Why a Booktrail?
1990s – Second in the Inspector Chen Cao series, this is a police procedural set in Shanghai, featuring a man who as well as a policeman is also a poet and gourmet
A Loyal Character Dancer
What you need to know before your trail
Inspector Chen’s mission in the Shanghai Police Bureau is to escort U.S. Marshal Catherine Rohn as she goes to bring the wife of an important witness in a criminal trial back to the USA. But on the way to Fujian where Wen lives, it is discovered that she has gone missing.
Chen meanwhile would rather be back in Shanghai, as there is plenty to be getting on with there. There has just been a body found in Shanghai’s Bund Park. But his boss insists his mission is to go with Inspector Rohn on a face saving mission of sorts. But what kind of mission is this really?
”The line between truth and fiction was always being constructed and deconstructed by those in power.”
Travel Guide
Chief Inspector Chen Cao works for the Shanghai Police Bureau and is a methodical and trusting police officer. He likes his work and likes to do it well but his dislike of the political games that others play put him on a on different playing field to others in the force. He is of the old school mould and even his outside interests – Chinese poetry and the values of days gone by – make him one of a kind.
His China is one of new v old, the changing face of the China in the 1990s. An insight into the Chinese police force in what appears to be one of the most overcrowded cities in China.
With the severe housing shortage in Shanghai, the park lent itself to the romantic yearning young people who had n privacy at home
The Cultural Revolution
Wen Liping ended up married to a man who used and abused her and was involved in the drugs trade. When Wen is called as a witness to people smugglers in the US, and then disappears, the matter becomes not one of a disappearance but of more international and far reaching consequences.
The cultural revolution is hailed asa time of economic change and new alliances. Through the eyes of these characters there is a strong sense of how people rely on favours and connections, how politics in China is a very personal affair.
In the early nineties under Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform, Shanghai had been changing dramatically….
In Bund park, he sees a message carved into a bench –
Long life the Proletarian dictatorship. The Bench had been repainted couple of times, but the message showed through”
As well as the historical and social setting, this too is one built with food and literary references Poems and nostalgia fill Chen’s mind as he sips Dragon Well greentea or reminisces about the world that was and his humble beginnings into the man he is today.
Where Next?
