“Please don’t read any more, Lianping.”
She found it hard to juxtapose the persona in the poem with the Party cadre sitting opposite, stirring his coffee with a spoon. Could it be the poem that was written for Wang Feng, or was it for another girl, perhaps named Ling? Stories about the chief inspector circulated among her circle, and it would be difficult for people not to speculate.
“You are so romantic,” she said, looking up from her phone.
“That is a too-sentimental piece,” he said, seemingly self-conscious. “But it will never do to mistake the persona for the poet. To use T. S. Eliot’s words, poetry is impersonal. I dashed off those lines after watching a Japanese movie, conjuring up the agony of the protagonist, and saying what he does not say in the movie. An objective correlative, so to speak. With creative writing, using such a persona may have a liberating effect.”
“I see. What about an ordinary cop’s persona, then? Of course, you are an extraordinary one. But you could choose to focus on an unextraordinary cop, like one of those working under you, where there is a lot of sacrifice but no flower or limelight. That would be a subject appropriate for a Party newspaper like Wenhui, and naturally you are familiar with the details.”
He didn’t respond immediately, but he seemed genuinely intrigued, nodding and sipping at his coffee again.
“Yes, you’ve made a good suggestion, and a politically correct one too. I’ll definitely think about it, Lianping. So, have you been in charge of the literature section for a long time?” Chen asked.
“No, it’s actually not my section. I normally edit the finance section.”
“You majored in finance?”
“No, in English.”
“Oh, that’s interesting,” he said, though he chose not to follow up on it. “Finance is far more popular today.”
“What do you mean, Chief Inspector Chen?”
“According to a novelist who was popular in the eighties, it’s far more popular nowadays to be a businessman, so he’s become a prosperous CEO and no longer writes.”
“Oh, that’s Tieliang. I watched that TV interview with him. What a shame! He made a fortune running a chain of clubs for officials—all in the name of literature and art.” She added more hot water to her cup and said, “But he’s not alone. You might remember a sentence in Dream of the Red Chamber: ‘Except the two stone lions crouching in front of the Jia mansion, nothing else is clean.’”
“Well, you simply need to swap ‘the Jia mansion’ with ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’”
“Wow, that’s quite something for a Party cadre to say.”
“May I smoke, Lianping?”
“Go ahead,” she said, realizing she’d been carried away by the conversation. After all, it was a senior police officer who was sitting opposite her, and she wondered what he really wanted to talk to her about. “Oh, I heard that you’ve published a collection of poetry, and it sold out.”
“I, too, thought it sold quite well. As it turned out, however, a Big Buck bought a thousand copies from the publisher, and then gave them out as gifts to his business associates. While it was done as a favor to me, and without my knowledge, it came as a blow to my self-esteem as a poet. And as a cop, too, since I failed to detect that trick with the sales. But then again, I didn’t graduate from the police academy, so perhaps that can be counted as a factor in my defense.”
She enjoyed his subtle touch of self-irony. At least he knew better. Then it was her turn to speak in a self-deprecating way.
“I didn’t major in finance. But for a girl from Anhui, any job in Shanghai was worth grabbing. My major in English did give me one advantage, though. In today’s financial world, a lot of new terms have to be translated from English. For instance, mortgage and option. These terms were nonexistent in the state economy. So I was offered the position at Wenhui.”
“That is quite a coincidence. I was assigned to the job at the police bureau due to similar considerations—I was needed to translate a handbook of police procedures.”
“In my situation, there’s also a material difference between a literature journalist and a finance journalist.”
“Enlighten me, Lianping.”
“For example, at the meeting at the Writers’ Association, what I was given there was a cup of tea. And not high-quality tea, for that matter. But at a meeting of real estate professionals, a journalist might be given all sorts of things. One time, I was even given a laptop.”
“No wonder Tieliang no longer writes,” Chen said. “But still, your job is important. It helps people understand the financial world in which they live, a world that would otherwise make no sense to them.”