Becoming Inspector Chen by Qiu Xiaolong

Author:Qiu Xiaolong [Qiu Xiaolong]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2020-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

He keeps on wading precariously across the treacherous river, stepping on one stone after another, most of them jutting barely out of the water’s surface, when he looks up, panic-stricken at the sight of a face-masked girl stumbling in the distance, shouting for help, struggling in vain toward the other bank, and drowning against the horizon shrouded in the impenetrable smog except for a yellow butterfly winging its way to him—

And he is transported with the butterfly, fluttering, flying so high suddenly, it seems to be bringing the distant horizon beyond the unknown land, the mysterious ocean, all the way into the dark eye of the sun, with the immense landscape changing dramatically under its flapping wings, before it abruptly starts failing, falling with a thud to the ground, turning into a round black pebble sticking out of the food market’s pebble street covered in white snow, but trembling almost imperceptibly, like a blackened human toe—

Startled out of the dream, he thought that the sound had come from his mother knocking into a chair under the attic. She got up so early, preparing for him the breakfast of white rice soup with small dishes of pickled cucumber and ferment tofu, and getting ready for her routine shopping trip for fresh vegetables in the morning, even though the Ninghai Street Food Market had long disappeared, along with the original pebble street which had been repaved in gray concrete.

It had been a night full of eerie dreams, with the background scenes continuously shifting back to those he must have seen twenty or even thirty years earlier. And it was not just because of his sleeping in the old attic, he was pretty sure of that now.

His mother was tiptoeing around with only a tiny nightlight flickering downstairs, believing he was still asleep overhead. She slept less because of her age. He could hardly see the first ray of gray light peeping in through the attic window.

He lay quietly in bed, trying not to disappoint her, thinking in the dark that still surrounded him.

In the dream, he had seen a face-masked girl drowning in the river. It vaguely disturbed him, though he failed to recognize her face behind the mask. Then the no less perplexing scene of a colorful butterfly soaring out of nowhere, flapping its wings, and bringing an unbelievable metamorphosis across the vision of the land. Cudgeling his brains out, he managed to recall something he had read in his college days, but he could not help wondering at its relevancy to the present moment.

The butterfly effect, that was the term in the book. With a butterfly flapping its wings in Chicago, a tornado occurs in Tokyo thousands and thousands of miles away, as the analogy describes in a poetic hyperbole. But to him, it seemed not to be just about something insignificant happening here which was capable of leading to another significant thing happening far, far away, or vice versa. It was also about the seemingly unrelated proving to be

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