A Map of Betrayal: A Novel

1956–1957

Gary and Nellie got married in the summer of 1956 and moved into a bigger apartment in north Alexandria. It was on the third floor and had a living room; two bedrooms, the smaller of which he used as his study; and a narrow balcony — more than eleven hundred square feet total. For the first time in her life Nellie lived in a place that felt like her own. Her parents, despite having accepted the marriage, still could not appreciate Gary, who in their eyes was too introverted and too tense. He seemed never to let his guard down and even at parties wouldn’t touch alcohol, giving the excuse that he was going to drive afterward. (Grandpa Matt often said about Gary, “Jesus Christ, the dude kept a poker face even at his own wedding. I wonder what can make him happy.” Grandma Beth would counter, “Gary couldn’t loosen up like you ’cause he and Nellie were gonna leave early the next morning. He had to keep his head together.” The newlyweds spent their honeymoon the following week in St. Petersburg, Florida.)

Yet unlike the McCarricks’ other son-in-law, Gary was responsible and generous to his bride. Better still, he had not expected anything from her parents. Before the wedding, Nellie had talked to Gary about whether she should ask her parents for a few thousand dollars to pay for the wedding party, but he urged her not to, saying he was already grateful that they’d given her to him, that in China the groom’s family had to take care of all the expenses. That was true, but it could also have been his way to ease his guilty conscience about bigamy. He believed that, with the help of the Chinese government, he could explain and justify things to Yufeng eventually. But what could he say to Nellie? There was no way he could reveal himself as a married man to her without being exposed. This realization made him more considerate to her.

After their wedding Nellie had stopped waitressing because she wanted to raise a family. With Gary’s salary, $680 a month, she was happy she needn’t go out to work anymore. In the early days of their marriage, they enjoyed having sex, so much so that he stopped using his study at night for weeks. At times they’d go to bed even before ten p.m. (“He was like a wild animal,” Nellie confided to Lilian many years later. “He was a little rough in bed in the beginning. I had to teach him how to slow down with some foreplay and how to follow my lead.”)

Nellie found herself pregnant in the late fall of 1956. In spite of his excitement, Gary was unnerved. Now remarried and with a child on the way, he realized he’d begun putting down roots in America. More unsettling was the prospect that the longer he lived here, the deeper and wider his roots might reach. He often shuddered at such a scenario: China summoning him back and his having to leave without delay, abandoning Nellie and their child without warning. He hoped nothing like that would happen. If a departure came, he’d like to have enough time to make arrangements and untangle himself.

Nellie’s pregnancy made her moods swing capriciously. She complained a lot and often threw fits, but Gary was tolerant and solicitous. If he couldn’t stand her anymore, he would lock himself in his study, working or reading. Nellie had few friends. She spent most of her days in front of the TV and wouldn’t miss a single episode of I Love Lucy and Lassie. She even dyed her hair fiery red like Lucy’s, and when she didn’t like what Gary said, she’d grunt “Eww” in imitation of that funny woman. At dinner she would brief him on what she had watched that day, but seldom did he show much interest. She suspected that her words went in one of his ears and out the other. Once in a while she felt so frustrated that she would lash out at Gary, calling him a “swot,” a word her grandfather had used to refer to someone who stuck his nose in a book all the time. Indeed, nowadays Gary read and wrote a lot, often deep into the night, in the study that he kept strictly to himself. In there everything was in order, and he wouldn’t let Nellie tidy up the room for him. Every morning he made sure to lock his two file cabinets before going to work. Whenever he found she had entered the study in his absence, he’d blow a fuse, insisting that the nature of his job allowed nobody but himself admittance to his work space. That annoyed her, but bit by bit she gave up cleaning that room.

What troubled her more ever since her pregnancy was that he had stopped making love to her, giving his fear of damaging their baby as an excuse. According to the Chinese custom, he argued, a husband was not supposed to have sex with his pregnant wife, because it was believed that sex might not only hurt mother and baby but also bring on bad luck to the man. Gary even added his own little spin to this common practice, saying, “It’s unnatural to have sex when a woman is expecting. Look at all the wild animals. They copulate only to breed. Once a female is impregnated, the males will leave her alone until she’s in heat again.”

Nellie wouldn’t buy that nonsense. One evening at dinner when the topic of sex came up again, she asked, “What if your pregnant wife is still in heat?” Her voice was full, a bit gravelly.

Gary stared at her in disbelief. “That’s just an assumption, isn’t it?”

She went on with a teasing smile. “By your Chinese standards such a woman must be abnormal, a shameless broad, right?”

“Oh, come on, let’s not talk like this. After our baby is born we’ll sleep together again.”

In fact, she wasn’t eager for sex either and was also afraid of damaging the baby. Nellie was just anxious about his avoiding her bed at night. Worse, seldom did he spend time with her during the day. If she could, she’d have smashed his study, which was becoming his bedroom. She continued, “My obstetrician said sex is okay during pregnancy as long as we’re careful.”

Gary’s eyes blazed, widening at her. He couldn’t believe she had discussed such a matter with Dr. Nelson, that dumpy man wearing a thick gold band on his tapering finger. Gary remembered the obstetrician’s smirk while the man was assuring him that the baby was healthy after he had examined the young mother privately, as if to insinuate to the husband that he’d just had fun with his wife alone despite the clean johnny wrapped around her body. Gary spat out at Nellie, “I don’t believe him. I don’t trust that quack. He’s a schmuck!”

“Jeez, you’re such a crank. You always have a chip on your shoulder.” She stood and returned to the living room while he rose to clear the dining table. They had divided the kitchen work: she cooked and he washed dishes. He took out the trash every morning as well.

Nellie was also afraid that Gary might go after other women during her pregnancy, especially those Asian females at Voice of America. He often freelanced there, translating articles from English into Chinese for broadcast. She knew he rubbed elbows with them. Whenever they were together, Gary’s rear end would turn too heavy to get up from a chair — he’d gab with those women for hours on end. Nellie had seen a handful of them, who were attractive and had suave, syrupy voices. Unlike other Chinese men, who spoke little English and preferred to live on the West Coast or in Chinatowns, Gary blended well with Americans. That made him stand out, and he was probably more attractive to those Asian women. The more Nellie chewed over his aloofness from her, the more embittered she got.

The baby was born on July 16, 1957. Nellie was a bit disappointed when a nurse told her it was a girl, because she had bragged to Gary that she’d give him husky sons who would make him proud. But this was just the first child; there’d be the second, the third, and maybe the fourth. She shouldn’t feel hopeless or afraid of facing her husband. To her relief, he looked genuinely happy and held their daughter in his arms, cooing and rocking her gently. Like Nellie, he believed that the baby was only his firstborn, which partly accounted for his happiness. Yet in the back of his mind lurked a vague thought he avoided clarifying: if the baby were a boy, Gary might have cherished him more, and it would be harder for him to pull up stakes when he was ordered to retreat from the States. The arrival of the baby girl was good and appropriate because she might not tie him to this place.

At home Nellie and Gary talked about what to name the child. They both liked Lilian, though he suggested Yu as her middle name, claiming that was his mother’s maiden name. It was actually the first character in “Yufeng,” as if by his adhering to the traditional Chinese custom, his first wife could somehow own a part of this American baby. Knowing Gary didn’t like her parents that much, Nellie agreed to let Yu stand between Lilian and Shang. (Three decades later, the daughter had Yu replaced with McCarrick on her own.)

Meanwhile, Gary followed international events closely. So many things happened in the USSR that 1957 could be called the “Soviet year,” the year the number one socialist power triumphed over the West. The Soviets had succeeded in firing an intercontinental ballistic missile that could deliver nuclear warheads. (They possessed both atomic and hydrogen bombs by then.) They sent into orbit two satellites, the second one carrying an animal passenger, a dog named Laika. In December the Soviet Union launched its first nuclear submarine. In contrast, the United States, having suffered the recent setback on the Korean Peninsula, seemed on the defensive. In late May in Taipei a large mob broke into the American embassy after the U.S. military court acquitted an American officer who had murdered a major of the Nationalist army. The mob breached a safe in the embassy and made off with the classified documents that laid out the U.S. plan to replace Chiang Kai-shek with a new puppet leader. It was widely believed that Chiang’s son Jingguo had a hand in the attack on the embassy. Chiang immediately apologized to the White House, emphasizing that this was not an anti-American act condoned by the Taiwan government. As a gesture of reconciliation, he allowed the U.S. military to deploy surface-to-surface missiles that could launch nuclear strikes on most cities in mainland China.

Through handling the information, Gary could see that his motherland was an underdog compared to the two superpowers. Although in 1957 China produced its first bomber and jet fighter, modeled on the MiG-17, the country was largely in a shambles. The rural collectives could not increase food production as expected, and the common people’s standard of living was deteriorating. Many things were rationed now — grains, cooking oil, meat, cloth. In south China each urban resident was allowed to buy ten feet of cloth a year, whereas in the northeastern province Heilongjiang, each person could get twenty-four feet because they needed more for winter clothes. The scarcity was so severe that throughout the country even some basic necessities, such as tofu, matches, cotton thread, wool, cigarettes, tea, sugar, soda, eggs, and soap, required coupons. All the bad reports saddened Gary, though from time to time there were snippets of heartening news. One piece that excited him quite a bit was about a Chinese swimmer who’d broken the world record in the one-hundred-meter breaststroke (1′12″7, held by a Czech) by one second. Somehow that man’s accomplishment touched Gary and reassured him that sometimes it took only one individual to make a difference and bring honor to the country. This sentiment was bolstered by his reading of Nietzsche. He began to believe in the superman, though he never succeeded in mastering his own life or outgrowing the herd values ingrained in him long ago.

Gary didn’t go to Hong Kong that year, having little valuable intelligence to deliver. In his letter to Bingwen, he said he couldn’t leave his postnatal wife alone at home and it was “business as usual” here. His handler wrote back that everything was in tip-top shape in Hong Kong, where it was uncomfortable for summer vacation anyway, so Gary needn’t come. Bingwen promised to “keep an eye on the old folks.” By that Gary knew he meant to look after his family back home. He felt vaguely dubious about his handler’s words, but he stifled his misgivings. The man represented the Party and the country and couldn’t possibly have promised anything they could not deliver. As long as they took care of his family, Yufeng and his parents should be able to live decently. That was the only way of helping them for the time being, so he’d better trust his superiors. After reading the letter once more, Gary flicked his lighter, set the sheet aflame, and dropped it in a jade-green porcelain bowl, which he kept under the window in his study for this purpose.

I asked my grad students to write two papers during the semester, one for the midterm and the other for the final. I was unhappy about the first ones they had turned in. They were surprisingly long-winded but too cynical to think hard about real issues. Many indulged in boilerplate, writing pages without saying anything substantial. Few could offer something interesting and original. In discussing the topic of one’s proper relationship with the collective, almost without exception they claimed they had to serve the country and the people heart and soul. As an individual, you could find the meaning of life only in “a harmonious relationship” with the people around you. In other words, the individual had to be subsumed under the collective. Only one young man insisted that he serve his mother first because she’d given birth to him. I couldn’t tell how serious he was, nor could I believe they all meant what they said. Some of them were fond of purple prose. They mistook verbosity for eloquence and ambiguity for beauty, worshiping the evasive and the fuzzy while looking down on lucidity and straightforwardness. I had read enough of their nebulous writings to see the absence of sincerity as the crux of the problem. I told the class, “If you cannot write clearly, that’s because either your head is muddled or you are too afraid to reveal your true feelings and thoughts. To me, clarity is a great virtue of intellect.”

Some of the faculty members auditing my seminar looked doubtful, although they wouldn’t say anything against me openly. I could see, though, that they had their reservations and might think I was too hard on the young people and had neglected the particularity of their conditions.

One grad student said, “We’ve been taught to write like that.”

“We cannot say everything too bluntly,” another chimed in. “That’s not the Chinese way.”

“Nothing’s absolute besides,” said Hongbin, a student Party member. “So we ought to avoid getting too explicit and too excessive.”

I told them, “Your explanations don’t hold water. What I cannot abide are cynicism and intellectual relativism. A punch in the face means pain, to open fire on peaceful demonstrators is a crime, incarceration without charge is a violation of a citizen’s rights, a home torn down without enough compensation is a loss, selling recycled sink grease as cooking oil is profiteering, to borrow others’ ideas without acknowledgment is plagiarism. You must call things what they are. Many of you will teach high school and college after graduation. How can you be good teachers if you have no firm convictions? If you cannot tell right from wrong or good from evil, how can you expect your students to respect and trust you?”

“I totally agree,” Minmin said. “Whether wearing a condom or not, to force a woman to have sex is rape.”

The class exploded into laughter. Just a few days earlier it had been reported that a county official in Guizhou province had assaulted a young schoolteacher after a banquet. The woman pressed charges, but the local police refused to investigate, claiming it was not rape because the man had worn a condom. The incident provoked a national uproar.

I WAS DELIGHTED that my niece Juli came from Guangzhou to see me. She was so svelte, with a narrow waist, that it was hard to imagine her as the sister of the thickset Juya. Already twenty-six, Juli looked as if she was in her late teens, wearing black chinos and plaited leather sandals. She’d been to Beijing several times, so when I offered to take her sightseeing, she said, “I can go to town to see friends by myself. You don’t need to keep me company, Aunt Lilian. You must have a lot to do at school.” So I gave her some cash and asked her to come back for dinner.

The next evening Juli and I chatted over decaf coffee. She was fond of cappuccino, espresso, latte, all the drinks offered at Starbucks, but like me, she couldn’t consume too much caffeine in the evenings for fear of insomnia. Sprawled on a canvas-covered sofa in my living room, she looked like a carefree child, smiling and blinking her brown eyes. She took after her mother, with round cheekbones, a pug nose, but a delicate neck. With her around, my apartment felt warm and cozy, and I enjoyed the homey ambience, in which we could relax. Juli said she worked with a troupe now, acting small parts in plays and singing with its band. Her goal was to break into a movie or TV series. “From the stage to the screen,” she told me. “They might give me a part or two. I know some people in the local TV business.”

“Your parents still think you’re a factory worker,” I said.

“Oh, I was, a long time ago.”

She went on to mention several places where she had worked. She’d left home seven years ago for Dongguan, a boomtown about forty miles southeast of Guangzhou. With a fellow townswoman’s help, she got her first job at a zipper factory, earning four hundred yuan a month. But she couldn’t get along with some roommates in the factory’s dorm, so she jumped ship and found a job at a textile storehouse, where she mostly handled inventory. The work wasn’t heavy, mainly processing paperwork and driving a forklift, but she had to do long shifts, sometimes putting in sixty hours a week, with no overtime pay or benefits, though the food wasn’t bad — there was meat at lunch, usually two dishes plus a soup. She’d eat as much as she could at noon so that she could spend less for dinner, which was on her own. She was homesick and miserable all the time, but everyone said she was lucky because her job was good by comparison and paid almost six hundred yuan a month. Still, she was constantly nagged by the thought of working in a warehouse for the rest of her life, so she moved on again. This time she was hired by Wal-Mart as a cashier, with similar pay but fewer hours.

“For a low-end job, Wal-Mart is as good a place as you can find,” she told me. “People prefer to work for foreign companies. The wages are guaranteed and never delayed, and they also pay you overtime. On top of that, the foremen are not as mean as those in the local companies, and they won’t treat you like you’re shirking if you take a bathroom break for more than ten minutes. Still, it was hard for me to stand at the cash register punching numbers and making change day in and day out. What’s worse, you had to smile at customers no matter how tired and unhappy you were.”

“How long did you work there?”

“Eight months. Then I joined a nightclub because they found I had a good voice. I became a bar singer, but I didn’t stay with them for long. Customers were rude and kept harassing me. They treated a girl like a prostitute, like you were supposed to let them have their way with you if they offered you a price. For most customers a girl was just a piece of meat, like a live fish or chicken available for consumption. It was there that I realized I’d never be happy if I worked only for money. What prompted me to quit was that one night, on her way home, a girl got battered and lost a tooth because she refused to go out with a customer.”

“So you joined the troupe?”

“Yeah, I want to perform onstage or to become an actress in movies or TV no matter how poorly I’m paid. I know I’m not pretty enough to become a star, but I’ll be happy to settle for small parts.”

“I’m pleased to hear that,” I said. “I’m proud of you, Juli. What’s a good life? A combination of vocation and avocation — to make work and fun one thing. That’s from Robert Frost.”

“Who’s he?”

“An American poet.”

“That’s cool — the way he put it.”

“It’s wisdom, simple and clear.”

“Thanks, Aunt Lilian. This is the first time somebody has said such heartening words to me about my wild life. I’ve never dared to tell my parents about this; they might send someone to bring back their bad daughter on the loose.”

We both laughed. We also talked about her twin brother, Benning, whose exact whereabouts Juli didn’t know. She was sure he’d been working for the government, often in other countries. That was all she knew. Sometimes Benning seemed quite aloof and secretive. Juli told me that he was the scholar of the family, the only one who’d gone to college. He also spoke English well; he had learned it as a foreign-language major. The more she talked about him, the more mystified I became by this nephew of mine, who seemed like a phantom my mind couldn’t grasp. I asked if Juli had a photo of him. She had some but not with her.

“Benning used to be a wild thing,” she said. “In high school he was obsessed with automobiles, but he was underage and couldn’t get a driver’s license. Whenever possible, he’d sneak into a car or tractor, monkeying with the gearshift and the dials on the dashboard. One evening our granduncle, my grandma’s brother, gave a dinner party at his home. We all went. When most of the men had gotten drunk, Benning slipped out and stole a truck that belonged to one of the guests. He drove it away, but the minute he got out of the village he lost control and ran into a pond used for soaking hemp. Lucky for him, the water wasn’t deep and he could get out of the flooded cab. My parents spent five hundred yuan repairing the truck.”

“I’d love to meet him,” I said. “He’s the only nephew I have.”

“I’ll send you his email address.”

“Please do. Do you have a scanner?”

“I have one.”

“Email me some of his photos.”

“Sure I will.”

Juli asked me what my father had been like. It struck me that part of her purpose in visiting me might have been to find out something about her granddad. I would not reveal his true profession; for the time being I was reluctant to introduce him to his granddaughter as a top Chinese spy. Instead, I told Juli that my father had missed her grandmother Yufeng all the time (which might have been partly true). I added that he’d been a loving father to me but a feckless husband to my mother, that he had lived a displaced life because of the separation from his original family, and that he’d also made many sacrifices for China and should be regarded as a hero by the Chinese.

I didn’t share my thoughts and questions about my father with Juli, though my mind had been full of them lately. In the center of his plight may have resided this fact: mentally, he couldn’t settle down anywhere. It was true that in his later years he began to like America and grow attached to my mother, but he could not imagine spending the rest of his life with Nellie. His heart was always elsewhere. Wherever he went, he’d feel out of place, like a stranded traveler.