Black Holes and sunshine laws
- By Eric Daly
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E-mail Beijing review, April 22, 2015
Ties to the past
In 1969, 16-year-old He volunteered to work on a farm in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province as an "educated youth," where he drove and maintained tractors. He wrote a poem published in 1971 and a novel which he submitted to contemporary writers who replied contending that he should stick to short stories until he further matured.
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The Chinese editions of four of He Jiahong's five Hong Jun crime novels |
Returning to his native Beijing in 1977, He worked as a plumber and met his wife, a doctor. At the talk, he jokes that should he lose his job as a law professor, he could earn more in the "skilled labor" of his former occupation. His in-laws-to-be were not impressed by this plumber with his literary aspirations, so He took and passed a college matriculation exam, despite the backlog of 10 years' worth of student applications within a university system that had only recently reopened following the "cultural revolution" (1966-76). His first choice was economics but poor math grades meant he chose law, a subject with which he was unfamiliar.
The law and He proved a good match. After graduation, he briefly practiced as a defense lawyer in 1985 before returning to study, obtaining a postdoctoral degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in 1993. His thesis was a comparative analysis of the U.S. and Chinese criminal prosecution systems. While there, He discovered writers from the then blossoming legal thriller genre such as Scott Turow. The fact that titles approximating technical and mundane legalese such as Burden of Proof, Presumed Innocent, and Body of Evidence were shorthand for suspense among the American reading public piqued his interest.
When He came back to China, he decided once more to write novels, to recapture the "dreams of his youth." He also wished to release something that vividly illustrated and explored issues in China's developing criminal justice system. In 1994-98, he wrote five novels and an abridged version of the first was published in China Youth Daily in installments.
Despite the freshness of China as a setting for a legal thriller, Black Holes is set not in the present but in the 1990s. Before then, He maintains at the Bookworm talk, people didn't know they were poor as everyone was so. Even among his academic peers, it was common to have a second job or to work through one's summer vacation. The stock market for the first time afforded the Chinese people the opportunity to get rich quick. Black Holes' original title was The Black Holes in Human Nature, and He reckons that the 1990s and the turbulent "cultural revolution" were two times in which such cracks opened, creating portals that incentivized and facilitated evildoing.
His frustrated economics career notwithstanding, Black Holes afforded He had a second opportunity to study something monetarily related. In order to give his work the ring of authenticity, he undertook research in a field with which he was largely unfamiliar: securities trading. In the manner of Hong at the novel's beginning, he would spend time on Beijing's trading floors, attuning his ear to the lingo of the marketplace, as well as reading finance books.
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