An Endless Story (有终) by Xiao Xie Chun Feng (小谢春风)

[douqi]

It took me three tries to get into this crime thriller, mainly due to work stress, not helped by the fact that I was simultaneously following the serialisation of To Embers We Return (焚情, pinyin: fen qing) by Ning Yuan (宁远) (which is so much more my thing). It was... fine, I guess? Maybe because I wasn't in the right frame of mind to engage with it, but I found both the plot and the romance (especially the romance) rather unsatisfying.

An Endless Story (有终, pinyin: you zhong) (fun fact: An Endless Story was the publisher's chosen English title for the print edition of the novel, but the literal translation of the Chinese title means 'there is an ending') features the central pairing of police captain Shen Zhuoyan and her 'shijie', data analyst Huang Zhen — so-called because Huang Zhen was a couple of years ahead of Shen Zhuoyan at the police academy. Shen Zhuoyan is the reserved one with the androgynous-to-masc presentation; she can often be warm in manner to subordinates, witnesses, members of the public, etc, but that's quite a surface thing and she never shares anything deep with them. Huang Zhen is the fashionable, femme bombshell, but also more than capable of handling herself in a physical altercation. It's clear from the beginning of the novel that they both know each other well and have a fraught relationship. Over the course of the book, it's revealed that this is linked back to an incident which took place when they were teenagers, and left its mark on them. The incident, it turns out, is also linked to the series of crimes which they solve in the novel.

The key incident, it turns out, is Shen Zhuoyan's sudden disappearance when both she and Huang Zhen were in high school. It's clear that Huang Zhen feels a lot of guilt over this, though she doesn't initially know the details of Shen Zhuoyan's disappearance or subsequent return. We learn over the course of the novel that Shen Zhuoyan was kidnapped by a man who, for some reason, tried to train her in the skills of criminal investigation, and whom she was eventually able to escape from. Huang Zhen's guilt stems from the fact that she believes she, not Shen Zhuoyan, was the kidnapper's target, and that Shen Zhuoyan was taken instead of her because of a prank she pulled. The series of crimes they're tasked with solving, we learn, are all linked to the kidnapper and his shadowy apprentice.

The kidnapper, it turns out, was an old acquaintance of Shen Zhuoyan's parents, and obsessively in love with her mother. When Shen Zhuoyan was little, her father, a police officer, sacrificed himself to protect his colleagues and the public during a raid on a factory being used to manufacture illegal drugs. The man who would become the kidnapper is incensed at what he perceives as Shen Zhuoyan's father's abandonment of her mother. He comes up with a twisted scheme: he'll kidnap a promising child, train the child to become as skilled a police officer as Shen Zhuoyan's father, but minus the sense of self-sacrifice, and then... send the child to Shen Zhuoyan's mother to take Shen Zhuoyan's place, so that she'll never suffer the same kind of grief again. Yeah, I'm not sure how it was supposed to work either, even if he hadn't stuffed it up by kidnapping Shen Zhuoyan herself.

The relationship between the two lead characters was written in a way reminiscient of the tip of an iceberg. The novel shows us what they do with and say to each other, but it rarely gets into their heads or shows us what they're thinking, so the reader doesn't get to see very much emotional or relationship development. It's clear that they do care for each other, but Shen Zhuoyan spends much of the novel pushing Huang Zhen away, for reasons that aren't entirely clear. I initially thought it was because Shen Zhuoyan had been diagnosed with quite advanced stomach cancer and she didn't want to put Huang Zhen through the trauma of a girlfriend's death, but then towards the end of the novel, they get together quite abruptly, and the cancer wasn't even mentioned. At the beginning of the novel, we also learn that Huang Zhen has a near-clinical emotional dependency on Shen Zhuoyan, but that isn't really resolved either. All this was exacerbated by the fact that the print edition's post-ending extra is all about Shen Zhuoyan dying in Huang Zhen's arms, which made it doubly strange that the cancer thing didn't feature more significantly in their relationship in the novel.

The novel has an interesting serialisation and publication history. It was initially serialised on the author's Weibo account (now deleted). Before the Weibo serialisation was complete, it was licensed for print publication, and the publisher promoted it quite heavily. The author then began to serialise it on JJWXC, and it now appears to be complete (even if it isn't marked 'complete'). I read the web version of the novel on JJWXC, and also read the print-only exclusive post-ending extra, which came as a little booklet with the mainland Chinese print edition of the novel.