A Map of Betrayal: A Novel

1954

For the first time, Gary took a vacation. George Thomas, recently married and having just returned from the States, had granted him three weeks off. Gary went to Hong Kong in early February, hoping to be able to cross the border to enter Guangzhou; though he didn’t have a passport from Red China, he was still holding the one issued by the Nationalist government. He also had his refugee papers, which permitted him entry to the United States. For five years he hadn’t heard a word from his family and only joined them now and then in his dreams. Were his parents still able to work in the fields? Did Yufeng resent his long absence from home? What could he say about his unfulfilled promise to go back and fetch her in a year or two? What a lousy husband he had been. If he got to see her this time, he would try to give her a child so that she might feel less lonely when he was away, and so that he could have a solid reason for requesting discharge from his overseas mission.

He wasn’t sure whether his superiors would allow him to go home for a visit. All his planning might turn out to be wishful thinking. But in spite of the uncertainty, he was full of hope and couldn’t stop indulging in reveries about a family reunion.

On the very afternoon he checked into a small hotel on Queen’s Road in downtown Hong Kong, he called Bingwen, who was delighted to hear about his arrival and eager to see him. They agreed to meet the next morning, around eleven, at a restaurant near the ferry crossing to Kowloon. Bingwen reminded Gary not to eat too much for breakfast because they’d have an early lunch. Gary didn’t get up until ten thirty the following day. After washing, he set out for the waterfront unhurriedly. On his way he stopped at a bakery stall, bought a small bun stuffed with red-bean paste, and ate it ravenously while strolling. Like anywhere in China, nobody here took notice of his eating on the street. He felt at ease, though he hardly knew this city, having once lived here for only a month (in the barracks at Stanley Fort), and was unable to understand the peddlers’ cries in Cantonese.

When he arrived at the restaurant, Bingwen was already in there, at a window table that commanded a full view of the room and a part of the terrace outside and the harbor. At the sight of Gary, he stood and rushed up to him. The man wore suede boots with brass buckles and a gray wool vest over a white shirt. They hugged, overjoyed to see each other at long last. Gary found that his comrade hadn’t aged in the slightest, having the same bright eyes and the same smooth, vivid face. After tea was served, a willowy waitress handed them each a small warm towel, with which they wiped their faces and hands.

They ordered lunch and resumed chatting. Bingwen pulled an envelope out of the pocket of his cashmere coat draped over the back of another chair. Dropping his voice, he said, “This is a little token of thanks from our country.”

“For what?” Gary asked in bafflement.

“For the information you provided three months ago.”

“Was it useful?”

“Certainly, it helped us smash a clique of spies disguised as returnees from Korea. We nabbed them all, executed a few, and put the rest in jail.”

Gary was shocked but didn’t say another word. He slipped the envelope into his rear pocket. He had assumed that all those anti-Communist POWs would go to Taiwan.

Their food came. The crabmeat dumplings, which Bingwen had ordered for the benefit of Gary’s northern palate, were steaming and puffy. Together with the entrée were some side dishes, all Mandarin. Gary lifted a dumpling onto his plate, cut it in two with his chopsticks, and put half into his mouth. “Oh, delicious,” he said, sucking in his breath because of the heat. “This makes me more homesick.”

A ferryboat blew its horn like a mooing cow, chugging away from the waterside and dragging a frothy wake. Bingwen said, “You’re from Shandong, so we’re having dumplings for this welcome-home lunch.”

“Thanks. When can I go back? You know I haven’t seen my family for five years.”

“Ah, that’s another matter I’m supposed to discuss with you.” Bingwen smiled cunningly, his hawk eyes scanning, as if to check whether the other seven or eight diners were eavesdropping. They were all out of earshot. He said to Gary, “Your family’s fine. We’ve been taking good care of them.”

“Can I go back to see them, just for a short visit?”

“No, you cannot, because the moment you cross the border, the Brits will inform the Yanks about you and that will blow your cover. The Party wants you to stay with the U.S. agency in Okinawa and to gather as much intelligence as you can. For this mission your identity must be kept secret. Brother, I know it’s hard for you. You’ve been making a tremendous sacrifice for our country. For that you have our highest respect.”

Hearing that, Gary felt touched and disarmed, unable to push his request further. A dull pang seized his heart again while a hot lump swelled his gullet. He lowered his eyes and asked, “What if the agency moves back to the United States? There’s been talk about that.”

“Go with them. That’s the instruction from above.”

Gary frowned, breathing hard as though something were stuck in his throat. “Look — I’m going to be thirty in a month, and this celibate life isn’t easy for me.” His voice took on a petulant note. “I won’t say I miss my wife terribly like a newlywed. My parents picked her out for me. But I feel bad, guilty — I shouldn’t have treated Yufeng this way. Besides, I miss home.”

“We know Yufeng is a good woman, and she understands you’ve been doing an indispensable service to our country. As for your personal life”—Bingwen blinked meaningfully and gave a tight smile—“the higher-ups deliberated about that too. If necessary, you should consider starting another family abroad. This also means you must prepare to live overseas for many years.”

“So mine is a protracted mission?”

“That’s right.”

Gary was stunned, but he managed to say, “Okay, I understand.” He came within a breath of protesting but realized that would only make matters worse and might jeopardize his family. He heaved a sigh, unable to fathom the full implications of the directive.

As much as he was happy to see his friend and handler and to know he was a Party member now, the welcome-home lunch was a huge letdown. In addition to the $500 in the envelope, Bingwen notified Gary that he’d been promoted, now holding rank similar to a captain’s in the army. From now on he would earn two salaries a month—$230 from the American agency and 102 yuan, about $50, from China’s Ministry of National Security. He was sure that few of his comrades were paid so well. That lessened his despondency a little. If he lived frugally and saved, someday he’d be able to return home a wealthy man. Still, hard as he tried, he couldn’t reason away his misery.

Hong Kong was warm in February, and there was a scent of spring in the air. The streets were overflowing with pedestrians, many of them in rags, apparently refugees from inland. Yet few wore cotton-padded clothes or heavy coats as people did in the north. Walking back to his hotel, Gary heard pigeons cooing and raised his head to look around, but he didn’t see any birds. Instead, he saw colored laundry fluttering on bamboo poles stretched between the balcony rails. Along the street endless shop signs swayed like tattered banners. A uniformed Indian guard appeared, standing at the entrance to a grand stone building, his head turbaned and his beard trimmed. The air was musty and felt a little sticky. Summer must be insufferable here, Gary thought. Perhaps hotter than Okinawa.

A small cleft-lipped boy in a patched gown accosted him, stretching out his cupped hand, but Gary recognized him — on his way to lunch he’d given this same beggar two coins, so he shooed him away. An old woman was limping over from the opposite direction, holding an oil-paper umbrella under her arm. A rickshaw caught up with her to see if she needed a ride, but she waved it off. As Gary was nearing a street crossing, a midnight-blue Rolls-Royce with chrome lights and bumpers emerged, honking petulantly while the pedestrians jumped aside to make way. Still, the sedan spattered muddy water on some people and on the stands selling hot soy milk, magazines, flowers, fruits, deep-fried fish balls. A middle-aged woman in green slacks and rubber boots waved her arms vigorously while yelling at the bulging rear of the car, “Damn you, foreign devils!”

Gary had seen only the Chinese chauffeur and another Asian face in the Rolls-Royce, but he was sure it was a foreign car since it had a U.K. flag on its fender. This reminded him that he’d been engaged in fighting imperialism. China had to drive all the colonial powers off its soil, and he’d better stop indulging in self-pity and fretting about his personal gain and loss. He ought to be more devoted to the cause of liberating the whole country. He stopped to pick up the South China Morning Post, which he’d found had better coverage of international events than Chinese-language newspapers.

During the rest of his vacation, he tried to enjoy himself and felt entitled to spend a bit of money. He dined at restaurants that offered northern food and frequented some bars, where he developed a taste for fruit juices, some of which he’d never had before. He liked mango puree, pineapple smoothie, kiwi slush, squeezed guava drinks. Restless with stirrings and with a knot of lust tightening in his belly, he even went to some nightclubs, where girls danced provocatively, their red flapper dresses flaring out from their waists. At one of the clubs he picked up a twenty-something, speaking only English to her, partly because he’d been instructed never to disclose his mainland background and partly because he meant to impress her with his U.S. affiliation. (Indeed, after he’d stayed more than four years with the Americans, his body language had changed enough that some people wouldn’t take him for a real Chinese anymore. He would shrug his shoulders and hold doors for others behind him.) The young woman of mixed blood, Brazilian and Cantonese, called him American Chinaman when they were both tipsy. She kept calling him that even in his hotel room.

As if suddenly liberated, he felt a kind of transformation taking place in him, and during the rest of his vacation he didn’t hesitate to seek pleasure, as though he meant to drop a cracked pot again and again just for the madness of it. He knew that once he returned to Okinawa, he would become the tame, quiet clerk again. Aware that this kind of dissipation might deform his personality and lead to a disaster, he made a vow that after his thirtieth birthday, on March 12, he would stop indulging himself.

Before Gary’s vacation was over, Bingwen gave him a lavish dinner at Four Seas Pavilion, a send-off attended by just the two of them. He told Gary that he should try to work his way up the ladder in the U.S. intelligence system. He needn’t collect every piece of useful information but should gather only what he considered vital to China’s interests and security. If possible, he should come to Hong Kong once a year so they could catch up and make plans. From now on he’d have an account at Hang Seng Bank, and the reward money would be deposited into it regularly.

“You’re our hero on the invisible front,” Bingwen told Gary in total earnest.

“A nameless hero,” Gary said with a tinge of irony. That was the glorious term used in the mainland media to denote a Red spy.

“Brother, I can’t say how much I sympathize with you. But I know this: you must feel like you’re living in captivity all the time, like a caged tiger. If I were in your shoes, I would crack up or die of homesickness.”

“Thanks for understanding,” Gary said. His comrade’s words dissolved his bitterness a little. He swallowed. Again the pain was shooting up his throat. He wanted to say he might be out of his element once he landed in America, but he thought better of it. He wouldn’t want Bingwen to report his words to their superiors, in whose eyes Gary was reluctant to devalue himself. What’s more, he believed there was glory in serving his country.

Bingwen resumed, “Please always remember that China has raised you and appreciates your service and sacrifice.”

“I shall keep that in mind.”

“Also, under no circumstances must you contact your family directly. That would put a lot of people in danger.”

“I won’t do that.” Gary knew that “a lot of people” would also include his family.

They lifted their shot cups and downed their West Phoenix. The strong liquor was making Gary giddy and teary. They polished off a whole bottle of it.

As soon as I returned to Beijing, I wrote Yufeng a letter. I told her who I was and that I’d like to meet her. The address Uncle Weiren had provided might be out of date, so my letter was hit or miss. All the same, I expected to hear from my father’s first wife and checked my mail eagerly every afternoon.

By early April I still hadn’t heard from Yufeng, and I grew more anxious. I talked with Henry about it. He suggested going to the northeast personally to find out what had happened to her, so I began making plans. I moved my seminar from the next Thursday afternoon to Tuesday evening (pizzas provided) so that I could have six days for the trip.

On April 7 I quietly set out. It would have been faster and easier if I’d flown, but I’d have had to present my passport to purchase plane tickets, and then the police might keep an eye on me and throw up obstacles. So I decided to take the train. At the station, to my surprise, I was asked to show my ID too. This was something new. I had traveled on trains in China before, on my own, and never needed to produce my papers for the tickets. With no way out, I handed my U.S. passport to the woman clerk behind the window, saying I was going to Heilongjiang to see my aunt. To my relief, she didn’t ask any questions and just gave me the tickets and the change, perhaps because there was a snaking line of people behind me. Plus, I spoke Mandarin well enough that she might have taken me to be an overseas Chinese, belonging to a different category of foreigners, who travel frequently in China to see families, relatives, and friends.

The trip was long, more than twenty hours, including the layovers in Harbin and Jiamusi. I didn’t go deep into the two cities while waiting for the next trains but merely strolled around a little to stretch my legs. Both places still had traces of the Soviet Union’s urban layout — massive buildings, broad boulevards, and vast squares. In the food stores I saw bread the size of a basin, bulky meat loaves, stout sausages. There were also a number of Russians on the streets, probably tourists and businesspeople.

The train rides had been humdrum but not tiring, thanks to my sleeping berth. I’d brought along a pocket New China Dictionary, which I enjoyed reading to brush up and learn some characters. The final leg of the trip was different, though. From Jiamusi I took a local train to Fushan County, and for two hours I sat among Chinese passengers, some of whom looked like peasants. Opposite me were a couple in their late forties, the man with a bald patch on the crown of his head and the wife with ruddy cheeks. Next to me a young woman sat with a toddler on her lap. She was obviously an urbanite, with a pallid face. After a male conductor had poured boiled water from a large galvanized kettle for the passengers who held out their mugs, I looked out the window, gazing at the shifting landscape, which reminded me of the midwestern American countryside. In a vast field two tractors were pulling harrows to pulverize the soil to prepare it for sowing, tossing up dust like teams of back-kicking horses. In another field a seeder was rolling. Beyond the machines, wildfires were sending up swaths of smoke. All the while I’d been holding my tongue to avoid revealing my accent, but now, unable to keep silent any longer, I asked the couple opposite me, “What are those fires for?”

“They’re probably clearing land for farming,” the man said. “They also burn the weeds to fertilize the soil.”

“What are they sowing? I mean those seeders.”

“Corn and wheat.”

“Soybeans too,” added his wife.

“Where are you from?” asked the young mother, my seatmate.

“Beijing,” I said.

“You don’t sound like a Han.”

“I’m half Uigur” came my stock answer. “But I live and work in the capital.”

Uigurs, a minority people in western China, are light-skinned and nicknamed the Whites of Asia. The passengers all bought my answer, and we began chitchatting. Soon the young woman next to me dozed off with her arm around her boy, who seemed in the deepest of sleeps. The man opposite me said that he and his wife had just gone to Nanjing to visit their son, who was a truck driver in an artillery regiment. The young man might get promoted to officer. If not, he should be able to make a decent living as a cabbie or trucker after being demobilized. I remembered that it used to be a sort of privilege to join the army and wondered if it was still so. The man said that military service was popular, but not everyone could afford it.

“What do you mean by ‘afford it’?” I asked in wonder.

“You have to pay,” his wife pitched in.

“Pay whom?”

“The recruiters,” the man said.

“How much did you pay for your son?” I was all the more amazed.

“Well, eight thousand yuan, the standard fee.”

That was about twelve hundred dollars, a hefty sum to a common Chinese family. His wife added again, “If you have a girl who wants to join up, that’ll cost you ten thousand.”

I said, “I guess military service might be the only profession where girls are more expensive than boys.”

That made both of them laugh. I wondered what would happen if a war broke out. Perhaps many soldiers would pay their superiors to get discharged or to avoid being sent into battle. The Chinese are a pragmatic people, most of them not interested in politics or principles. For them, survival has to take priority. The common people’s main concerns can be summed up in four words: food, clothing, shelter, and transportation. Nowadays they also talked a lot about health care and children’s education.

The station of Fushan was a new yellow building topped with a clock tower, which read 2:50. The platform was paved with concrete slabs and swarmed with people, many of whom were there seeing off family members or friends. The toddler whose mother had shared my seat refused to get off the train and burst out crying. He wanted to keep on riding. That got the grown-ups laughing and his mother embarrassed. Her eyes widened in panic as she said to no one in particular, “Forgive us. This is his first train ride.”

Outside the station stretched a line of taxis, and young women were holding signs that displayed hotel prices and amenities, all including free cable TV. I got into a cab and told the driver, “Take me to a guesthouse in town.”

“A cheap one?” He started the ignition and pulled away.

“No, a good quiet place.”

We were going north. Along the roadsides the young trees, birches and aspens and acacias, were sprouting leaves like tiny scissor blades and spearheads, all their trunks lime-painted from the roots up to four feet to protect them from insects. The town felt empty, with only a handful of pedestrians in sight. This was the first time I’d seen a town in China that looked as if there’d been more houses than people. It brought to mind a small U.S. midwestern town on a quiet day, though Fushan was a county seat. I asked the cabdriver why so few people were around. He said there’d just been a peasant uprising, which was suppressed by a contingent of riot police sent down from Harbin, so most country folks weren’t coming to town for the time being. Even the marketplace had been closed, and had just opened up again the day before.

“What for?” I asked the cabbie. “I mean the uprising.”

“Some officials in the county administration leased thousands of acres of land to local peasants and pocketed the money. But the land is public property and belongs to the state. This outraged the country folks. They sent delegates to the provincial capital and then to Beijing to lodge their grievances, but they got manhandled in both places. All the officials turned a deaf ear, so the villagers came back and started a demonstration. The local police tried to break up the crowd but got roughed up by the demonstrators. Then the whole thing grew into a huge uprising, roads blocked and trains stopped, and more than a thousand cops were rushed down from Harbin.”

“Did anyone get killed?”

“No, but hundreds were injured. Some cars and tractors were smashed and burned. The cops fired lots of tear gas and rubber bullets.”

“No pepper spray?”

“What’s that?”

“Some police in foreign countries would spray peppered water on demonstrators. It can be effective for breaking up small crowds.” I moved my hand left and right to show how to apply an aerosol can. He saw my demonstration in the rearview mirror, wagging a toothpick between his lips.

“More like a toy, isn’t it? Tell you what, the country folks eat hot peppers every day and wouldn’t give a shit about something like that.”

I chuckled. Actually, my question about pepper spray wasn’t frivolous — I wanted to see how sophisticated the Chinese police had become in crowd control. The government was unlikely to send out the standing army to quell uprisings again, having learned from the fiasco of Tiananmen Square. That was why in recent years they’d been building a huge police force (2.5 million in total) and spent more on “internal security” than on the military. I often wonder, without that astronomical budget, how much China could do for its people, for the children in the countryside who are underfed and deprived of decent schooling.

We stopped at a two-story inn called Home for Everyone. I handed the cabbie a fifty-yuan bill for a thirty-five-yuan ride and let him keep the change. A fortyish woman at the check-in counter gave me a multibed room, just for myself, as it was a slow time of year. I went upstairs, unpacked, took a quick shower, and lay down on a bed that smelled of tobacco. Though exhausted, I was in a good frame of mind because the woman downstairs hadn’t asked for my ID and I might be able to stay here peacefully. I had not expected the trip to go so smoothly.

In the evening I went out for dinner at a nearby eatery, a cubbyhole that had only three tiny tables below a cyst of a low-watt bulb, but it offered spicy noodles and succulent steamed buns stuffed with pork and cabbage. I wished I could eat noodles like a full-blooded Chinese, heartily slurping the broth and sucking in the wheat ribbons noisily and then, halfway through, holding the big blue-rimmed bowl to my sweaty face to bolt down the remainder. But whenever I ate noodles, people could tell I was a foreigner who used chopsticks clumsily and was afraid of lifting the bowl to my mouth. So I bought two small buns and a bowl of soup instead. The old man at the counter pointed his stubby red finger at me and said good-naturedly, “Just two buns? You eat like a kitten.” Behind him a stack of huge bamboo steamers was swathed in a cloud of vapor. He must have taken me for a Chinese woman fastidious about food, so I said, “Thanks,” then carried my purchase to a table and sat down to eat.

In China I liked being viewed as Chinese, though in the States I always insist I am American. For me, similarity is essential — I want to be treated equally. In elementary school I had once come to blows with a girl who called me “mongrel” instead of “bitch.” I looked up the word in a dictionary to see if it was related to “Mongol.” It wasn’t. I also examined a photo of my family and could see that I had my father’s nose and mouth, but I had white skin. Strangers tended to regard me as a brunette. Clearly it was my last name that singled me out. Yet intuitively I had always known I was different. Later my father would urge me to date only Chinese boys, saying they were more reliable than white or black boys. That sounded anachronistic to me. I was so annoyed by his harping that once I retorted, “Why don’t you find me a suitable Chinese boy? I don’t want a nerd, though.” I said that thinking of Francie Wong, the only Chinese boy in my prep school. After my father died, I often wondered what he would have thought of my first husband, who was Hispanic. Carlos was quite nerdy, even bespectacled, but he had his charm and, as an insurance broker, maintained a large clientele.

Back at the inn, I ran into its owner, a roly-poly man with a doughy face and a thatch of bushy hair, and I asked him how to get to Gutai Village, where Yufeng was supposed to live. He said it was far away, more than ten miles, and I should take the bus. But I wanted to go alone in a car so I could have a flexible schedule the following day. The man helped me book a taxi, for which I put down a one-hundred-yuan deposit.

I ARRIVED IN GUTAI around midmorning the next day. The trip was easy but turned out to be futile. The village chief told me that Yufeng had died a few years ago, and that the rest of her family was living in the county seat, running a seamstress shop. Her body had been cremated and the ashes were in her daughter Manrong’s charge, so Yufeng had left nothing in the village. “Damn,” I said to myself. “I hope this won’t be a wild-goose chase.” Without further delay I headed back to Fushan Town.

In the afternoon I went out in search of my half sister. The village chief had told me, “Just ask about Seamstress Shang, everybody knows where her shop is.” I was glad she and I still shared the same family name. My mother used to tease me, not without malice, saying, “You’re probably the last Shang on earth.” True, even in China, Shang, meaning “esteem,” is an uncommon name, but in a nation of 1.3 billion people, there must be many thousands of Shangs. The seamstress shop was easy to find indeed. It was on a cobbled street in the commercial section downtown, the part closed to automobiles. After passing the few vendors selling produce and poultry along the sidewalk, I entered the shop.

“Can I help you?” a resonant voice asked from a corner. Following it emerged a sixtyish woman in a green turtleneck sweater.

At the sight of her I felt my heart lurching. She was the spitting image of my father, although a female version and four or five inches shorter, with the same elongated eyes, wide nose, full forehead, and roundish cheekbones. She was a bit plump but glowing with health.

“Are you Manrong Shang?” I asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“Your father’s name is Weimin Shang.”

“Who are you?” She stared at me in amazement.

“I’m Lilian Shang, his daughter too. Can we speak inside?”

She called over a younger woman, obviously her daughter, and told her to mind the front counter. Then Manrong led me into the back room. After we sat down at a table strewn with scraps of cloth, stubs of French chalk, and a measuring tape, she kept looking at me as if she hadn’t yet recovered from the astonishment. I took a small album out of my purse and handed it to her, saying, “Here are some photos of our father.”

“I never met him,” she said. “All I know about him is that he gathered lots of important intelligence for our country but couldn’t come back to join us. He died in the line of duty. That’s what the Internet says.” She couldn’t access uncensored Google or she’d have known that our father’s life had ended wretchedly. As she was thumbing through the album, her eyebrows now joined and now fluttered. Then her thick lips stirred, a smile emerging on her face. She said, “This is him. We have a photo of him as a young man.”

Holding down the turmoil inside me, I tried to explain calmly, “Our father died thirty years ago. He had never forgotten your mother. He loved her but couldn’t come back, so he married my mother, a white American woman, and they had me. I’m their only child.”

Manrong broke into tears, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand. I began crying too, my fingers gripping her forearm. “I’m so happy to find you at last, Sister.”

She wiped her face with a hand towel, got up, and went to the front room. She called out, “Juya, come and meet your aunt!”