A Map of Betrayal (18 page)

My colleagues and I were worried about the students’ safety. The following day the security on campus was stepped up, but fortunately the college didn’t take measures to discipline the rabble-rousers—it would be too risky to ignite another outburst of anger right before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident.

June 4 saw plenty of police patrolling the campus, though the tense atmosphere was eased by the French Open in Paris, at which the Chinese tennis player Li Na was to play the final match with the Italian defending champion. Most students gathered in the dorms watching the game. When Li Na finally won the Grand Slam, they came out in force, lit chains of firecrackers, and played instruments and thumped drums and basins in celebration. No one ran amok, though. Some shouted “Li Na, offense!” as if she were still fighting on the tennis court. Some teachers joined the celebration as well, and the police didn’t interfere. The young people regarded Li Na as a hero, partly because she had quit the national tennis team long ago and won the championship on her own. What’s more, her victory made history—no Asian player had ever won the French Open.

In her acceptance speech Li Na didn’t thank China or any leaders. Instead she said, “My thanks to my sponsor, to the staff here, to the ball kids, and to my team.” She also took the opportunity to wish a friend a happy birthday. That was extraordinary to the Chinese and certainly grated on the bureaucracy. On another public occasion she had insisted, “Don’t talk about bringing honor to our country. I’m competing for myself.” She once cried into a mike held by a reporter, “I love you, Jiang Shan!” That was her husband, who couldn’t accompany her to the tournament. She also openly claimed she played tennis for money. Regardless, when the band started the Chinese anthem at the medal ceremony, she turned tearful and mouthed the words. To the students, Li Na embodied a rebellious, independent spirit. Hers was a new face of China, open and confident and smiling, so for the moment she became an icon, an inspiration to the young people.

At last I heard from my nephew, Benning. Evidently he and Juli had just exchanged emails, and he knew I was American and a history professor. He wrote his message in solid, effortless English, which struck me as extraordinary. Yet when I suggested meeting him in person, he became evasive, saying he was too far away
from Beijing at the moment. But where was he? I didn’t get a clear answer. The more he hedged, the more curious I got.

Then one day he confessed, “I am in the United States, on the East Coast.” That was a shock, and I wanted to know more. “Don’t interrogate me, please,” he wrote. “I am sure we will spend a lot of time together in the future.”

I wouldn’t let it go at that and kept asking him. He avoided answering fully but would reveal something from time to time. I tried to form a picture of him with the scraps of information I had. He’d been in the States for more than two years, running a small business outside Boston that dealt in software and computer parts. He’d been assigned there by a Chinese company and seemed to be enjoying himself. The reason he hadn’t told his family his whereabouts was that he felt he might be called back or sent elsewhere after his current assignment; also because he came back to China for business or vacation every two or three months. I said I’d love to see him remain in the States for many years, which he said was what he wanted too. I was excited that I would have a family member on my father’s side living near me after I went home. The world suddenly felt smaller and more mysterious. If only my father could have seen his grandson in America.

1961

The Shangs were living in a quiet cul-de-sac at the end of Riverview Street in Alexandria. Their home was a raised ranch with an attached carport; a huge rock sat beside the house, and holly hedges demarcated the property. A pomegranate tree, rare in Virginia but already more than ten years old, stood in a corner of the backyard, reminding Gary of the same kind of tree back in his home province. He had paid twenty-three thousand dollars for this place, a little higher than the market price, but he loved the tranquil location, the brick exterior of the house, the living room with oak-paneled walls, and the finished lower floor, where the windows were just above the ground and where he could have a room for a study, so without haggling he had clinched the purchase. Nellie also liked the home, particularly the bay window in the kitchen and the French doors between the living room and the dining room, which made the house feel more spacious than it was. She was fond of the peaceful neighborhood too and devoted herself to taking care of Lilian and to the housework. The girl was going to be four in July, and once she started preschool, Nellie would look for a job, doing something she liked. But what did she want to do? She wasn’t sure yet, though she thought about it now and then.

Gary would mow the half-acre lawn and trim the shrubs. All the work outside the house belonged to him, including digging out the weeds in grass—dandelions, creeping charlie, mallow, clover. He hated slugs and would get rid of every one he saw. He was good with his hands and maintained their car and household appliances. Sometimes when he was free, he’d take a walk in the nearby park, where the air would quiver with scattered birdsong. He’d bring along his daughter if the weather permitted, either holding her in his arms or leading her by the hand, and once in a while he
would carry her piggyback. He’d teach her some Mandarin words or phrases. To some extent he was a good family man, gentle to his family and polite to their neighbors, who were all impressed by the chrysanthemums he had planted around his house. Yet he was detached from what was going on around him and wouldn’t mix with others, except for the fact that he followed the NBA on his own and could talk with his colleagues about the games. Try as he might, he couldn’t get excited about baseball; the game was too slow for him. Fortunately, his wife never complained about their lack of social life. Rarely would the Shangs invite people over. Not until their daughter was old enough to make school friends and to hold a pajama party once a year, around Halloween, did they begin to have a few visitors.

Although Gary was calm in appearance, 1961 was a tumultuous year for him. In the spring he was naturalized. At the citizenship ceremony he pledged allegiance to the Star-Spangled Banner and swore he’d bear arms to defend the U.S. Constitution, a document he had read with great admiration for its careful attention to the citizens’ rights defined and protected by the amendments. It was like a contract between the country and the people. He went through the whole ceremony with a numb heart, though he was deeply impressed by its solemnity and forced a smile when he showed a woman official his expired Chinese passport. With a pair of scissors she cut a corner off its front cover, handed it back to him, and congratulated him on his brand-new citizenship. By now Gary could honestly say he loved some aspects of American life—the orderliness, the plentitude, the privacy, the continuity of daily life, the freedom of travel (domestically with a car and internationally with a U.S. passport or green card). Nevertheless, his mind couldn’t help but wander to the distant land where his other family was. He had decided not to have more children with Nellie, not wanting further complications. For him, happiness lay elsewhere, and he could visualize it only in his homeland and in the reunion with his original family.

With his U.S. citizenship in hand, he had to pass a lie-detector test in order to become a regular CIA employee. He read about how the polygraph worked and knew that as long as he wasn’t disturbed by any question and didn’t make the needle jump, he should be able to fool the machine. To keep himself calm, he began to put into his teacups two herbs—schisandra fruit and tuckahoe, both of which he’d bought in San Francisco years before. For days the herbal tea made him slightly sedated, and a week later he passed the test without difficulty. Now he had access to documents classified as Top Secret, some of which were sent to him for translation directly from George Thomas, who had earned his PhD the year before and was now addressed as Dr. Thomas by his colleagues. He and Gary, though, were still on a first-name basis. They continued to frequent jazz bars together. Most times Thomas would talk while Gary just listened. Afterward he would recall their conversations, write down snippets of intelligence, and squirrel them away.

Now able to read more reports on the Far East, Gary could see that China was in shambles. The Great Leap Forward had been a catastrophe, and the whole land had been ravaged by a continuous famine. The collectivization in the countryside ruined the agriculture. People wouldn’t work hard anymore because they were no longer paid and could eat for free. During the previous fall a lot of crops were left in the fields, to be eaten by birds and animals or just to rot. Even fruit was not picked in some orchards. When people had consumed all the food before the winter set in, they began to eat the seeds. As a result, many fields couldn’t be sown in the spring. This reduced grain production drastically. Now in both cities and the countryside people were starving and dying. Many secretly left their villages for provinces where the famine was less severe.

Bad news came from all over China, but Gary focused his attention on his home province, Shandong, because he wasn’t sure whether some of the information had been doctored by Taiwan’s intelligence service to influence the White House and the Pentagon.
(They were always eager to present a chaotic China to the Americans.) By following the events in a place he knew, he might be more capable of assessing the severity of the situation. Yet he could find little news about his hometown, though he gathered quite a bit of information on some nearby counties. Most country folks there suffered from dropsy, with swelled bellies and their legs puffed out like small barrels. Many women had prolapsed uteruses; even those in their twenties and thirties underwent menopause. An official in charge of birth control admitted that she no longer needed to hand out contraceptives because people were too feeble to conceive. The government tried to help some, issuing six ounces of grain per day for a grown-up and four for a child. But the emergency rations were distributed through echelons of cadres, many of whom would embezzle some for themselves and their families. As a result, country folks received hardly any food. According to one account, in the Huimin area, the prefecture where Gary’s home county was located, tens of thousands had died of hunger and some villages were deserted.

For a whole summer he followed the reports anxiously, still a tad incredulous. How could it be possible for the China that used to be poised to surpass the United Kingdom to collapse into such havoc in the blink of an eye? When dining at Chinese restaurants, he would prick his ears to catch bits of conversation and would talk with others about the situation back home. One day, he saw Suzie Chao, a Mandarin broadcaster at Voice of America, sitting alone in Bamboo Garden, an eatery that had only six tables and offered a lunch special for seventy-five cents. He asked her, “Can I join you?”

“Of course, welcome,” she said pleasantly, her almond-shaped eyes smiling as she waved her slim hand.

He placed his bowl of noodles on the table and sat down opposite her. She looked worried in spite of her bright face. She had a vibrant voice, which had struck Gary as tinged with yearning whenever he heard her on the air, as though she were speaking to
somebody she knew well but couldn’t reach. They talked about the famine back in China. She was also anxious to learn more about it. Gary told her about the reduction of population in Shandong but added, “A lot of folks fled their homes or just disappeared, so the figures we got might have been exaggerated. Still, it looks awful.”

She sighed and flipped back her hair to keep her pageboy in shape. “I’ve just heard that my uncle’s family lost their home. The villagers went to tear down his house and used the bricks and timber to build a pig farm.”

“Why would they do that?” Gary asked, thinking it might have been because of her relatives’ connection with her family, who had fled to Taiwan.

“All the houses belong to the commune now. This makes me sick.” She sniveled, on the brink of tears.

“But can they still raise pigs—I mean, do they have something to feed to the pigs?”

“Actually, the pigs are all gone. Either died of disease or were slaughtered for food. People were too desperate to think about their future livelihood. They even ate grass and elm bark. A lot of them starved to death. I heard there was cannibalism in my home county.”

That came as a surprise. Suzie was from Jiangsu, a province known for its fertile paddies and abundant water supply, generally called “a land of fish and rice.” If the famine had wreaked havoc in a place like that, then the whole of China must have become hell.

After that lunch, Gary and Suzie often met at noon or talked on the phone. Initially he was cautious when speaking with her and suspected she might have a complicated background, with her family both in Taiwan and on the mainland. She was poised and somewhat pretty and had a fine figure and a distinct voice. As they got to know each other better, he was surprised to find her single. Unlike most young women, she was not in a hurry to look for a man, though she was already thirty-one. She even claimed she could never make a good wife (“Domesticity is not my strong
point,” she confessed), so it would be better for her to remain single. She’d once had a boyfriend in Kao-hsiung, a journalist who’d died in a ferry accident seven years before. That man was an overseas Chinese from Indonesia but had lived in Taiwan most of his life. These days whenever Suzie heard something about the famine on the mainland, she would share it with Gary, who was good at analyzing the information and could see numerous implications. She was impressed and said, “If I had your brain, I’d go to law school or do a PhD in the history of science.”

The more time they spent together, the more intimate their conversations became. One day over dinner Suzie revealed to Gary that a few years ago she had dated an American man, an audio engineer at the Capitol, but they broke up because he looked down on things Chinese. She told Gary, “In the beginning Michael was all right, but he got spoiled. I was too easy on him, I guess. One evening I made rice crust soup and he said under his breath, ‘It’s impossible to eat Chinese shit every day.’ I heard him and shot back, ‘If you sleep with a Chinese woman, you ought to eat Chinese food.’ We had a row, and I just couldn’t stomach it anymore, so we split. Afterward I gave up dating altogether.”