A Map of Betrayal: A Novel

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.

But their fights had affected their daughter differently — the girl began daydreaming about leaving home. How she wished she could live far away. If only her piggy bank were full.

It was in the fall of 1964 when Nellie started her own affair with her boss, John Tripp, Jr., the manager of Outstanding Fences. John, a beefy man in his early forties with a lumpy face, would take Nellie to a nearby motel after they lunched together, and they would stay in bed there until her daughter’s school was about to let out.

In fact, Nellie didn’t enjoy the time she spent with Tripp, because he was too demanding in bed. He’d make her do difficult things for him as if she were “an entertainer.” As a result, her body would grow sore and she feared there might be damage to her insides; still, she dared not refuse to give him what he wanted. Finally one afternoon, with a pounding heart, she asked him whether he might be willing to form a family with her if she asked her husband for a divorce. Tripp was taken aback, then said, “No, Nellie, I’m sorry I can’t do that. I’m awfully fond of you, but I’ve been single all my life and it’s too late for me to change my ways. But I’ll be around.”

She had asked that mainly to see how much he cared for her; she hadn’t made up her mind about a divorce yet. His answer upset her and cooled her down. What a flameout.

The affair, which had been halfheartedly carried on by both parties for about three months, finally came to an end. Soon Nellie quit bookkeeping for the fence company and stayed home, knowing that for better or for worse Gary wouldn’t abandon her and Lilian. He had promised her to keep the family together and wasn’t a man who’d break his word.

Still, Nellie couldn’t suppress her thought of divorce altogether and would talk about it with her sister, Marsha, on the phone. Lilian didn’t like her aunt, a blonde with thin arms and long dimples on her cheeks. When the girl was a toddler, Aunt Marsha had called her China Doll, a nickname Lilian hated. It was good that the woman lived on the West Coast now.

One day after school, as Lilian was stepping into her house, she heard her mother talking on the phone. “To be honest, Marsha, I already feel like an old woman. It’ll be too hard to find a man willing to share family life with me.… Okay, I’ll think about what you just said. You know Gary’s very stubborn about child custody.… Maybe he and I should be separated for a while, just to give each other more space. That might be good for Lilian too.”

But that wasn’t what the girl wanted. That evening after mother and daughter had sat together and read two chapters from The Story of Crazy Horse, Lilian told Nellie that she would stay with her father if they were separated. “I don’t mind going to another school,” said the daughter. Her mother looked stunned and remained pensive for hours.

Lilian later tipped off her dad that Nellie sometimes talked with Marsha about divorcing him. “Thanks for the info,” Gary said with a weak smile. “Does your mom often drink beer or wine when I’m not home?”

“Uh-uh, I didn’t see her drink.”

“That’s good. If she uses alcohol, let me know, okay? I don’t want her to become an alcoholic like her father.”

To her credit, Nellie wasn’t fond of drink. Despite her many years of waitressing, she couldn’t taste any difference between red wine and white wine. In contrast, Marsha often took a glass when chatting with Nellie on the phone. Once tipsy, Marsha would confide all kinds of unseemly domestic troubles, such as her husband’s addiction to gambling — whenever he went to Las Vegas, a row would wait for him at home — and the couple’s regular use of marijuana and other drugs. As a result, they often fought over money. And their son pilfered cash from his mother’s purse (but she wouldn’t tell his father, afraid he might beat the boy black and blue). Yet whenever Marsha urged her to leave Gary, Nellie would say, “Well, I mustn’t rush. I must think more about this.”

Without fail, Lilian would give her father an update on their chat.

THE PREVIOUS NOVEMBER John Kennedy had been assassinated. At first Gary was so overwhelmed by the news that he couldn’t respond to it. Some of his colleagues grew emotional as they talked about it. David Shuman was mumbling about the event with his mouth slightly lopsided while tears glistened in his camel eyes. As he was listening to David, Gary burst out sobbing. He cried wretchedly, burying his face in his arms on his desk. That astonished his colleagues and convinced them that he was a true patriot, even more heartbroken and devastated than they were by the national tragedy. In fact, though saddened by the news, Gary wept also for another reason. He dreaded that the assassination of the U.S. president might trigger a world war if another country was implicated. His gut told him that the Soviet Union might have been behind it. Even China could have been an accomplice, if not directly involved.

For the whole spring and summer of 1964 he was restless, expecting the outcome of the FBI’s inquiry into the case and hoping that Beijing had had nothing to do with it. After a ten-month investigation, the results were announced in late September: Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in the assassination. Many of Gary’s colleagues shook their heads in disbelief, saying that the man couldn’t possibly have done it single-handedly, that there must have been an organization behind him. If not the Mafia, it could have been a hostile foreign power. Unlike them, Gary in secret heaved a sigh of relief.

Nevertheless, China made big news that fall. In mid-October it shocked the world with the explosion of its first atomic bomb. The country, though ravaged by famine and revolutionary hysteria, began coming back to the arena of international politics with a vengeance. All at once Mao was feared and condemned as a monster, but he was also celebrated by some as a farsighted statesman who’d had the aspiration and determination to put his country on the map regardless of the odds against it. A major Japanese newspaper even proclaimed: “With the success of the nuclear test China has become the number one power in Asia.”

Gary began to look into this matter and found that originally Mao had looked down on atomic bombs, though the United States had dropped two on Japan. In an interview conducted by the American correspondent Anna Louise Strong in August 1946, Mao said, “A-bombs are paper tigers that the U.S. reactionaries use to threaten people. The bombs appear fearsome but are not really that powerful.” Mao’s ignorant defiance alarmed even some leaders of the socialist countries. The French physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a Communist who was Madame Curie’s son-in-law, had these words passed on to China: “Comrade Mao Zedong, to fight against nuclear weapons, you must first possess them.” That startled the chairman and set him thinking about how to make the bomb. He asked Khrushchev to help.

After long negotiations, the two countries signed an agreement in October 1957: the Soviet Union would provide for China a model of the atomic bomb, the blueprints, and the technical specifications. It would also send scientists to help China with the project. But the first expert did not arrive until the beginning of 1959, and he did nothing. More unfathomable and frustrating, in his pocket he always carried a handbook, which he would consult from time to time but wouldn’t let any Chinese see. The other Russians who came after him didn’t do much either. Then, in July 1960, quite unexpectedly, Khrushchev went back on his promise and withdrew all the two-hundred-odd Soviet experts serving in various areas of China’s nuclear industry. The Soviet leader had never liked Mao, though he showed his respect because the Chinese leader was more experienced. “Comrade Mao Zedong always acts as if God must serve him,” Khrushchev once observed.

Gary and his CIA colleagues all had thought that with the Russians gone, China would abandon its nuclear ambitions, but to everyone’s amazement, it pushed ahead. Hundreds of factories and thousands of scientists participated in the project. Many of these people lived in the desert in Xinjiang, working around the clock, totally dedicated though they were underfed and underpaid. Some died there, of illness or from becoming lost in the desert. The country was so resolved to build the bomb that Vice Premier Chen Yi declared at an industrial conference: “Even if we reach the point that we have to pawn our trousers, we must continue developing nuclear weapons!”

The relentless effort had finally produced a bomb and gave China a huge boost. The explosion also threw the United States a little off stride. More reconnaissance missions were flown by U-2s, but the planes were mostly shot down by Chinese SA-2 missiles. It was impossible to bring back photos of the nuclear base in western China. For months the White House had been pondering how to snuff out that dangerous program. Air strikes were no longer an option, a fact Gary gloated about in his diary. As an alternative, the CIA and Taiwan put together a contingent of paratroopers, all Nationalist soldiers specializing in demolition and night fighting and newly equipped with M16s. They would be air-dropped into the interior of China and proceed to destroy its nuclear facilities. This operation was code-named Thunderclaps. Together with the scores of commandos, some secret agents had already been sent to the mainland to prepare the operation.

While translating the exchanges between Taipei and Washington, Gary began to form a full picture of the undertaking. He also found its communications plans and the code names of some secret agents already in China. He checked out the documents, saying he’d have to work on them at night, and shot photos of them. In addition, he wrote a report that synthesized the information and described the operation in detail. He took an early vacation in June 1965 and went to Bangkok, a hot spot where, to Gary’s knowledge, several CIA officers had spent their time off lately. From there, a week later, he flew to Hong Kong and delivered the intelligence to Bingwen. Immediately three more men came from Beijing to meet with Gary. They were convinced that he was infallible in his analyses and clairvoyant in his predictions, which had been proved correct time and again. Within a month China apprehended most of the secret agents and thus thwarted the Thunderclaps operation before it could get off the ground. The CIA was mad at Taipei, believing that someone in the Nationalists’ rank and file had leaked the secret to Red China.

Later in the fall of 1965 Gary was notified by Father Murray that he’d been promoted to the fourteenth rank, similar to that of a lieutenant colonel. And along with the promotion came a first-class merit citation awarded by China’s Ministry of National Security. His salary was 154 yuan a month now, about $70. That was a substantial amount, considering a worker usually made less than 50 yuan monthly. Gary assumed that his salary had routinely been sent to Yufeng. He had no idea that since she’d left their home village four years before, she hadn’t received a penny from the government.

Minmin, my student in Beijing, wrote me that she was done with her master’s and had just defended her thesis on the feminist movement in the United States in the 1970s. She wished I’d been there when “those fogies” on her committee were badgering her “with inane, outrageous questions.” I emailed back and asked about her future plans. She said candidly that she was thinking about climbing Mount Everest, which for some reason had been on her mind of late. She could not explain why, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the mountain. I liked that about her — she had the passion to follow her own vision, however silly and impractical it might seem.

In fact, I’d once told the students in my graduate seminar back in Beijing, “I admire many good qualities the Chinese have, such as diligence, resourcefulness, modesty, respect for old people, but I’ve found two characteristics I don’t like about the Chinese, which I might also have since I am half Chinese. The two are petty cleverness and practical-mindedness, which tend to bring about expediency and compromise. These two shortcomings can erode the steadfastness of one’s character and undermine one’s will to do what’s meaningful in the long run. George Bernard Shaw once said: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself; therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’ I hope that when you’re young, you cherish your unreasonableness, which, like the fire of life, might dwindle as you grow older.” The moment I said that, I realized I’d quoted those words from a volume of my father’s diary, over which I had pored the night before. On its very first page he had put down that sentence by Shaw, whose plays, like D. H. Lawrence’s novels, had helped him while away the long lonesome days in Okinawa.

I thought I might have offended some of my students, but a good number of them told me that my words made them think a lot, that they appreciated my candor. One even thanked me for reminding him not to become “a smart fool.”

Minmin, unlike most young Chinese, didn’t seem pragmatic. She was undaunted by the difficulties of reaching the summit of Mount Everest. (Of course she had fewer financial worries and family duties compared to other young people.) She might not be clever, but her vivacious personality set her apart from her classmates as an individual who still showed a spark of life. For that I admired her.

She also told me about a dilemma she had to solve — a military college had just approached her with a job offer. If she accepted it, she might have to put off or abandon her Mount Everest dream. I didn’t know how to advise her, since physically she wasn’t that strong and I wasn’t sure she could climb the mountain even though she had all the support she needed from her well-heeled brother. She might not even be able to go through the strenuous training for mountaineering, so I refrained from offering her any advice.

I HADN’T KNOWN Henry had been emailing with Ben directly. When he told me, I felt uncomfortable and asked, half in jest, “So you two can bad-mouth me behind my back?”

“Come on, Lilian,” Henry said. “You know guys can chat more freely without a girl around.”

“What do you talk about?”

“Ball games, girls, politics, military history, smart weapons. Also about how to make money.”

“Ben already has a girlfriend. Why still talk about girls? Isn’t Sonya good enough for him?”

“He’s a handsome guy. There must be others falling all over him.”

“You really think he’s good-looking?”

“Absolutely.”

By Chinese standards I’d say Ben had average looks — a bit too masculine, big-boned, rough around the edges. Conventionally, Chinese women preferred men with slightly feminine features — smooth skin, soft eyes, a delicate jaw, a refined manner. Some also liked bookish men, perhaps because the knowledge of books used to promise power and wealth, not to mention prestige. That has changed, though, as capitalism has penetrated every fiber of Chinese society and reshaped people’s values and mentality. Most young men have a different sense of masculinity now. Two decades ago, my male Chinese friends had often said that their ideal man was the late premier Zhou Enlai or the great writer Lu Xun, both of whom were not strong physically. Nowadays many young men would pick Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant or Tim Duncan (nicknamed Stone Buddha by his Chinese fans) as their male icon. And believe it or not, a lot of them also worshiped Allen Iverson because the six-foot basketball player embodied the possibility of stardom for men of average stature.

In late July I got a disturbing message from Juli. Wuping had jilted her and removed her from the band, and now she was at a loss about what to do. I urged her to keep a cool head. Since the relationship hadn’t been going anywhere, it might be better to break up sooner than later. “You don’t understand, Aunt Lilian,” Juli retorted. “He has shacked up with another woman. The bitch just graduated from a drama college and started acting in a TV show. She knows how to put a spell on men and always sways her ass like it is a beacon in a lighthouse. There’s no way I can compete with a slut like that. Heavens, my worst nightmare has come true!” The more we wrote back and forth, the more desperate and unbalanced Juli sounded. Then she told me that Wuping had beaten her and called her “a crazy cunt” when she went to his office to confront him. I guessed she must have made a scene.

I called Ben to see how much he knew about his sister’s trouble. To my relief, he was up-to-date and said he’d met Wuping before and known from the outset that the man was unreliable. “He’s a crook and a self-styled lady-killer,” Ben said. “He uses every trick to turn a woman’s head, but he’s a smug good-for-nothing, the type we call ‘an embroidered pillowcase.’ ”

“In English we say ‘an empty suit,’ ” I told him.

“That’s right. A big nothing or a bag of hot air.”

I laughed out loud, amused that he could come up with those expressions. “He looked too smooth to me, like a top-notch schmoozer,” I said. “But how can we help Juli? She seems to have lost her head over that jerk.”

“Don’t worry, Aunt Lilian. I’m heading back to Guangzhou tomorrow night and will settle up with him.”

“What are you going to do? You must not resort to violence, okay?”

“Of course I won’t touch him, but I’ll talk with him. He knows I’m well connected in police circles there and can have him brought in anytime.”

I couldn’t grasp the full implications of Ben’s words and asked, “Do you have enough money for the trip?”

“My company will pay. I’m also going back for business meetings in Beijing.”

His ability to fly back and forth so easily made me mull over my father’s life again. During his first years here, how poignantly Gary must have longed to go back to visit his family, even just once. Yet perhaps little by little he got accustomed to the pain of loss and jaded about homesickness. Did he always remember the streets of his village and the trails on the mountain slopes and along the rivers that used to be frequented by cranes, herons, mallards? And the endless chestnut groves on the hills? And the temples and shrines on the lakesides? Probably to a great extent he had managed to suppress the memories of home so he could function normally each day. Did he ever imagine adopting a new homeland so that he could restart his life here? Surely having “eaten all the bitterness” (as he phrased it in his diary), at last he could enjoy American life, given that he did grow to like this country. What a tangled existence he had lived. In recent months he had grown more enigmatic to me, because at times it was hard for me to penetrate the armor of detachment he had clothed himself in.

The thought came to me that I might put Ben in touch with Minmin. I liked Sonya, but my father’s life had exemplified how difficult it was to live with a spouse of a different race, who spoke a different language, grew up in a different culture and social environment, and believed in a different religion. Actually, like my mother, Gary had gone to Mass regularly and even contributed ten dollars a month to our church, but I couldn’t tell if he was serious about Christianity. In his diary he never mentioned the religion, and he seemed to have remained an atheist. In all likelihood he had joined the church as a camouflage. If he were a genuine Christian, he’d have owned up to his true identity in a confessional and some pastor would have entered his life, offering spiritual guidance. But his diary didn’t mention any clergyman except Father Murray. I believed it was their common language and cultural background that had brought my father and Suzie together, and as a result, there was no way my mother could separate them. That conviction prompted me to call Ben again and tell him about Minmin. I wanted him to meet her in Beijing. I said to Ben, “You can buy a book for me and take it to her as my present. I will write her about this so she can know who you are.”

The book I suggested was The Search for Modern China, by Jonathan Spence, which, though a hefty volume, might come in handy for Minmin. It was an excellent overview of modern Chinese history and a widely used textbook in American colleges. I told Ben that he could get the book at any good bookstore, and I would reimburse him. “No need for that,” he assured me. “I will deliver the present to Minmin in person.”

That night I talked to Henry about Ben’s plan to intercede for his sister, afraid he might bungle the case, but I said nothing about Minmin. I did not intend to be overtly matchmaking, and my present for her was more or less a lark. “Don’t underestimate Ben,” Henry said. “He’s very savvy about dealing with people.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“I observed him when he and I went out together.” Henry’s eyes shone while a smile crossed his whiskered face. “He’ll handle everything properly. I’m not worried about him.”

“You sound like you know him better than I.”

“That’s why I hope he can manage our building someday. He’ll be good at handling the troublesome tenants.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. Henry was always nervous when he asked for overdue rent from some tenants, above all two young women. I was the one who had to go to them and ask.

BEN CALLED A WEEK LATER. He was back from China and busy catching up on work. He assured me that Juli had broken up with Wuping peacefully and was out of trouble now. Curious about the word “peacefully,” I asked him to elaborate. He said he’d met with the man and told him that if he’d jilted Juli without enough reason, there’d be consequences. Ben showed Wuping a page of information on the tax fraud committed by his father’s garbage company. Every month his old man imported shiploads of trash from Japan and Australia for $1.5 a ton and then sorted it to get recyclable materials, which he sold to Chinese factories. He netted a two hundred percent profit. Aside from breaking the tax law, he had leased out some of his garbage dumps as ranches where thousands of cows grazed on nothing but trash, and as a result, their beef was heavily contaminated, even poisonous. The old crook’s collusion with the cattlemen alone could get his company shut down and him put into jail. Despite denying any knowledge of the crimes, Wuping was shaken and came back to Ben on the same day. He offered Juli fifty thousand yuan, which settled their breakup and her unemployment.

I asked Ben, “How did you find out about his father’s tax fraud?”

“I told you I was well connected in police circles there. No fat cat in China has a clean ass. All the successful businesspeople evade taxes, otherwise how could they get rich? The police have kept track of every one of them. If they don’t behave, they’ll be brought in.”

I felt uneasy about Ben’s way of handling his sister’s affair but didn’t press him for more details. I asked, “Is Juli all right?”

“Sure, she’s back in Heilongjiang with my parents.”

“You mean she gave up her musical career?”

“She was silly and lost her heart to that playboy. She isn’t much of a singer to start with. It’s time she came to her senses.”

“You might be right.” Somehow I had always avoided thinking poorly of Juli’s musical talent. “Your parents must be happy now. Are they okay?”

“I didn’t see them. I was busy attending meetings in Beijing. But I called them. They were well and sent their regards. By the way, I met Minmin and gave her the book. She loved it.”

“She told me that.”

“You should be careful when communicating with her, Aunt Lilian.”

“Why? What’s wrong with Minmin? You don’t like her?”

“Not because of that. She is a fine person, but the military has taken an interest in her.”

“I know they offered her a lectureship, but she doesn’t want it.”

“It might not be easy for her to turn it down.”

“Really? Can’t she choose her own career?”

“It’s not that simple. Declining an offer from that kind of school is like refusing to serve our country. She might have to pay for it if she can’t give them a convincing reason.”

“You mean she’ll be treated as a dissident?”

“Something like that.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“A lot of things in China don’t make any sense, but we have to accept them as part of life. In any event, she said she wanted to climb Mount Everest first. She’s a bit nutty.”

I didn’t know what more to say. Minmin couldn’t be that vulnerable; she had her own financial means and didn’t have to take a day job. In a couple of years she might come to the States to do graduate work. So I felt I needn’t worry too much about Minmin, to whom Ben seemed to have felt little attraction. That caught me off balance a bit, but there was no loss.

I thought more about Juli. She got fifty thousand yuan from her former lover. That was a small fortune. I remembered I had once asked my grad students at Beijing Teachers College how much scholarship money they received for living expenses. Typically each got seven hundred yuan a month, which was not much but enough for food, their major expenditure since they all had free beds in the dormitories. In fact, a small amount of money still could go a long way in China if you were thrifty and knew where to shop. Part of me was uneasy about the cash settlement Wuping had offered Juli. Didn’t she once love him? How could she be compensated for her loss so easily? On the other hand, I knew that if she stayed with her family, she’d be all right and could recover from the heartbreak eventually. In my next email I urged her not to leave home again. I wrote: “There is nothing more precious than family in this world. Stay with your parents as long as you can. They are getting on in years and need you around.”

“I understand, Aunt,” she replied.