The episode, and other anecdotes that have haunted Qiu, inevitably become Chen’s bug-bears. Then I saw she was reading a book about the stock market.
I saw a young girl reading a book on a bench, just like I used to. “My first visit back to China after seven or eight years, I went to Bund Park (Shanghai) with some friends. Qiu plays down his similarities with Chen, with whom he shares a love for fine food and poetry, and a pedigree in politically charged bureaucracy.īut he can’t help lending Chen nostalgia for simpler times, when the guiltiest pleasure available to a Shanghai high-school graduate in the 1970s was reading banned English books furtively on a park bench. Written in English, the books have been translated into 19 languages including Swedish, Japanese and Hebrew. Some are bestsellers, including the debut novel “Death of A Red Heroine” which won the crime writers’ Anthony Award for best first novel in 2001.
#Licencia ia writer series#
Qiu’s Inspector Chen series is hugely popular in the United States and Europe. Qiu, a bespectacled poet and professor, turned to crime writing to document the changes.įallen Communist heroes, people smugglers and gangsters became the counterpoints to Inspector Chen, a policeman poet, struggling to make sense of wrenching changes in Shanghai. Eliot’s home-town St Louis, Qiu came back to Shanghai eight years later to find the formula had changed.Įconomic reform had brought wealth, corruption and seething frustration from those left behind in the boom. That was the formula of the time,” Qiu said.Īfter leaving China in the late 1980s to study at Washington University in T.S. “The essays would say that the works had value, but would also warn people to be alert that the writers were products of capitalist society. Qiu, who once penned a self-criticism for his father during the Cultural Revolution, found himself at a prestigious government think-tank in the 1980s writing critiques on the works of modernist poets like T.S. The ruling Communist Party that denounced his factory-owning father as a “black capitalist” in the 1950s and 1960s welcomed businessmen into its ranks in 2002. Perhaps the censors don’t read the newspapers?” Chen laughed.Ĭhen, who grew up during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), but has lived in the United States for the past 19 years, can’t help but have a keen sense of irony. “Chinese newspaper reviews refer to my books as being set in Shanghai. While frustrating for the author, the cuts fooled no-one. Maybe they are still thinking about it,” he shrugged. “I haven’t heard from the publishers since. Qiu, who grudgingly accepted censorship for his first three novels - “Death of a Red Heroine”, “Loyal Character Dancer”, and “When Red is Black” - refused cuts for his fourth, “A Tale of Two Cities”. “They took out street names and other landmarks because they were worried people would recognize these places as Shanghai.” But they ended up changing the name of Shanghai into ‘H city’,” Qiu, 54, told Reuters during an interview at a Beijing hotel. “The publishers promised they wouldn’t cut any of my work.
In China, Qiu’s stories of Shanghai gangsters, sleaze and official misdeeds is less beguiling to official censors. The U.S.-based author’s tales of Chief Inspector Chen Cao, a Communist Party member and beat cop probing politically sensitive murder cases in Shanghai’s underworld, have proved an unlikely hit for Western audiences. Chinese author Qiu Xiaolong poses for a photograph with his latest book titled 'Red Mandarin Dress' in Beijing March 8, 2008.
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