Six years ago, Shanghai was rocked by the murder of Canadian model Diana O’Brien. The 22-year-old was stabbed repeatedly at her apartment on Xiaohua Lu and Dingxi Lu by 18-year-old migrant Chen Jun. The tragedy is explored by Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Mara Hvistendahl in And the City Swallowed Them.
“I was living in that neighborhood at that time and it was a shock,” she explains. “Everything was getting cleaned up from subways to visas in preparation for the Olympics and the Expo. I wanted to understand what was going on but there was a lot of misinformation. When I finally did return to it, so much time had gone by that I was able to learn more.”
Since moving to Shanghai in 2004, Hvistendahl has established herself as a prominent writer. Her debut book Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men was named one of 2011’s best books by the Wall Street Journal and Slate, finishing as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Her impeccable research skills can be found throughout her latest work. She visited both affected families, using the case to explore issues like fly-by modeling operations and the plight of migrants in Shanghai, while offering an incisive look behind the Chinese judicial system.
“By the time I was finished writing, it was less about the crime and more about the parallels between their lives,” she says. “Shanghai is a city that belongs to the Shanghainese and it’s easy for migrants to become invisible. There were so many similarities between that world and the one that Diana inhabited.”
And the City Swallowed Them astounds with its empathetic portrayal of a robbery gone terribly wrong. Both Diana and Chen had arrived in Shanghai weeks before – “tiny specks in the world’s most populous city.”
Both were suffering culture shock, trapped in dire circumstances. O’Brien, contracted out by a Canadian modeling agency, was predominantly shilling booze at ritzy clubs in second-tier cities, working on a tourist visa. Her shared apartment’s front door randomly popped open, but it was still better than most. As Hvistendahl writes, “Everyone in the business knew of models who lived crammed ten to twelve to an apartment.”
Chen was one of China’s 58 million liushou ertong, left-behind children. His family’s land was absorbed into an uncompleted local government program and his parents left home for more lucrative work. His father sadly concedes to Hvistendahl that he never really knew his son.
At 15, he dropped out to work. Eventually falsified papers brought him to Shanghai – the latest addition to the city’s temporary workforce, 40 percent of its total population. However, Chinese policy ties access to social services to birthplace.
After being fired, Chen decided to return home. He hatched a plan to steal a few items from a nearby apartment to pay for a bus ride to his village home in Anhui Province, leading to the fateful event.
The final chapters are a fascinating look at China’s judicial system. The reader’s skepticism recedes alongside that of O’Brien’s parents as Shanghai police dutifully walk them through their investigation, providing access to evidence such as security footage used to identify Chen and even the crime scene.
The courtroom scenes are colorful, spotlighting one of the oldest legal traditions in the world. With roots in the Tang Dynasty, Chinese law places great importance on confessions to restore social harmony, hence the country’s 99.99 percent prosecution rate.
In a surprise to them, O’Brien’s parents ultimately decide Chen’s fate. Rather than execution, they recommended death by reprieve, which provides a two-year window for rehabilitation before a reassessment to determine whether the sentence should be downgraded to a life sentence or upgraded to death.
A thoroughly engrossing read, And the City Swallowed Them is the debut release by Deca, a cooperative comprising nine leading journalists that have collectively reported from over 90 countries. Inspired by collectives like French photojournalism pioneers Magnum and recent Los Angeles hip-hop phenomenon Odd Future, Deca aims to release a new story each month.
Upcoming releases include Stephen Faris’ report on a refugee crisis on a small Mediterranean island, McKenzie Funk’s account of a dramatic rescue on a runaway oil rig in the Arctic and Vanessa Gezari’s observations from a trial of an American soldier accused of murder in Afghanistan.
The digital stories will be released as Amazon Kindle Singles and on the Deca app. Hvistendahl praises the format. “With this, magazine stories are getting longer… or books are getting shorter,” she laughs. “The bottom line is that they’ve proven to be successful and people are reading them.”
// Find out more about And the City Swallowed Them at www.decastories.com
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