Customer Reviews

Paper Butterfly: A Mei Wang Mystery (Mei Wang Mysteries)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Paper Butterfly is the second novel in the Mei Wang series written by Diane Wei Liang. Liang was born in Beijing of parents who were consigned to a remote labor camp during part of her childhood. In 1989, she was involved in the protest in Tiananmen Square. Those two experiences provided her with insider knowledge put to good use in Paper Butterfly.

The story begins with Lin, sentenced to eight years in a work camp in Gansu Province at the age of twenty due to betrayal by a childhood friend. His time at the camp cost him his youth, his sweetheart, and almost cost him his life.

The president of a record company hired Mei to find a rising pop star who has gone missing. Kaili had disappeared for several days when Mei agreed to a discreet search into the troubled singer's life. Although the police think her disappearance was related to robbery, Mei began to search into Kaili's past.

After Kaili was found dead, Mei was dismissed from the case. Unable to let go of Kaili's life, Mei decided to continue on her own. She soon found herself receiving threats and her life at risk. Ultimately she found the past violently colliding with the present.

In Paper Butterfly, the author shows how once one's course is set, it is almost impossible to return to the old way of life. Liang writes with poignancy, drawing on the sights, sounds, and smell of a city teeming with life. She has created a modern day female detective struggling with a mix of the new ways and the old traditions of her family. This unique mixture together with Liang's life experiences combine genuine mystery and mystique into one thoroughly enjoyable story.

Paper Butterfly: A Mei Wang Mystery (Mei Wang Mysteries)

As the second of Diane Wei Liang's Mei Wang series, the plot of "Paper Butterfly" is an improvement over the author's first novel, "The Eye of Jade," and there are a number of rural scenes that are rendered quite vividly. Unfortunately, the characterization is weaker. Mei Wang's personality traits, which may have fascinated the reader in the previous novel - her aloofness and distaste for "back doors," her rare courage as a female detective, her conflicting emotions toward her mother - are no longer given enough stage to perform, or develop, in this 224-page thin sequel. As a consequence, Mei Wang's role in "Paper Butterfly" is not as memorable. Using a political event familiar to Western readers as the plot driver might be a clever idea, but it does not necessarily work well for an uninteresting protagonist.

Contemporary Chinese detective stories are not a new comer in the stage of English literature. Qiu Xiaolong, for example, has successfully portrayed inspector Chen Cao in a series of novels set in Shanghai. Diane Wei Liang's unique angle is the introduction of a female detective, but that uniqueness has yet to be well exploited.

The novel's writing, executed in the author's second language, poses an issue as to how much rendering of foreign-language terminology is too much. The author seems very eager to teach her readers Chinese nouns, as she uses pinyin (the most commonly used romanization system for standard Mandarin) way too frequently. Many of those nouns, such as "hulu," "tufei," etc, are insignificant words in the book and have readily available English equivalents, thus presenting them in Chinese pinyin doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose other than distraction. A less arbitrary display of Chinese terms might be more effective.

This is the second book by this author that I have read and thoroughly enjoyed. Ms. Liang writes beautifully. Her prose is sometimes almost poetic. I am hoping Mei Wang continues with her investigations and returns to us very soon.

Diane Wei Liang uses the conventions of the detective story to plumb the mysteries of the changes that have taken place in her homeland over the last two decades, and how those changes have affected values and ideals. The book is ingenious in its approach and provocative in its observations.

No longer working for the Ministry of Public Security, Wang Mei knows from experience how slippery a slope she walks as an "information consultant"; private investigators are prohibited in China. Guanghua Record Company CEO Peng Datong hires Mei as a "consultant" researching the disappearance of his pop superstar Kaili. She vanished following a highly regarded performance at Beijing's Capital Gymnasium.

Mei finds Kaili's dressing table filled with cigarettes and pills, but it is the letters and a PAPER BUTTERFLY the sleuth finds that interest her. Apparently, Kaili has a long distant sweetheart. As the migrants leave Beijing to work in the provinces, Mei follows Kaili to Dashanzi where the workers live in abandoned factories while in the city. Meanwhile pressure rises on Mei to drop her investigation with only Police Detective Zhao helping her. At the same time, Mei feels guilty when a former student Lin returns to Beijing after her release from remote East Wind Lao Gai Camp where he was educated and purged of his inflammatory role at the Tiananmen Square demonstrations.

Though readers will know instantly which side of the Tiananmen Square human rights debate that Diane Wei Liang is on, fans will enjoy this modern day China private investigative thriller. Fascinatingly Wang being an information consultant is mindful of Mosley's Easy Rawlins who also could not be a professional sleuth in 1960s Los Angeles; adding depth to her fall from grace is her former peers and her family scorns her for quitting her prestigious job to go capitalist. The story line focuses intensely on China for instance the drop in acceptance of migratory workers to second class with the professionals like Datong taking over the city. The story line is somewhat leisurely flowed as the emphasis is on the culture and human rights.

Harriet Klausner

Mei Wang was a young star at the Chinese Ministry for Public Security in 1989, during the demonstrations that led to the brutal attacks by the Peoples' Army on the students in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Though recently out of university, Mei could not bring herself to endanger her promising career to join the demonstrators. She escaped the tragedy in the Square but not the guilt at her self-perceived failure to support the movement.

Now it's nine years later. Mei's career at the Ministry stalled after she refused an offer to become her boss's mistress. This, and Tiananmen Square, led Mei to leave the Ministry and its prestige and status behind. She now has a successful private investigation business, carefully registered as an "information consultancy" because private investigation is illegal in Beijing. Mei has done well although, unlike many of her generation, she is not obsessed with getting rich under the Party's new and more relaxed economic regime.

Hired by a record tycoon to investigate the disappearance of a rising pop star, Mei uncovers a cache of letters in the girl's apartment that reveals a romantic link between her and a student who disappeared into a penal camp in the wake of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. When the girl turns up dead, the case becomes a murder investigation. But Mei's client immediately fires her and pulls strings to bring government pressure on her to make sure she drops the investigation.

Mei perseveres, of course, and soon uncovers corruption and hypocrisy in many places in a society still riven by the 1989 events and by fear of its own government's unbridled power, which seems to serve mainly those who can corruptly influence Party decisions. The picture of mistrust, self-delusion and personal betrayal is very dark but rings true.

Author Diane Wei Liang speaks with authority. According to the jacket note, she spent time as a child in a labor camp in a "remote region of China," was in the Student Democracy Movement and "protested in Tiananmen Square." Here she examines how the events in Tiananmen Square, still a forbidden topic in China, indelibly marked an entire society. Her prose style is straightforward and direct, almost plain but never uninteresting. She moves her story along and makes it believable throughout. This is a dark story that is hard to put down.

This was my first Mei Wang mystery, and probably will be my last. The most interesting part of the book are the snippets of life in China, but the mystery itself is poorly written. Red herrings abound,not intentionally, but because characters that go nowhere are everywhere. Poor editing includes a chapter in which the very same character is given a different name two paragraphs after being first introduced, then the original name is given again. "Sing" is written in place of "sign." It's sloppy and distracting.

None of the characters is developed fully enough so the reader particularly cares about their fate. Resolutions to mysteries come quickly and leave the reader wondering if that is all there is to the story. Characters take action, but nothing in the prior paragraphs set up what happens, as if entire sections had been chopped out. It's a choppy, sloppy effort.

This is the first book I read from this author. I chose it because I am from a similar background as the writer or the heroine. Less than half way through the book, it already feels like a western story set in a Chinese background. Association to the Chinese student democracy movement is far-fetched. The character of Mei has no trace of a Beijing-born girl. If she can be real, she must have stayed overseas for a quite few years and became somewhat westernized.

I cannot deny this book can be entertaining. However, it is full of typo and spelling error of both English and Chinese (Pinyin). I wish the author had been more careful.