Nine Days (18 page)

“I can be there in an hour,” he said.
“Do not move.”
And then: “I mean it this time.”

This time we did too. We finished our breakfast and ordered cups of tea, and sat, and talked a little, and sat some more.

“So how bad was it when you called your parents?” Ti-Anna asked.

I told her that I had not, technically speaking, called my parents.

She gave me a look, but then stared into her cup.

“I guess I’m in no position to lecture about being honest with the people you love,” she said.

I let that wash over me.

Then I asked, “Were you trying to throw me off when you asked Wei about crossing by land?”

Ti-Anna shook her head. “I was just trying to make sure there
wasn’t a smarter way in,” she said. “And save you some money. But it seemed way too complicated.”

I nodded. “Once I thought about it, I knew you’d fly. And I figured you’d prefer the sound of ‘Dragon Air’ to ‘East China Air Lines.’ ”

“It did seem like a good omen that Dragon Air had the first flight out,” she said.

Ti-Anna found a piece of paper and worked on a note to Wei. An hour after I’d called, Brian showed up.

He sat down at our table and asked where we’d been all night, but when I said it might make his life simpler if he didn’t know, he agreed to go along with that. He took Ti-Anna’s passport and my boarding pass and disappeared for a while, and when he returned he had a boarding pass for her and checked-luggage tags for each of us. My brother would get his backpack after all.

“I’m very sorry for the trouble I caused you,” Ti-Anna said.

He waved her apology away with his big hand.

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “everyone in the consulate admires the heck out of what you both did down there. But we were worried sick, as you can imagine.”

“The heck”? I thought. You can do better than that, I happen to know.

“Actually, I have one more favor to ask.” Ti-Anna handed him Wei’s ID, with her note, and Brian promised to deliver them. When we started to say our good-byes, he interrupted us.

“I’m instructed to stick around until you are actually on the plane,” he said. “Probably until you’re in international air space, in fact.” Then he added hastily: “Not that I don’t trust you, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “The noodles here aren’t bad.”

Brian ordered a large bowl, pulled up a chair and entertained us with tales from Mongolia, where he’d been posted before coming
to Hong Kong. As we boarded, he shook our hands and assured us there were no hard feelings.

“One piece of advice, though,” he said. “I’m only a grunt in the consulate, but I do hear things. And what I hear is, the Chinese aren’t happy with you two. You might want to assume that you’ve got company on every phone call, and an extra reader on any email you send. They know how to do it.”

That gave us something to think about on the long flight home.

The flight home was our last chance to be together without parents and rules and other interference.

We were exhausted, though, and I don’t think either of us was picturing what lay ahead.

I had just spent the most intense nine days with Ti-Anna that I’d ever spent with anyone. I’d also just spent the most intense twelve hours apart from Ti-Anna that I’d ever spent apart from anyone. It felt as though it would take both of us a while to work our way back from that.

We slept a lot, and not always at the same time. She started watching a movie in Chinese but fell asleep about five minutes in. I slipped off her earphones and tucked a blanket around her.

That was when the Chinese student came by.

The attendants had taken away the dinner trays and turned down the lights so people could sleep. The woman next to me got up to use the bathroom—Ti-Anna and I were in the middle two seats of a four-seat row—and a young man slipped into the empty seat, like he’d been waiting for a chance.

“I saw you on TV,” he whispered. “You and your friend.”

“Oh?” I said warily.

“I just want you to know,” he whispered. “Not all Chinese people agree with what our government is doing.”

“You’re from China?”

“Shanghai,” he said. “On my way to university in America.”

“Oh?” I asked again, a little less warily. “Which one?”

The seat’s rightful occupant returned.

“Doesn’t matter,” the student said. “Just tell her”—he pointed to Ti-Anna, a lump under her thin airline blanket—“some of us think her father is right. And brave.” And he went back to his seat.

At Dulles, as the plane taxied to the gate, Ti-Anna took my hand one more time, and we sat quietly for one more minute.

We were back in America.

Passport control, luggage, customs, it all went smoothly. We walked through the automatic doors into a crowd that almost made me nostalgic for Hanoi. Families were yelling for their Hong Kong relatives, professional drivers waved cards with the names of business-people they were supposed to meet, porters with luggage carts tried to drum up business.

At first I didn’t see anyone I knew.

Then I saw him leaning in a relaxed way against a pillar across the concourse: blue suit, tight haircut. I recalled Brian’s warning.

I poked Ti-Anna.

“Look who came to meet us,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. Then we both saw something else, a frantic movement at the far edge of the crowd.

I have to admit, my first thought was, I wonder whose busy schedule made my parents late this time, Mom’s or Dad’s?

In my defense, my next thought was only a millisecond away: you’ve got a lot of gall even
thinking
about complaining about your parents—about anything, anywhere, ever again.

Then I didn’t have any thoughts at all, just relief and love and gratitude gushing through me. There was my mom in front, looking totally mom-ish as she firmly but politely pushed her way toward us. And—I had to do a double-take, or maybe it was a triple—there was Ti-Anna’s mom, holding hands with mine. My dad and brother and sister were right behind.

Don’t get the wrong idea: My parents were furious. Steaming, even. Incensed. Enraged. Not One Bit Amused. In fact, it would take me days to find out how angry they really were.

But they were also totally happy, and the happy part came before the mad part. I thought they might never let me go, and that felt great, but when we did finally stop hugging, I saw that Ti-Anna’s mother still had her arms around Ti-Anna, eyes closed, head on her chest. If my mother hadn’t gently patted her shoulder, the two of them might still be in the terminal.

Even though my parents had never met Ti-Anna, they hugged her, too, and so did my sister. Her mother shook my hand in a friendly way and said something in Chinese, as if a few days in Hong Kong ought to have been plenty for me to master the language. My brother pretended to inspect his backpack with an eye toward charging me for any damage, and we moved in one tight, noisy pack toward our van.

It felt good to be home.

As far as my summer went, things pretty much went downhill from there.

I had to hand over the credit card, and my phone, which hurt worse. I didn’t argue. My mother had some choice words as she showed me how much we’d spent.

I found a job. It’s in an ice cream place in Bethesda. It’s not bad, really. I started work on my third day back. The other kids working there are nice. At the rate I’m earning, I figure I’ll be able to pay back what I owe in, oh, twenty-seven years.

As I say, that was the third day. On my second day back, we had to visit the police.

My parents had turned out not to be quite as clueless as I had counted on. Days before they got my email from Hanoi, they had figured out that I wasn’t visiting James. They’d been frantic. They’d come back from Geneva early and reported me as missing to the police.

The bank had called my mother to ask if she was in Hong Kong, because if she wasn’t she might want to know that someone was using her card to withdraw money from an ATM there. She informed the police, and had to tell them that if I was the one withdrawing Hong
Kong dollars, I hadn’t exactly stolen her card, but I didn’t exactly have permission to be flying around Asia with it either.

My parents didn’t want to press charges against me for theft, or anything else for that matter. But once you report a problem to the police, it’s not so easy to unreport it.

The police officer did a good job of scaring me out of my socks. I can’t remember all the crimes he threw around, but unauthorized use of a credit card was one. Forgery was another. Some fancy terms for running away from home. A federal charge involving misuse of a passport. As he worked his way down the list, I started wondering who was going to be in prison longer, me or Ti-Anna’s dad.

After convincing me that they were determined to send me to reform school, he sent me to talk to a juvenile court judge instead, not in a trial but in her office, in a kind of preliminary meeting.

She was scary too, in her way, but also interested in our story. She told me that, sadly and surprisingly, she comes across girls right here outside Washington, D.C., who have been sold into prostitution, not that different from the ones we saved from the truck. She hinted that if I kept paying my parents back, and did community service, and showed in my account of this whole thing that I’d learned a lesson, then maybe she’d let me stay with my family after all.

When I haven’t been hand-packing pints of butter pecan, I’ve been writing this account, as she asked me to do. And I have given a lot of thought to her question about what lessons I learned.

I learned the best place to get dim sum in Hong Kong and pho bo in Hanoi, but I know that’s not what she has in mind. I learned that when you use crutches, you should put as much weight as you can on your forearms. Otherwise your armpits will pay the price. But I don’t think that’s it, either.

I learned that once you start crossing a street in Hanoi, you
shouldn’t hesitate and you shouldn’t turn back. Maybe I can convince her there’s a life lesson in there somewhere.

I learned that there are people in the world you can trust, and people you can’t trust, and it’s not always easy to tell one from the other. Still, you can’t let your fear of the second type keep you from taking chances, because the first type is a lot more common.

I’m afraid what I learned most of all sounds so obvious that the judge may wonder why I had to go halfway around the world to figure it out. That is, that not much in life is more important than friends.

Which brings me, one more time, to Ti-Anna.

Since we’ve been back, we haven’t been able to spend much time together. Her mother still doesn’t think it’s proper for her to come to my house or me to go to hers. When I’m not at work, I’ve been writing this essay. And with this stupid cast, I can’t just bike over there when I have a few free minutes.

Still, we’ve talked.

When we got home we discovered that our press conference had made a bigger splash than we could have imagined, both because of the slave-trading ring we’d exposed and because of what we’d discovered about Ti-Anna’s father. U.S. government officials had believed our story: you couldn’t argue with the photos. People were shocked, or said they were, at how the Chinese had lured and kidnapped him.

The Vietnamese foreign ministry had demanded an explanation from China, and the American State Department had too, since Ti-Anna’s dad is a legal U.S. resident. All the human rights groups had condemned what China had done.

The amazing part, according to Ti-Anna’s father’s friend at the
State Department, was that with so much coverage of the whole thing the Chinese government had felt compelled to respond. They put out a statement claiming that her dad was being held for illegally crossing the border from Vietnam into China.

“But that’s ridiculous!” I sputtered into the phone when she was telling me all this.

“Of course,” she said. “But still it’s good news. First of all, they admitted that they’re holding him. Now they won’t let something terrible happen to him, or they’ll get blamed.

“They haven’t charged him with anything serious, like espionage or undermining the state,” she continued. “If they leave it at crossing the border, they could let him go with a fine and not lose too much face. At least that’s what our friend says.”

“Let’s hope so, for
their
sake,” I said.

I could almost see Ti-Anna smiling on the other end of the phone. “Our next mission may be a little tougher without your mom’s credit card,” she said.

Some reporters called, but her mother and my parents agreed it would be better for us not to talk to them, and we were fine with that. Eventually our local weekly did a story about us, using a photo from the Hanoi press conference.

We each friended Wei right away. Getting her ID back a few hours late had been no big deal, she assured us. She had a great time in Hainan! She misses us!

We miss her too.

Ti-Anna promised to pay back half of what we’d spent, but so far her mother hasn’t let her take a job. She’s been busy helping her mom, as she told me when we finally got together this morning.

It’s been one of those hot, still, late-July days, when you think a thunderstorm might be coming but you’re not sure. I wasn’t on the ice cream store schedule, and I wanted to uncramp my fingers and celebrate having almost finished this essay.

We met at the bike trail and walked together for a while. Ti-Anna didn’t mind ambling at my broken-legged pace. When I told her I could use a rest, she was fine with that, too. We found a bench in the shade.

Ti-Anna was looking even prettier than usual. I thought it was because she seemed so happy and relaxed, and I told her so—not that she looked beautiful, of course, but that she seemed to be in good spirits.

She nodded.

“The best thing is how my mom seems to have bounced back,” she told me. “She’s applying for permission to visit my father, she’s trying to hire a lawyer for him, she’s talking to people about a petition campaign to free him.”