Nine Days

by Fred Hiatt

  Kwan’s was one of the sleekest, all intimidating marble and glass. In the lobby two young women in powder-blue suits with powder-blue caps sat behind a desk, but they didn’t seem to be blocking anyone from the bank of elevators. Trying to look like we knew what we were doing, we found Horace Kwan on the directory on the wall—floor 33—and joined the flow of people riding up.

  Double glass doors led to a thickly carpeted anteroom, where another young lady sat primly behind a wooden desk. It was weirdly quiet.

  Ti-Anna found her voice first.

  “We’d like to see Mr. Kwan, please,” she said in English. I realized I had yet to hear her speak Chinese since we’d landed.

  “Do you have an appointment?” the lady said.

  She didn’t exactly sneer, but she looked like she would have sneered if she hadn’t been trained not to. Obviously, she knew the answer to her question.

  Ti-Anna shook her head.

  “Would you please tell him that Ti-Anna Chen is here? We don’t mind waiting.”

  “I’m afraid Mr. Kwan doesn’t see anyone without an appointment,” she said.

  “I understand,” Ti-Anna said.

  “Would you like to make an appointment?” the woman asked icily. “Though Mr. Kwan is quite booked for the next several months.”

  You had to know Ti-Anna to tell when she was angry. I could sense that she wasn’t going to be inviting this woman to lunch any time soon.

  “Would you please tell him that Ti-Anna Chen is here?” Ti-Anna repeated in a pleasant voice. “I think he might like to know.”

  The woman sighed, started to speak, glared at Ti-Anna and apparently decided that we weren’t going anywhere. Shaking her head, she disappeared through a door in the wood-paneled wall behind her desk.

  The door reopened almost instantly for a tall, distinguished man in a suit, with horn-rimmed glasses and a shock of black hair falling over his forehead.

  “Ti-Anna?” he said. “Is it really you?”

  She nodded. “And this is my friend Ethan.”

  “Horace Kwan,” he said. He gravely shook my hand, then put a hand on Ti-Anna’s shoulder without speaking.

  Finally, he gestured toward the door.

  “Please come in,” he said.

  Take that, I wanted to tell Miss Snooty, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  Chapter 16

  Stepping into Horace Kwan’s office, you felt you might fall right into the harbor. The wall facing us was glass. You could see the Kowloon ferry dock we’d left from an hour before, and if you squinted and shielded your eyes from the sun bouncing off the waves you could even make out the railing where we’d met Wei and Mai.

  “Please,” Horace Kwan said again. “Do take a seat.”

  He pointed us toward a couch facing the glass and sat in an armchair to the side. His desk was at the other end of the room, dark wood with graceful curving legs.

  Nobody spoke.

  Well, I’m certainly not going first, I thought. But neither of them seemed uncomfortable. Horace Kwan was studying Ti-Anna as though if he looked hard enough he could read what was on her mind—but in a nice enough way, and she waited patiently.

  Finally, he broke the silence.

  “I’ve heard so much about you, for so long, Ti-Anna,” he said. “This is a great pleasure.” You could tell he meant it.

  “I’ve heard a great deal about you, Mr. Kwan,” she said.

  There was another pause, and then he asked, “What brings you to Hong Kong? Are you meeting your father?”

  “Well,” Ti-Anna said. “We hope so. But that is why we came to see you. We don’t know where he is.”

  I was studying his face, but I didn’t see any change of expression—maybe a tensing, a slight leaning forward in his chair.

  “What do you mean?” he said. “Please explain.”

  You could imagine his using the same calm tone for someone who came in and announced, “I just beheaded my husband,” or something along those lines.

  So Ti-Anna explained—how her dad had gotten a message that excited him, how he’d left for Hong Kong, how he’d hardly been in touch since—and how unusual that all was.

  “I am certain that if he came to Hong Kong he would want to see you,” she concluded. “So I thought you might be able to help us.”

  It was her turn to sound calm, but I knew she wasn’t feeling calm. If Horace Kwan couldn’t help, I wasn’t sure where we’d go next.

  He put his long fingers together in a steeple, searched Ti-Anna’s face again and then glanced over at me.

  Following his gaze, Ti-Anna said, “I have no closer friend than Ethan.”

  I blushed, and thought I’d tuck that away to replay later. I realized—I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before—that if not for me they would have been speaking in Chinese.

  “Well, then Ethan is my friend also,” Horace said. “I’m sure you know”—he was looking at me now—“that Ti-Anna’s father is one of our bravest and most important patriots.”

  Now it was Ti-Anna’s turn to blush.

  “Though you would not know it from Chinese newspapers today, I’m sure he will go down as such in our history books. If,” he added drily, “Chinese students are ever permitted to study their true history.”

  He turned to Ti-Anna. “You know, this may surprise you, but I’ve always thought the bravest thing your father did was to leave the country,” he said.

  “To leave? Why was that brave?”

  “He could have endured whatever they dished out in prison. But he knew how hard it is in China to be the family of a patriot—of a dissident, as they are called. I think he worried how much more your mother could stand, with him in jail and plainclothes police camped on the landing outside your apartment door, listening in on every phone call, following her on every trip to the market.”

  Ti-Anna perched on the edge of the sofa, facing Horace, totally still. I didn’t know if she had any memory of those police guards. Somehow I was sure that she had never heard her parents talk about any of this.

  “So,” Horace said, “he left. Very difficult for him. He knew few would understand the different kind of courage required. He worried especially about the opinion of those who mattered most to him—especially his daughter.”

  I thought I might get teary, so I could only imagine how Ti-Anna must be feeling.

  “He knew the normal fate of the exile—forgotten, overlooked, belittled. Somehow, if our suffering diminishes, then supposedly so does our moral authority. It is a strange calculus.” He gazed out at his stunning view.

  “In any case,” he resumed. “Your father was determined to fight against this fate. Not for the sake of his ego, you understand, but for China. Even from America, he never stopped fighting for democracy in our homeland. And so, yes, I did see him here, quite recently, on his latest mission in that quest.

  “He stopped in the day he arrived,” Horace said. “Like you, he did not feel it necessary to make an appointment.”

  He smiled, and as he walked to his desk said, “You all must assume my business is doing very poorly, since you are sure you can drop in and find me available.” He leafed back a page on his desk calendar. “The fourth, it was.”

  “And?” Ti-Anna said, her voice quavering slightly for the first time. “Did he tell you why he was here?”

  Horace hesitated. “You must be hungry,” he said. “Why don’t we continue our conversation over dim sum?”

  Before Ti-Anna could politely lie to him that we had already eaten, I interjected, “Yes!” It came out as a bit of a squawk. I realized, embarrassed, that it was the first word I had spoken.

  But Ti-Anna didn’t overrule me, and I realized, even more embarrassed, that his wanting to go out had nothing to do with food. He wanted to talk where he knew they would not be listening.

  As he held the office door for us, he and Ti-Anna started conversing in Chinese. The young woman at the front desk gave me the evil eye as we walked out. I smiled ba
ck. We rode the elevator down in silence.

  Chapter 17

  I tried to memorize our route as Horace led, so that we could find our way back without him, but I soon gave up. He took us along skywalks and up and down escalators; only once did we come down to a road and have to wait at a traffic light.

  He loped easily on his long legs, his shock of black hair bouncing lightly over his forehead. Ti-Anna walked beside him, chatting quietly.

  Every once in a while I glanced over my shoulder, but if someone was following us, I didn’t have a chance in a million of spotting him. I had thought New York City was crowded, but it couldn’t match Hong Kong.

  There was no hiding the Taurus parked across from Ti-Anna’s apartment in Bethesda, and that was how they wanted it—to be visible, to be intimidating. The man on the Metro—if he was one of them—stood out from the crowd enough to be noticeable. But here, everyone was Chinese. Almost everyone was in suits. Not a few had military-style haircuts. There was just no way to know.

  But if they cared enough to break into our hotel room, I had to assume they might care enough to keep an eye on us now.

  Horace must have had the same idea, judging by how he behaved at the restaurant.

  Inside the front door a half-dozen employees, each wearing headsets, manned a desk as people jostled to get their names on a list for tables. When the boss saw Horace, she made room through the crowd, led us to a bank of elevators—it seemed to be a four-story restaurant, crazy as that sounds—and escorted us to the third floor.

  A wave of noise, a cheerful, hungry roar, nearly knocked us over as the elevator door opened on a huge room full of round tables. Before us a thousand people, or so it sounded, were eating and waving chopsticks and talking and arguing and drinking tea, while young women in uniforms pushed carts through the din, unloading little dishes at one table, then weaving on to the next and unloading some more.

  The manager led us to a corner that I guessed was Horace’s regular spot. But Horace whispered into her ear, and she led us right back into the middle of everything and plopped us at a table there.

  “This way you can enjoy the true Hong Kong experience,” Horace said to me with a polite smile. Yes, I thought, and this way no microphone could possibly pick up our conversation.

  It wasn’t easy to talk above the roar, anyhow, and for a while we concentrated on the food, or at least I did. Horace poured tea into our little round cups, and he said yes to almost every server who pushed a cart past us, until our table was covered with dishes of shrimp dumplings and pork wrapped in tofu skin and other things I didn’t recognize and couldn’t possibly name, even after tasting them.

  Ti-Anna nibbled, Horace popped an occasional morsel, his chopsticks like extensions of his long fingers. I … well, I may have eaten more than my share. I already had spent enough time with Ti-Anna to know I’d better take advantage, because who knew when my next meal might be. Besides, I thought, it was only polite, as a guest, to show enthusiasm.

  Finally, when every kind of cart had been wheeled past us, Horace leaned toward us and, in as quiet a voice as could be heard, asked Ti-Anna to retell her story, from the beginning.

  She described her father’s decision to go to Hong Kong, and how he had just disappeared after the second phone call, and how we had decided to follow. She ended with the broken hair and our plan to break free of the listeners.

  Horace nodded gravely. “It is worrisome,” he said. “I was certainly surprised to see you and your friend.”

  As far as I was concerned, that didn’t advance things much. Ti-Anna nodded and waited.

  “As you know, your father always believed that the key to bringing democracy to China would be uniting intellectuals like himself with workers from the factories,” he said. “Many people argued against him. The workers are too busy making money and worrying about feeding their relatives back in the village, they would say. But he would say, no, the workers also want to be free, it is just a question of overcoming their fear.”

  I was sure none of this was new to Ti-Anna. But she listened without impatience. I tried to follow her example.

  “When he came to see me, he was very excited, because he said he had a chance to meet with leaders of an underground workers’ movement,” Horace went on. “He seemed to think this could be the beginning of something big.”

  “Meet where?” Ti-Anna asked. “Inside China?”

  Horace shook his head. “He didn’t explain, and I didn’t ask,” he said. “But he told me the contact had come through a man who—well, do you know this name?” He slid an expensive-looking pen from his breast pocket and, rather than saying the name aloud, wrote three Chinese characters on a paper napkin, which he then swiveled so Ti-Anna could read it. She shook her head.

  “He moved from the mainland to Hong Kong about fifteen years ago, I believe,” Horace said, “probably barely in time to avoid arrest.”

  He crumpled the napkin into a ball and shoved it into his jacket pocket.

  “He started a radio program that attracted a huge audience inside China. Every illegal strike, every workers’ protest—somehow he would find out about it, and report on it, and people all through China would listen. Of course, no Chinese newspapers would write about such things.”

  He sipped his tea.

  “A few years ago, his radio station said they would not carry his program anymore,” Horace continued. “A business decision, they said—no advertisers. I’m sure there was pressure from Beijing.” He spat that out with disgust.

  “He kept his program going on the Internet. He still seems to hear more about what’s happening inside China than anyone else, I don’t know how. And somehow he earns enough of a living to keep going. I’m not sure how he manages that, either.”

  “So my father was going to meet him?”

  Horace nodded. “If anyone knows where your father was headed, it would be he. Your father told me they were getting together the day after he saw me.”

  Whatever food remained on the table was looking a bit gelatinous. Horace signaled for a waitress, who came over and counted our plates to figure out how much we owed. He pulled some bills from his pocket. I offered to help pay, but he waved me off.

  As the waitress walked away, Ti-Anna said, “Do you know how we can find this man?”

  “He lives on Lamma—you know the island?”

  Ti-Anna shook her head, but I said yes. I hadn’t read and reread the guidebook for nothing. Lamma was just south of Hong Kong Island, and in a way its opposite—only a few thousand residents, in a few fishing villages. People from the city took the ferry there to go to the beach or eat seafood at restaurants on the bay.

  “Do you know his number?” I asked.

  “He has no phone, as far as I know,” he said. “But I can give you an email address.”

  Ti-Anna shook her head. “Can you give us any more information? We need to pay him a visit.”

  “You and your friend are not exempt from dangers,” Horace replied. “You cannot just roam about.”

  When Ti-Anna did not answer, he began drawing on another napkin.

  “He lives on the most isolated part of the island—down here,” he said as he sketched what looked like a long, narrow piece of a jigsaw puzzle. “The opposite end from where the ferry drops you.”

  This time I took the napkin, folded it and stuck it in my little pack.

  “There are no cars on the island, as you know,” he said to me. “If you don’t have a boat, you have to walk. But once you get to his little bay, there’s no missing the house and its bright red roof.”

  We headed for the elevator. He and Ti-Anna resumed talking in Chinese, this time very earnestly. As we rode down, I saw tears in her eyes. But by the time he shook our hands outside the restaurant and we again thanked him and said good-bye, she seemed calm.

  “What was that about?” I asked.

  “I asked if he would contact my mother,” Ti-Anna said. “She will feel more reassured hearing from him.�
��

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said we would be better off not pursuing this on our own, but that he would not try to stop us, since we had come so far and were so determined. He said my father would be proud of us. And he said he would tell my mother that I am fine, since it is true so far.”

  “Wow,” I said. “ ‘So far.’ What does he think could happen?”

  Ti-Anna shrugged. “He didn’t strike me as full of optimism,” she said. “But at least he didn’t try to stop us.”

  Chapter 18

  At first, things went according to Ti-Anna’s plan, and I started to shake the ominous feeling Horace had left me with. Maybe I’d just eaten too many dumplings, I told myself.

  We found our way back to the ferry docks. To be honest, I found our way; Ti-Anna’s sense of direction was on a par with her appreciation for food.

  We scoped out the piers, trying not to telegraph our interest in one over another. Ferries for Lamma seemed to depart every thirty minutes, from Pier 4.

  At a kiosk, we bought a map of the island. Ti-Anna didn’t want to leave such a clue, even with a harried clerk inside a kiosk, but I didn’t think Horace’s napkin would be enough to get us to Radio Man’s house before dark. As a compromise we bought maps of a few other islands too.

  I also insisted on buying some protein bars and Snickers, and a couple of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut bars—they still seemed to like their British sweets in Hong Kong.

  “How can you even think about food after all that dim sum?” Ti-Anna said.

  “You’ll thank me later,” I replied, thinking of it more as a suggestion than a prediction.

  Joining the crowds in front of the main Star Ferry dock, we found places on a bench, sipping boxes of cold tea with our faces turned to the sun. The day was warming, though a cool breeze was blowing in from the bay. We could have been a couple of young tourists getting a lazy start on our sightseeing.