The Huangpu River is a broad, slow-moving waterway through Shanghai that serves as a tourist route, a working passage, and a dividing line between the city’s old and new worlds. On a cruise undertaken by Li Yan and Nien Mei-Ling to find An Wenjiang, its mist-muted banks frame an encounter that unsettles their assumptions about a man connected to a murdered opera singer.

Setting and Access

The search for An begins at the booking office for Huangpu River cruises, housed in a triangular granite building at the ferry terminal at the south end of The Bund. Li Yan and Nien Mei-Ling park across the street and make their way down to the quay by a network of pedestrian overpasses. The first cruise is due to leave at 10:45, and the waiting room is nearly empty: a bored attendant stands by the drinks counter while two uniformed women staff the sales desk. Clocks show the time in New York, London, Beijing, Tokyo, and Sydney, a small marker of the international outlook surrounding the tourist trade.

The desk staff tell them that An Wenjiang drives the boat, but that it is about to depart. Rather than wait two hours for its return, Li Yan and Nien Mei-Ling hurry aboard. Their route is not simply a scenic diversion: the river’s regular passenger service becomes the means of reaching a potential witness before the opportunity passes.

The Cruise and the Encounter

As the cruiser noses into midstream, the river’s scale overtakes the view of the city. The day is overcast and humid, and the low cloud dims the banks. The Bund on one side represents Shanghai’s old world; Pudong faces it as the new. In the mist, both lose colour and definition, while the river between them seems broader and more enduring than either shore. The waterway is at once a boundary and a shared passage, separating the two districts even as the boat carries passengers between them.

An Wenjiang is at the controls in a wheelhouse without a wheel: a joystick governs both rudder and engine speed. His appearance and surroundings make a sharp first impression. Beneath a baseball cap, his hair is long and greasy; his hands are black with oil, his fingernails broken and dirty, and a cigarette burns beside a jar of green tea on the dashboard. He objects coarsely to Li Yan’s entrance. The detective shows his identification and tells him to watch his language because Nien Mei-Ling is present.

The interview reveals a less simple figure than his rough manner initially suggests. When asked to identify the dead opera singer, An first laughs, then agrees. He asks whether she was murdered. Li Yan confirms that she was, and An turns away as tears gather in his eyes. His request that they tell him if they discover who killed her makes plain that his attachment to her went deeper than his earlier boasting about their sexual relationship had implied.

Working River and Narrative Significance

After speaking with An, Li Yan and Nien Mei-Ling return to the upper deck. The boat has rounded a bend and passed the international passenger terminal. Factory buildings and apartment blocks disappear into haze; the cruiser passes Shanghai No. 10 Cotton Textile Mill and Li Hua papermill, then the Shanghai Shipyard, where rusting former ocean-going liners sit among cranes. This industrial shoreline gives the river another identity beyond the polished tourist route: it is also a corridor alongside the working city, marked by mills, shipyards, and ageing vessels.

The cruise’s changing views mirror the investigation’s movement from an easy assumption to a more complicated human truth. An Wenjiang’s job makes him accessible, and his abrasive appearance invites judgment, but his grief disrupts the detectives’ first impressions. Against the river’s muted division of old and new Shanghai, the encounter insists that people, like the city seen through the mist, cannot be understood from their outward surface alone.