A Map of Betrayal (23 page)

She also revealed that the National Security people had questioned her parents about my visit to them. Her father urged her to be more cautious when communicating with me. “Lilian is American and might have another pot to boil,” he said to her on the phone. Father and daughter had a heated exchange—she was arguing that I was innocuous, while he insisted that she mustn’t tell me too much about China. He got impatient but conceded, “I won’t say Lilian is bad. I like her and believe she’s a good person, harmless. Just be careful and keep in mind that there’re other eyes to read what you write to her and other ears to catch what you say.”

I told Juli: “I don’t blame your dad. His concern is entirely justified. Do take precautions.”

But from then on I felt too self-conscious to speak freely when I emailed or phoned Juli. I was uncertain about to what extent the National Security people monitored our communications. I just told her to let her parents know I’d keep an eye on her brother and give him a hand whenever he needed it.

MY HUSBAND WAS FASCINATED
by my nephew, so I invited Ben to visit us. There was another reason for my invitation—I needed his advice about how I could communicate with his family in China without compromising them. I didn’t want to ask him on the phone; his line might have been tapped by the FBI. Even his cell phone might not be safe. I suspected he was an agent of some kind, but perhaps involved only in some borderline espionage activities—at most a small-time spy.

I invited Ben to join us for Independence Day, but his girlfriend Sonya’s parents would be in Boston for a short visit that week. He arrived on July 8 instead, and we went to pick him up at the train station, driving my two-year-old Toyota Prius. This was his first trip to DC, and at the sight of me and Henry, Ben waved spiritedly. He hurried over, beaming, with a blue suitcase in tow.
He hugged me, then my husband. The two of them had spoken on the phone.

Stepping out of the station, Henry asked him about the train ride, and Ben said, “Everything was splendid except for Baltimore.”

That made us laugh. On our drive home, Ben was impressed by how quietly and smoothly my Prius was running. He said that his Mustang, with 230,000 miles on it, was noisy and jerky whenever he accelerated, but he’d just found a used engine and would have his old one replaced soon. He’d never trade his Mustang for another car unless it was a Chinese model. Too bad China hadn’t produced safe, quality cars yet.

“How about a new Volvo?” I asked. “A Chinese company acquired Volvo from Ford last year.”

“Hope they won’t bungle the product,” Ben said. “But a Volvo is not for a bachelor like me. It’s more like a family car, isn’t it?”

“Why d’you say that?” Henry asked him.

“If I had kids I might consider a Volvo.”

“It’s expensive,” I put in.

“Sure, assuming I can afford it,” said Ben.

We ate at home that evening, mixed greens salad and boiled dumplings stuffed with shrimp, pork, and chives, which I’d bought ready-made at Maxim Super Market in Silver Spring. Ben liked red wine, so we uncorked a bottle of Merlot. As we were eating, all using chopsticks and mashed-garlic sauce mixed with balsamic vinegar, Henry asked Ben, “Don’t you miss home?”

“Sometimes I do,” Ben said, smiling with his top lip curled a little, as if the food were too hot. “But New England is quite similar to northeast China in climate and landscape. It could have been worse if they had sent me to Miami or Houston. I’m a northerner and not used to the hot humid weather. I lived in Alabama for half a year, and my first American summer down there was pretty miserable.”

“So you feel at home in Boston?” Henry pointed his chopsticks at his own plate as he spoke.

“Not really. I must learn to be detached, because at any moment my company might call me back or transfer me elsewhere.”

“If you had your druthers,” I said, “would you like to settle down in the States?”

“Absolutely, I like America. Life’s good here.”

“What d’you like most about American life?” asked Henry.

“Believe it or not, I like the order and peace you can have as long as you’re law-abiding.”

“And can pay your bills,” I said.

“Of course. For that matter, I’ve found Americans work too hard, harder than the Chinese, perhaps because there’re too many bills to pay here. I have friends who are doing two or three jobs at the same time. That’s crazy. They all believe that only by working hard can they get rich. I don’t see how they can get out of money troubles by making ten or eleven dollars an hour. On the other hand, this shows another positive aspect of American life—hard work is always rewarded more or less.”

Henry and I chuckled, amused and impressed by his remarks. After dinner, we retired to the living room and resumed our conversation. Both Ben and Henry loved hockey, so, teacups in hand, they turned to watch a rerun of the final match between the Canucks and the Bruins, while I retreated to my study in the basement to revise a paper on the depiction of Asians in Hollywood Cold War movies. There was a hard deadline for the submission, so I’d have to complete the piece within three days.

BEN TOLD ME
I ought to avoid talking about politics when I phoned Juli, because her line was definitely tapped by Chinese National Security. In addition, I should be careful about what I wrote to her. The Internet police there monitored the online traffic and could break into your email to gather evidence against you. Recently they had banned a good number of bloggers and shut down their accounts because those users had grown too outspoken,
their voices gaining too many readers. Whoever could hold the attention of the multitude might be suppressed sooner or later. Ben was worried about his twin sister, who could easily get carried away.

After breakfast the next morning Henry and I gave Ben a brief tour of our property. We took him through the three floors of the building and then to the grounds behind it. On the boughs of a sycamore hung two transparent bird feeders filled with mixed grains and sunflower seeds. We stopped to watch some goldfinches, red crossbills, and robins eating the feed. A handful of birds, already done with breakfast, were chattering while bathing and grooming at a granite birdbath next to a kidney-shaped flower bed, but most of the other birds stood quietly on the maples and hornbeams nearby, waiting for the two at the feeders to finish and fly away—then another two would go over to the plastic tubes and eat. They’d mostly been standing in line patiently, though a few scudded from branch to branch.

“Gosh, they’re more polite than the subway riders in Beijing,” Ben quipped. A red-breasted robin fluttered its wings as if in response.

Henry laughed. “They know each other.”

I joined in, “They’re not as tough as birds in China for sure, poor competitors.”

This time it was Ben who broke into laughter. He said, “They’re blessed without the need to compete.”

On the eastern side of the backyard spread a tennis court surrounded by a high chain-link fence; a few balls dotted the green court, some tattered and mildewed like overripe fruit. “Wow, you two are real landlords,” Ben blurted out at the sight of the court.

For a moment I was at a loss for words. Then I said, “Henry keeps everything in order. We take care of the property by ourselves.”

“You know I’m pretty good with my hands too,” Ben said and then turned to Henry. “If someday you want to retire, please hire
me. I can do carpentry and plumbing. Last fall I helped my friend Deon fix his roof.”

“Can you really do those things?” I asked.

“Sure I can. I can do basic masonry too. You saw the floors in my parents’ home, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“I laid the bricks in all the rooms.”

“That’s impressive. Tell me, why didn’t you use grout instead of cement to seal the bricks?”

“That was too expensive.”

No doubt Ben was a handyman of sorts, but I wasn’t sure he knew how to do all the maintenance jobs here. It wouldn’t matter—he always could learn.

After rush hour, Henry took Ben into DC to visit some museums, while I returned to my study to finish the paper on Cold War movies. These days I had also been perusing my father’s diary, on which I’d spent hundreds of hours but which I still had to read time and again, especially some fragmented sentences, to connect all the dots, though by now I had grasped his story on the whole. Today, however, I had no time for my father’s journal, having to provide dozens of endnotes for the paper. That would take several hours.

Late in the afternoon Ben and Henry came back. My nephew couldn’t stop raving about the museums on the National Mall, which were all free to the public. He told me, “We even saw many original pieces by Rodin—they all stand in the sculpture garden, in the open! Amazing. I can imagine how privileged the people living in that area must feel. All those great museums must be like amenities in their lives. This is unbelievable. I wish I could live in DC so I could take friends to those museums when they come to visit me.”

“Which of the museums do you like most?” I asked.

“The air and space museum. I had never seen one like that.”

Before dinner I showed him my study. He looked through
my little library, shelves crowded with books floor to ceiling, and admitted, “I’ve read only seven or eight of these books. I wish I were a scholar like you, Aunt.” He was seated in a rattan lounge chair, drinking almond milk.

“You’ve been doing pretty well in your computer business. I’m just a woman of books, not suitable for anything else.”

I showed him the six volumes of diary left by Gary. He opened one and began skimming some pages. I said, “I’m still working on your grandfather’s story. Once I’m done, I’ll let you have his journal.”

“Well,” he replied thoughtfully and put down the volume, “I might have to know more about his life to make sense of this.”

“I’ve been trying to understand him too.”

Ben and Henry seemed to have hit it off. They talked a lot about basketball and football games; both were fans of the New England Patriots. After Ben had left, my husband kept saying about him, “What a fine young man. I wish I had a nephew like that on my side.”

“You’ve met him just once,” I said.

“Look, Lilian, I’m about to be sixty-two. In a couple of years I won’t be very active anymore. If Ben can manage this building for us, that will make our remaining years free of lots of trouble. Don’t you think?”

“Can you trust him entirely?”

“Not yet. Like I said, we can try to get to know him better. I’m fond of him, that’s the honest truth.”

I was pleased to hear that. Sometimes I did feel a stirring of maternal feeling for my nieces and nephew and couldn’t help but try to get involved in their lives. Yet Ben seemed too ambitious to become a building superintendent. He’d once told me that he dreamed of living on Cape Cod, in a colonial home with a garden and a dog. And a boat, if he could afford it.

1964–1965

This was the third time Gary had resolved not to see Suzie anymore. He wanted his life to be simple and focused, but a few weeks later she called him and wanted to meet again, saying she missed their “confabulations.” Could he see her just one more time? She promised she wouldn’t misbehave or yell at him again. He did not agree at first and urged her to find something that could fill her idle hours, like yoga or meditation, both of which had come into fashion recently. Or it would be better if she could see another man, a bachelor. He wouldn’t give her the illusion that he’d leave his wife, non-Chinese though Nellie was, and abandon his child on account of another woman. No, under no circumstances would he further complicate his life. But there was no way to communicate the deeper reason to Suzie. She kept calling him, at times even when he was in meetings. She knew he was a kind man at heart in spite of his phlegmatic appearance, so she was not afraid of pushing him. What she liked about him was that he wouldn’t impose anything on her and always treated her as his equal, as a friend. When they were together, she felt at ease, didn’t need to suppress a hiccup or a cackle, and could always speak her mind. Never had she been so relaxed and comfortable with a man. If only she could spend some time with him every day.

At last he agreed to see her just one more time. When they met in a café near Christ Church on an early summer afternoon, she said to him, “You must admit there’s a lot of chemistry between us.”

“Suzie,” he countered, “please don’t act like this, don’t mess yourself up. My life is more complicated than you can imagine. You’ll be better off if you stay away from me, a married man with a child.”

“I’d have done that long ago if I could.” She lowered her eyes, her lashes fluttering a little, as though she was ashamed of her confession. “Sometimes I wonder if this is due to bad karma. It feels like I owed you something in my previous life and came to this world just to pay you back.”

“We’ve known each other for only a few years,” he said.

“But I feel we’d met generations ago.”

Her words touched him to the core, so the affair resumed and lasted till the end of his life. He’d go and see her once a week, usually in the evening, giving his wife the excuse that he had to put in extra hours at the CIA. Nellie never questioned him about the evenings he spent away from home. Besides the secretive nature of his work, she assumed that a man, especially a professional man, should have another life outside his home. As long as he brought back a paycheck every month and took care of their family, she didn’t complain.

Yet in the early summer of 1964 she discovered the affair, informed by a neighbor, Mrs. Colock, a tall string bean of a woman whose husband had often bumped into Gary and Suzie together in bars and restaurants. Nellie and Gary fought that night, hurling furious words that frightened their daughter. This was the first time Lilian had heard her parents shout at each other profanities they had forbidden her to use. She locked herself in her room, crying and listening in on them.

The next morning her father drove her to school as usual. They spoke little, though the girl still kissed him before running to the school entrance. She was glad that summer break was about to start, that soon she wouldn’t need her father to drive her to school anymore. But her mother seemed to have changed from that day on; she’d become more subdued and taciturn, as if she had a sore throat and had to save her voice. Actually, Nellie was thinking of divorce, which Gary said he would accept if she let him keep their daughter. In truth he couldn’t possibly raise the girl alone, given his career and his absentmindedness; he insisted on sole custody of
their child in order to save the marriage. That made Nellie hesitate, because she couldn’t entrust Lilian to Gary alone.