Word: chen
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...Decades later, the stirred memory of that photo suggested the plot of Qiu's Red Mandarin Dress, the fifth and latest of his popular, Shanghai-set Inspector Chen detective novels. This time, Qiu's hero, a cop and poet, is on the trail of a serial killer who dresses his female victims in tailored qipao dresses - a macabre gesture freighted with political meaning. As in the previous books, the investigation leads Inspector Chen to a brutal legacy from the past, for even the most vicious of Qiu's criminals are victims of China's bloody history. So, incidentally, are many...
...course of duty, Inspector Chen has tackled political corruption (Death of a Red Heroine, 2000) and human trafficking (A Loyal Character Dancer, 2002). Qiu's 2006 mystery, A Case of Two Cities, was a virtual blueprint for the pension scandal that roiled Shanghai's highest political aeries last year and led to the resignation of the city's Communist Party chief. "A cop walks around and knocks on people's doors, asks questions," Qiu says. "It's become a convenient way to write about things I want to explore...
...Perhaps reflecting his creator's donnish temperament, Inspector Chen is somewhat ambivalent about the door-knocking and petty politicking that go along with police work. In the course of his investigations, Qiu's hero frequently cites literary theory or quotes Tang dynasty poetry. Chen is less a cop moonlighting as a poet than a poet daylighting...
...Mandarin Dress, Chen has retreated further than ever from day-to-day policing, and, perhaps inevitably, the novel's crime plot often gets enjoyably lost in a thicket of Chinese history, literature and food. Yet Qiu also adeptly follows the genre's conventions and, when Inspector Chen's investigation gains momentum, the mystery of the women in the red dresses predictably returns to a buried crime from the Cultural Revolution: the sins of the nation's past revisited upon the present. Already, Qiu says, he's at work on the next novel in the series, which will...
Student entrepreneur Chen B. Fang ’10 currently funds laddertoheaven.com, a site where users can share good deeds, with the money he earns from three jobs. This spring, a new undergraduate business competition may provide him and other innovators on campus with some much-needed cash. Yesterday marked the official launch of “I^3,” the Imagine Invent Impact Harvard College Innovation Challenge. The competition will award $80,000 in cash grants and provide up to $40,000 in services for students to pursue innovative ventures. Michael Segal...