revolutionary,” at least in the official interpretations, including the poem composed for his second wife,
     Kaihui, and another poem written about a picture taken by his fourth wife, Madam Mao. The two poems were the only ones he
     could remember that had any relation to Mao’s personal life.
    Some critics thought otherwise, perhaps. In traditional Chinese literary criticism, there was a time-honored tradition of
     suoying, i.e., an effort to find the true meaning of a work in the author’s life. Such an approach to Mao’s work might not
     have been practicable, for there was only the official version of his life. Still, a scholar in the field might know something
     inaccessible to Chen.
    On the list of Mao poetry scholars Chen had made, some were so established that it was beyond Chen to attempt a quick contact,
     let alone a quick breakthrough; some of them were high in their Party positions, having worked with Mao, which also excluded
     the possibility of Chen’s learning anything from them; some had passed away; and some were too far away from Shanghai. So
     the only one approachable at the moment was Long Wenjiang, a “scholar” quite different from all others, but in Shanghai, and
     a member of the Writers’ Association too.
    As a Mao poetry critic, Long had come to the fore during the Cultural Revolution. Not because of his academic studies but
     because of his class status as a worker. Having spent years collecting various annotations and interpretations of Mao poetry,
     he put them together into a single volume. The publication of the annotated edition immediately established him as a Mao scholar
     in the years when workers and peasants were encouraged to be the masters of the socialist society. He became a member of the
     Writers’ Association, as well as a “professional writer.”
    But Long’s luck dipped after Mao’s death in 1976. For several years, few were interested in anything related to Mao. Mao scholars
     started working on different projects, like Tang or Song poetry, but Mao was the only subject Long knew anything about. Instead
     of giving up, he plodded on, betting on a revival of interest in Mao. The revival finally
came with Mao’s becoming a brand name in the materialistic age, with Mao restaurants and Mao antiques and people collecting
     Mao badges and stamps for their potential value in the market. Plastic Mao images had even become potent charms for taxi drivers,
     dangling in front of windshields, supposedly effective against traffic accidents. Chen, too, had a lighter made in the shape
     of the
Little Red Book
— click it and a spark would shoot up, like Mao’s prediction about the red