A Map of Betrayal (11 page)

Since the early summer of 1955, he had noticed a spate of documents from Taipei that touched upon the role of General Sun Lijen, who had been the commander of the Nationalist land force in Taiwan. Gary was fascinated by this man partly because Sun and he were fellow alumni, both having attended Tsinghua University, though the general had been many years ahead of Gary. At college Sun had played basketball and even joined China’s national team briefly. Then he went to Purdue on a scholarship, majoring in civil engineering. After earning his BS, he worked in a New York architecture firm for a short while. Later he enrolled at Virginia Military Institute (class of 1927) and studied military science for two years. He then returned to China and served in the Nationalist army, in which he rose rapidly through the ranks.

He fought numerous victorious battles against the Japanese and the Communists. Among Chiang Kai-shek’s generals, Sun was the most capable, feared by the Red Army and dubbed the Eastern Rommel by Joseph Stilwell, the U.S. commander of the China-Burma-India Theater during the Second World War. But Sun was isolated in the Nationalist army, whose generals were mostly graduates of the Huangpu Military Academy, which Chiang Kai-shek had once headed. Owing to Sun’s American background, Chiang had never trusted him and, in the summer of 1954, removed him from the command of the army and appointed him a staff general in the president’s cabinet without any commanding power.

Through translating some reports and conversations, Gary suspected that Chiang Kai-shek might have begun purging Sun Lijen, who was suspected of attempting a coup to seize presidential power and to set himself up as a U.S. puppet. Groundless though the accusation might be, Sun was fired in August 1955 and soon placed under house arrest. Gary could see that the CIA might actually
have engineered the alleged conspiracy, though he wasn’t sure how deeply Sun had been implicated. His instinct told him that Sun’s career might be over. If so, Chiang’s army would be weakened considerably, if not in disarray. He checked out the documents concerning General Sun’s situation, telling the clerk in charge of classified materials that he had to translate parts of them at home. That was common among the translators when they had to work late into the night. Gary took photos of many pages about Sun’s case, believing these were significant intelligence.

In mid-October he took a two-week leave and went to Hong Kong. He met Bingwen and handed him the films. His handler was thrilled, since the mainland was still dead set on liberating Taiwan, and the loss of Chiang’s top general might open a window of opportunity. Gary also reported on his relationship with Nellie and asked for instructions from their superiors.

Two days later he and Bingwen met again at a teahouse. His handler told him, “As for this woman, do whatever is necessary. You must live in America as long as you can.”

“You mean I should marry her?” Gary asked.

“Yes, that will make your life easier. We all understand the situation. Besides, that’ll make you appear more normal among the Americans.”

“How about my wife and parents back in Shandong?” Gary muttered, his heart gripped by a numbing pang, even though in recent months he had managed to suppress most of his memories of Yufeng.

“Our country will take care of them. You can set your mind at rest.”

So Gary spent ninety-four dollars for an engagement ring with a tiny pear-shaped sapphire. He flew back to the States three days later. He had no idea that he already had two children. His superiors must have instructed Bingwen to withhold the information so that Gary could settle down more quickly in America.

My sister, Manrong, insisted that I stay with her family, so I checked out of the inn late in the afternoon and left with my niece Juya for her mother’s house. Juya, a strapping woman with an ample chest and wearing a purple kerchief on her head, was carrying my stuffed suitcase with as much ease as if it were empty. On the way, whenever we ran into acquaintances of hers, she’d tell them I was her aunt, and I just nodded at them without speaking.

Manrong’s husband, Fanbin Liang, greeted me warmly and shook hands with me. His palm felt thick and meaty. He had been a low-level official in the county administration and had just retired. In China the retirement age for men is sixty and for women fifty-five. I often half-joked with my colleagues in Beijing that I wished I were a Chinese woman so I could retire at fifty-five, which meant I’d have only one year left. By and large, China was still a good place for older people—in some areas life could be slow and easy. At age sixty-one, Fanbin didn’t look that old, though his eyes were pouched and his mustache and temples grizzled. He kept saying to me, “What a happy day this is for our family.” Indeed they were all in festive spirits. Manrong had called over her son-in-law and granddaughter, a small girl who was a bit rambunctious, wearing a tiny pigtail on either side of her head. The six-year-old gaped at me and brought out, “You don’t look like American.”

“Shush, Little Swallow!” Manrong scolded the girl, then turned to me. “She hasn’t started school yet but is already a big mouth.”

“I just told her what I think, Nana,” Little Swallow cried back.

That made the grown-ups all laugh. I touched the girl’s apple face and patted her hair. In response she placed both palms on the back of my hand. This indeed felt like a family reunion, as if every
one of them had known me for ages. I was moved—rarely had I been among so many relatives. My mother had an older sister who had a son my age, but I’d met him only twice in my whole life.

Manrong’s home was clean and spacious, the floors made of fine bricks sealed with cement. A large flat-screen TV stood against the back wall in the sitting room, a stainless-steel floor lamp inclined its gooseneck from a corner, and framed family photos were propped up on a long oak chest against another wall. “This is my mother,” Manrong told me, pointing at a black-and-white picture. I leaned over to see Yufeng in her mid-forties: a smooth egg-shaped face, narrow cheekbones, a straight nose, bright but pensive eyes, a mole above the left corner of her mouth, and graying bangs covering a part of her forehead. She looked healthy and somewhat citified, like a nurse or schoolteacher. She must have been very capable both inside and outside the household. Next to this photo stood another one, a wedding portrait, in which she and my father, shoulder touching shoulder, were smiling blissfully. They were a handsome couple, lean-faced and rather elegant, a veil over the bride’s head while the groom’s hair was pomaded shiny and parted on the side. In his breast pocket was stuck a fountain pen. Above their heads, toward the right-hand corner, was a sloping line of characters:
FOR WEIMIN AND YUFENG
’
S HAPPY UNION, JANUARY 16, 1949.

“Your mother was very pretty,” I said to Manrong.

“Yes, she was voted the number one beauty back in our home village in Shandong.”

“Voted by whom?”

“By some men in the village, secretly.”

“No wonder it was so hard for her to live there.” I remembered the proverb and quoted, “ ‘Gossips always cluster around a widow’s house.’ I mean, without her husband around she must have lived like a widow.”

“You really understand the Chinese, Lilian.”

“Our father always demanded that I learn Mandarin. One of my fields is Chinese history.”

I saw a bottled watercooler stand in a corner, similar to the one in Henry’s superintendent’s office in our apartment building back in Maryland. Fushan County is right on the Songhua River, whose water must have been quite polluted. The bottled drinking water also indicated that Manrong’s family was doing well, though I noticed she used tap water for cooking. In the back of the house was a low-ceilinged office, where I saw a computer, a scanner, a fax machine, and a laser printer. I was impressed that even in such a backwoods town the family was savvy about electronics. Juya said that she went on Weibo, the Chinese microblogging site, every night. She had online pals in other provinces, even one in Mongolia. I told her I didn’t blog. That was a surprise to her, because she thought that most Americans were bloggers.

“Why don’t you blog, Aunt?” Juya asked me in her throaty voice.

“It’s too time-consuming. I prefer to spend my idle hours reading books. That’s part of my job besides.”

“It’s really wild out there. You can make all kinds of friends through blogging. Also, it’s fun and helps me follow what’s going on in the world.”

“I have many students already. I might lose my mind if I have to deal with more people.”

She gave a chesty laugh. I admired her carefree manner that showed she was pretty content and got on well with her parents. My sister was lucky to have a daughter like Juya, not to mention her granddaughter, Little Swallow. I had always regretted not having children. My first husband disliked kids, and my second marriage took place too late, when I was already forty-eight.

At dinner I learned that besides Juya, Manrong and Fanbin had two more children, Juli and Benning, twins in their mid-twenties who were both working in the south. (My sister and her husband
had been fortunate: their firstborn was a girl, and at the time the one-child policy wasn’t strictly implemented in the region, so they were allowed to have another child, but the second-born turned out to be twins.) How the family all wished those two could join us. We were seated at a lower dining table on the long brick bed, heated from underneath, which was very warm due to the cooking of the big dinner—the heat and smoke from the kitchen range went through under the bed before reaching the chimney flue. I couldn’t sit cross-legged like they did, so I bent one leg and let the other one hang over the edge of the bed. I apologized for my bad manners, but Manrong said, “Just make yourself comfortable. You’re at home now.”

They kept putting food into my bowl: a chunk of fried catfish, or a piece of chicken, or a spoonful of sautéed mung bean sprouts mixed with baby shrimp and wood ears. I liked the food but couldn’t eat much. They all had better appetites. I wished I could eat heartily without being concerned about my weight. Even though I wasn’t on the heavy side, I was always wary about overeating. In my mind’s ear would ring my mother’s voice, “Lilian, don’t stuff your face.”

That night Manrong chased her husband to another bedroom, saying she wanted me to stay with her so we could talk about our father and also “girl to girl.” In fact, we had hardly mentioned him during the day. I would not confide to my sister that he’d been a Chinese spy caught by the FBI, or that he’d been a lousy husband. I told her instead, “He missed your mother a lot but couldn’t come back.”

“We all knew he was on an important mission overseas,” Manrong said. “Did he know about my brother and me?”

“Yes, in the late fifties his higher-ups informed him about the two of you. When he died, he assumed our brother was still alive. He often mentioned your mother in his diary.”

“My mom had a hard life.” She paused, as though expecting my response, but I didn’t know what to say. We were lying on the
brick bed in the dark, two feet apart. The room was so quiet that there was only the tick-tock of the wall clock.

Manrong continued, “Mom often said my dad was a distinguished man with a degree from Tsinghua University. That was really something. I don’t know who else in our home county went to Tsinghua. On her deathbed my mother said to me, ‘When you see your dad someday, tell him I was a good daughter-in-law to his parents and a good wife to him.’ Well, I wish I could’ve let him know that.”

“I went to Maijia Village in Linmin last month,” I said. “I was told that you and your mother had left because our brother died.”

“He was born runty, not like me, although we were twins. In the fifties we lived decently on the money from the government. But when the famine struck, we became worse off than the villagers, because we couldn’t grow crops and money became worthless, like straw paper. Our brother and I were eleven that year, both skinny like bags of bones, hungry all the time. It was reported that lots of people had died of hunger, so Mom was terrified. Then our brother died and my mother almost lost her mind with grief. When Uncle Mansheng asked us to join his family here, we left Maijia right away.”

“It was a smart move,” I said. “More than two hundred villagers starved to death in the following years.”

“As a matter of fact, later Mom told me there was another reason we’d moved.”

“What’s that?”

“There was a man in the village, Uncle Weifu, who was from our Shang clan, a distant cousin of our father’s. I remember him, a quiet, humble man. He was a bachelor and very kind to us. He often came to help Mom with household work, like thatching the roof, digging ditches to drain rainwater out of our yard, killing a hog for the Spring Festival. He was a handsome man, tall and muscular, with a straight back and sparkling eyes. His family was so poor he couldn’t find a girl willing to marry him. The village
was whispering about him and Mom. The two were fond of each other for sure. Mom later told me that Uncle Weifu had asked her to marry him, but she’d never do that because she was still married to our dad. She said to him, ‘What if my husband comes back one day?’ In spite of everything, she couldn’t help but develop a soft spot in her heart for Uncle Weifu and would get heady with joy whenever he was around. She confessed to me that if we hadn’t moved away, soon enough she might not have been able to restrain herself. She dreaded a scandal.”