A Map of Betrayal (16 page)

Two other local groups took the stage after Juli’s band, but neither was as good. A pair of young men did a break-dance routine, but they were out of sync with the music and didn’t move in unison either. When one was done and stood up, the other was still spinning on the floor like a top. Following them was a kind of strip show—four girls, all wearing sooty eye shadow, spike heels, and canary two-piece swimsuits with frills, strutted, wiggled their hips, and frolicked around. Every one of them seemed to be a bundle of nerves. Their fists were drawing tiny circles in front of them as
if they were boxing with someone invisible. Now and again they kicked their feet high, revealing the pale undersides of their legs. Someone in the audience gave a shout of laughter. “Take it off!” a male voice boomed from the right front corner of the hall. I noticed that no matter how erotic the girls’ movements were, their faces remained wooden, slightly worried, as if they’d been alert to someone, their director or boss, observing them from the side. The performance felt robotic, though loud catcalls rose from the back.

Then the emcee stepped onstage again and announced, “Dear friends, brothers and sisters, let me remind you that tonight’s show is called ‘Mad in Love,’ so our finale is going to be enacted by two performance artists who will demonstrate our theme to the max.”

The stage went dark while the room kept buzzing. When the lights came on again, a couple, both sporting red underwear, the man in his mid-twenties and the woman a few years older, were making out on a large mattress on the stage. The audience was too transfixed to let out a peep. When both performers seemed aroused, they got into a sitting sex position. The woman, straddling the man’s lap with her back to his face, peeled off her cherry-red bra and dropped it to the floor. She went on to bump and grind her fleshy backside while they both faked orgasmic cries. Some in the audience grew disgruntled, swearing under their breath. A few snickered and hooted.

Then the two performers changed positions—the woman got on all fours, swaying her hips a little, ready to take the man. As they were slowly stripping off their underwear with exaggerated gestures, a team of police arrived. They rushed onstage, pulled the couple to their feet, and shoved them. The male actor swerved to escape, but a cop tripped him. At once another two pounced on him and pulled him up. One slapped his face while the other punched him in the gut. “Ow!” The man doubled over, holding his sides with both hands.

The two performers had sheets wrapped around them but were still barefoot. The police handcuffed them to each other, led
them offstage, and proceeded toward the side exit. Though shaken, the couple kept shouting, “Long live artistic freedom! Wipe out oppression!”

Juli was close to tears, muttering that she too was in hot water now. I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and tried to calm her. Wuping was frantic and hurried up to the emcee to demand an explanation. Why hadn’t they informed him of such a harebrained finale beforehand? Why had they invited that pair of freaks to enact sex publicly? Who was supposed to take responsibility for this show now? Several others also surrounded the chubby emcee, who apparently hadn’t breathed a word about the finale to them either. I took Juli out of the theater and hailed a cab.

We went to Stacy’s apartment, afraid that the police might be after Juli. My friend was out with her students, so I sat Juli down at the dining table and put the kettle on the stove. She was still in a daze and kept saying, “They’ll haul me in tomorrow for sure. Aunt, I’m in big trouble.” She shielded a part of her face with her narrow hand, which had callused fingertips and square nails.

After a few mouthfuls of pomegranate tea, she calmed down some. She asked me whether what the performance artists had done was art. “Certainly not,” I said. “Millions of people are doing the same thing every day in this province alone. How in God’s name can they justify the crude sex act as art? At best it’s part of life, an experience but not art.”

“So the cops should nab them?” Juli asked, her cheeks still tearstained.

“I don’t think they deserve to do jail time. At most they should be charged with public indecency.”

“So even in the United States people are not allowed to make love onstage?”

“Not like that. It was too vulgar, beyond the pale.”

The more we talked, the more distraught Juli became. She was so terrified by the prospect of getting arrested that she dissolved
into tears, sobbing in my arms. Patting her shoulder, I murmured, “I won’t let that happen. I won’t leave until you’re safe.”

She hugged me tighter. “Aunt Lilian, you’ve been so good to me, like my mother.”

I wouldn’t let her go back to her place that night, afraid that the police might turn up there, so we slept in the same room, sharing a queen-size bed.

The next morning when we saw Wuping, he said that the two performance artists were a married couple, notorious for being flaky, but their marital status might help lighten their penalty, because the charge might simply be public exposure. His prediction turned out to be correct. Rather than being treated as serious criminals, the couple were each given half a year in forced labor, and the chubby emcee lost his job.

I spent three more days keeping Juli company. Convinced that the police were not after her, I returned to Beijing. But the week after I was back, they summoned her. They asked her a host of questions, which she answered truthfully, so they were convinced that she’d had no inkling about the sex performance. She insisted she too had been outraged by it. Lucky for her, they let her go.

1959

The electric fan whirled while Gary slept in his study. Suddenly his daughter burst into tears in the living room. He sat up with a start, rubbing his eyes. He hadn’t gone to bed until three in the morning, having to finish a report for Thomas on China’s covert campaign to root out the remnants of the Dalai Lama’s followers. The Tibetan leader had fled to India a few months before.

“Mommy, I can’t get up! Help me!” hollered two-year-old Lilian.

Gary ran into the living room and found his wife lounging on the sofa, watching
Leave It to Beaver
. Her blond hair was in ruby rollers that made her head twice its normal size. Lately Nellie had been so moody that she often threw tantrums. Their baby was lying faceup on the floor in a flowered pinafore and a diaper, one of her legs motionless, apparently in pain, as her other leg kicked the air.

“Leave me alone,” Nellie grumbled and pushed Lilian with the side of her slippered foot.

Gary rushed up to his wife and asked sharply, “Why don’t you help her?”

“I’m just tired of the little bastard.”

“What did you say?”

“I’m tired of her and you!”

He slapped her, then grabbed hold of her forearm and pulled her off the sofa. She yelped. He went on beating her. “Don’t ever abuse my children again!” he hissed and kicked her thigh and rear end. Her denim sundress was disheveled; her pink panties showed. Then he caught himself using “children,” the plural, and that brought back his presence of mind. He reached down, picked up their daughter, and carried her into his study. The girl kept gulping
down her tears. Gary looked at her shin, on which was a bruise the size of a nickel. She had just tripped over a kiddie chair.

From the living room came his wife’s wailing. “Goddamn you, Gary! I know you have lots of bastards elsewhere!”

It was out of the question that she could know about his first family, because he’d left their photo in his safety deposit box in the Hong Kong bank. Wait, had he let slip the truth in his sleep? Impossible—Nellie didn’t understand Chinese. But couldn’t he speak English about his twins? Damn, anything could happen in a dream. He pushed back those unanswerable questions, went into the kitchen, and opened the freezer for ice cubes. He wrapped them in a hand towel and pressed it on Lilian’s shin. As his anger subsided, he regretted having beaten Nellie. How could he have lost his head like that? How had he degenerated into a wife beater? A surge of shame sickened him, but he remained unapologetic.

That was the only time he beat his wife. In their twenty-five years of marriage they often quarreled, but he would just walk out if he couldn’t stand her fits of temper anymore. He would roam the neighborhood and the parks until he thought she’d cooled off. Yet neither his wife nor their daughter could forget that beating. Even long after he died, Nellie would remind Lilian of the humiliating episode, saying, “It was all thanks to you.” Lilian, then in her forties, would remain silent, knowing her mother might blow her top if she responded.

Ever since Lilian began teething, Nellie had been complaining about their apartment, calling it a “henhouse.” Their neighbor’s television was on most of the time, blasting music and commercials through the poorly insulated wall. The Jamesons, in the unit overhead, would squabble raucously even in the middle of the night, shouting out obscenities and threats. Even their kitchen knife would continue to chop chop chop above Nellie’s head every afternoon. She’d given up on the couple, who would never mend their ways however much she pleaded with them. She was sick of all the
scuffles and the noise, including that from the front street, where cars would whoosh by even in the early hours of the morning. Just a week ago an old Hungarian woman had broken her hip while descending the stairs, which were worn and slippery. There was also the recent four-dollar increase in the rent, eighty-one dollars a month now. It would surely go up again the next year.

Nellie wanted “a real home,” a house on a quiet street where their child could ride a tricycle without their needing to watch over her. Gary agreed to move, but he said they had to wait until they had saved enough for the down payment on a house. Nellie suggested selling their car, but he wouldn’t do that. They had a good part of the loan for the Buick yet to pay, and they needed that car. He didn’t trust Nellie’s opinions about financial matters and often said to her, “You’re so extravagant. I never thought you were such an expensive girl when we were dating.” Indeed, in spite of her modest origins, she wouldn’t hesitate to splurge on clothes, cosmetics, groceries, and toys for their daughter. To be fair, Nellie didn’t have fancy taste. When dining out, she didn’t mind having hamburgers or fish and fries. Even burritos would do. Her spendthrift ways might have been due to her years of waitressing in bars and restaurants, where she’d seen rich people throw cash around. To some extent, she was pleased that Gary took charge of their money, because he was frugal by American standards and also prudent about household expenditures. Sometimes she joked that she wished her father were a Chinese man. (Grandpa Matt would uncork a bottle of Jack Daniel’s or Johnnie Walker on any excuse, and money burned a hole in his pocket.)

Gary also had a good head for investment. Enlightened by a hurricane that had blacked out parts of the DC area for two days the summer before, he’d bought some electricity stocks, which had been rising in value ever since. Nellie was impressed that it was so easy for him to make money.

In truth, he took a casual approach to the investment, which eventually didn’t yield much. His mind was preoccupied with
other matters. Following the news in his homeland, he came to know that the previous year China had scored a bumper harvest. Then the collectives called “the commune” began to be formed in the countryside. He had misgivings about that, knowing the kolkhozy, the commune system in the Soviet Union, had turned out to be a nightmare. The collectivization in China went to such an extreme that even household kitchens were banned. The country folks began to have meals at communal dining centers, where free food was plentiful enough that everyone could eat their fill. People seemed too optimistic and giddy with fantastic visions, which promised to realize a Communist society soon, a utopian world where everyone would work diligently while taking whatever they needed free of charge. (“You can eat beef stewed with potatoes as much as you want,” according to Khrushchev’s depiction of Communism.) The Chinese government propagated this slogan nationwide: “Surpass the UK in ten years, catch up with the USA in fifteen.”

Gary had been to England and was very impressed by its order, efficiency, and affluence, though it was still recovering from the war. China’s official slogan appeared too simpleminded to him, based on the assumption that the United Kingdom and the United States would stop developing. Worse, the Chinese seemed unaware that the West’s development had relied on the elaborate building of infrastructure and resulted from centuries’ worth of accumulation of wealth and knowledge. Also, of course, from exploiting underdeveloped nations. Bo Yibo, the vice premier in charge of industry, even reported to Chairman Mao that China would surpass England in outputs of electricity and steel in 1959. Mao was so exhilarated that he declared, “We shall definitely get ahead of the Brits in three years, but for now we must keep this secret.” That sounded silly to Gary, because to maintain a bigger household you must pay bigger bills—the same went for countries.

Though beset by uncertainties and doubts, Gary was riveted by the tremendous changes in his homeland—evidently the nascent
socialist country was developing at a record pace. Growing up, he had seen how destitute the people were—many county seats would be teeming with beggars in the springtime, and some folks were so desperate that they sold their children and headed south to beg. By any criterion China was poor. More than half the population was illiterate, and everywhere the land was exhausted after sustaining the population for millennia. Granted, the socialist system might have unleashed the potential of the country, but most Chinese seemed unaware how shabby their land was compared to many other nations. At the same time, Gary could sense a kind of desperation in Mao, who’d just spoken about the necessity of reaching economic preeminence in the world, saying, “If you have no rice in your hand, even chickens won’t respond to your call.” The chairman’s analogy, devoid of his habitual pompous rhetoric, seemed to show his knowledge of their country’s plight; on the other hand, it also implied that Mao might aspire to become the leader of the Socialist Bloc, like the late Stalin. The chairman’s ego must be too inflated.