At the anecdotal level August illustrates how China's sense of history has experienced a post-Mao re-emergence, how grandiose imperial decor is again in vogue, how thoroughly food imagery infiltrates every kind of Chinese conversation, and how certain old ideas (concubinage) have a glamour that their modern equivalents (prostitution) lack. The tycoon who survived the economic downturn of his city, Beihai, to become the world's biggest, most vulgar producer of foie gras is a typical figure to attract August's eye.
Inside the Red Mansion fares so well with peripheral stories that it must forestall the inevitable: an actual run-in with Lai. While in China, August never gets closer than glimpsing Lai's disappointing hometown and the grim pleasure palace of the title. Later he fares better in a Canadian courtroom during Lai's trial. (Lai ran afoul of Chinese authorities after attracting too much attention and wound up accused of smuggling and tax fraud on a grand scale. His flight to Canada created a diplomatic crisis and made him a focus of public scrutiny.)
So August has a wonderful anecdote about seeing Lai walk into court, size up the lawyers, decide he was underdressed for the occasion and simply walk out to change his clothes. He returned in a partial tuxedo. And "by the end of the hearing he was treating the security officers in the courtroom as part of his entourage rather than as captors." When it comes actually to interviewing Lai face to face, August's questions do not live up to the occasion. ("How did you get to know so many officials?")
In the process of telling Lai's story, August also conveys his own. He came to China from New York with a certain naivete about how freely he could move through the country. He began to notice signs of surveillance around him. "The temple park was a wonderful place for an afternoon outing, and all the more enjoyable if you could watch grown men crouch in the bushes," he observes.
And a year before Inside the Red Mansion was published, a handler from the Chinese Foreign Ministry told August that he had enjoyed the book. You needn't be a spy to agree.
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