Inspector Chen has taken a few days off to translate a document for Gu, a shrewd businessman. Meanwhile, his colleague Yu is assigned the case of the murder of Yin, a former Red Guard who wrote a controversial novel denouncing the Cultural Revolution, during which her lover Yang was mistreated and died. The story alternates between these two parallel events, bringing to light the historical and political context of the 1920s and 30s in Shanghai, but also the vestiges of those times, with a very fixed hierarchy that comes with advantages and the power of connections. I felt that this third episode of the Inspector Chen Cao series was much more political than the others, and that the murder was a pretext, but it was a very interesting insight into a history that I don’t know at all.
“You and I are so crazy
about each other,
as hot as a potter’s fire.
Out of the same chunk
of clay, the shape of you,
the shape of me. Crush us
both into clay again, mix
it with water, reshape
you, reshape me.
So I have you in my body,
and you’ll have me forever in yours too.”