by Fred Hiatt
“You what?” I said, before I could stop myself. “I mean, did she say how she was going to get it back to you?”
“Yes, she said she’d leave it in an envelope at the desk of the Y,” Wei said. “My parents would probably kill me, but I think she is so brave. Like you! I was happy to help!”
“That is so nice,” I said. “Did she take anything else?” Why would Ti-Anna want Wei’s Hong Kong ID?
“No,” Wei said. “Actually, I keep my Home Return Card in the same billfold, and I just gave her the whole thing.”
My heart sank. Her Home Return Card—I knew from the guidebook that that was what China gave Hong Kong residents who wanted to travel to the mainland. A China visa, in other words. Except since it was all one country, they couldn’t call it a visa.
“Why?” Wei asked. The note of doubt was back, a bit stronger this time. “Is something wrong?”
“No, no, I just … I just wondered if maybe I’m in the wrong place, or something. Are there two Y’s?”
I was babbling now, trying not to alarm Wei while my mind raced to imagine what Ti-Anna might be up to. One thing was for sure, she wasn’t planning to give Wei her document back in the morning. And she must be awfully desperate to involve this sweet girl.
“Not really,” Wei said. “At least, when anyone says the Y, they mean the main one. On the Kowloon side?”
“That’s what I figured,” I said. “Well, I’m sure I screwed up somehow. There wouldn’t be anything unusual about that.”
I paused. “What else did you guys talk about? I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to see you.”
“We didn’t have much time,” Wei said. “I promised my parents I’d be home before dark. She told me a little about what happened to you in Vietnam, like I said. I told her how we were going up to the beach on Hainan Island next week. She asked me what it’s like, and how we get there—she talked about how, even with her father and everything, she’d like to go back into China someday.”
“ ‘How you get there’?” I repeated. Hainan was a resort inside China proper. “What do you mean?”
“You know, do we fly, or take the train, or whatever,” she answered. “She asked about Lo Wu, where we cross into the mainland, and how that works, whether pedestrians can cross. But we take the train. We talked about school a little. And how neither one of us is looking forward to it! And she promised to come visit again. You better come too!”
“Definitely!” I said. “Or you to Washington.”
“I wish!” Wei said. “All right, I’d better go. Friend me as soon as you get home, all right?”
“Definitely,” I said again. “Thanks, Wei.”
My heart had sunk even lower. Ti-Anna didn’t intend to be in Bethesda two days from now, friending Wei or anyone else. I realized that she didn’t plan on being on a plane to Dulles tomorrow. I wasn’t going to get on that plane without her, though. I knew that now.
Ti-Anna was heading into China with Wei’s ID and Home Return Card. Somehow she thought she was going to rescue her father from prison in Kunming.
What she really was going to do was get herself locked up. For a long, long time.
Chapter 42
My guidebook was in my pack—in the trunk of Brian’s car. I stumped as fast as I could to the nearest fancy hotel, the Regent, found its gift shop and pulled a guidebook from the rotating shelf.
Speed-scanning, I learned I could get to Lo Wu via the Kowloon–Canton Railway, which left from the Hung Hom station, which was just a few blocks away. I shoved the book back and swung my way there. The train accepted the same Octopus card as the subway and the ferry. I boarded as the doors were closing. Trains left every five or ten minutes, I saw, so Ti-Anna might have a pretty good lead on me. How good, I didn’t know.
It was a forty-minute ride through the darkness, which gave me time to think, but I wouldn’t say I was thinking clearly. Mostly I tried to imagine what Ti-Anna thought she was up to.
Somehow she might get to Kunming, I could believe that. She looked enough like Wei to travel on her ID, and her Chinese was good enough not to make anyone suspicious.
Somehow, though I had no idea how, she might even find the prison where they were holding her dad—if he had in fact been taken to Kunming, and if he hadn’t been moved since.
Then what? She thought she could make them see reason? Or she’d smuggle him a file inside a moon cake?
Eventually Wei would report her card as lost or stolen. Would she tell who had stolen it? Maybe not. She might still feel loyal to Ti-Anna, even when her card wasn’t at the Y tomorrow morning. Or she might feel embarrassed to have been duped.
All in all, Ti-Anna might figure she’d have a few days inside China before they even knew she was there.
What I knew for sure was that she had a way into China and I didn’t, and so I had to stop her at the border.
As soon as I saw Lo Wu, I should have realized how impossible that would be.
Thousands of people go back and forth every day, so of course the border crossing was an enormous complex: barracks and buildings and fences and lines and intimidating signs everywhere.
There were a dozen lines in a glaringly bright terminal, and hundreds of people snaking back and forth, patiently waiting to present their documents. I raced from one line to the next: no Ti-Anna. I made myself do it again, slowly, face by face; maybe she’d disguised herself in some way.
Of course she wasn’t there.
I couldn’t wait inside the building. Either you were in line, or you had no reason to be there, and I didn’t exactly blend in.
I sat by a scraggly bush out in the shadows, from where I could see inside the waiting hall. Crushed juice boxes and empty beer cans were scattered around me, and diesel fumes mixed with a faint odor of urine. I’d been starving. Now I felt nauseous.
And so I waited, feeling foolish.
At some level I must have known it was hopeless, even as I tried to examine each arriving person, the businessmen with their briefcases, the young moms with children and backpacks full of presents for the grandparents across the border.
Of course she wouldn’t have disguised herself: the whole point was how much she resembled Wei. Maybe she hadn’t come here at all. These days there were many ways to cross into China: trains, buses, even ferries that would take you to cities up and down the Pearl River Delta. For all I knew, she had asked Wei about this one to throw me off.
I couldn’t admit that I had failed to stop her. And I couldn’t think what else to do.
I didn’t realize that I’d dozed off until I woke up, befuddled. The immigration hall was dark. In fact it must have been the quiet that woke me.
I stood stiffly and remembered why I was there. The darkness was like a final verdict of failure. I made my way back to the station.
Midnight had passed, and I had missed the last return train. The next wouldn’t leave until five-something, I learned from a man still inside the ticket booth.
He was gray-haired, soft-spoken, and when I looked bereft (not to mention bedraggled, I’m sure) he seemed to take pity. He told me where I could still find a taxi to take me back to Kowloon.
It would cost a small fortune, but I was past caring. I was low on cash, though, so I asked the man where I could find an ATM, and he pointed me back across the station.
Standing before that ATM machine, in the nearly deserted Lo Wu railway station, was where I discovered that my Visa card was missing.
Day Nine: Monday
Hong Kong and Washington, D.C.
Chapter 43
The empty slot in my wallet shocked me into finally thinking straight.
I sprint-crutched my way back across the deserted station. The man in the booth looked a little exasperated when I reappeared.
“This is going to sound crazy,” I said. He looked up at me, without expression. “I’m sure you want to get home. But could you possibly do me a giant favor? It’s an emergency.”
He waited patiently,
if a bit warily.
“I need to know when was the last flight from Hong Kong to Kunming today, and when’s the first flight tomorrow.”
“Kunming? You mean in Yunnan province?”
I nodded. It’s possible my pronunciation wasn’t native quality.
He looked me over skeptically.
“And this is an emergency?”
I nodded.
He sighed, put on the bifocals that he kept hanging around his neck and turned to his computer. In a minute he came back to the microphone in the window.
“There are four flights a day,” he said. “The last one today was at three-fifty p.m. The first one out tomorrow is Dragon Air Flight 2435 at nine-fifty-five a.m.”
“Thank you!” I said, with so much feeling that the clerk looked alarmed for the first time.
She could not have flown out yet. I still had a chance.
“That’s all you need?” he asked.
I nodded and tried to calm myself.
“Thank you,” I said again. “You are very kind.”
It wasn’t all I needed, but there wasn’t much the man in the booth could do about the rest of my problems. I didn’t have enough money for a taxi back to Kowloon, let alone to the airport, and without my credit card obviously I couldn’t get more. But if I caught the first train back, and then the airport bus, I should still have time.
In the darkest corner of the station I slid down with my back against a tiled wall and my broken leg straight out. I was sure Hong Kong police wouldn’t look kindly on this kind of vagrancy, but a couple of men in uniform had strolled through while I’d been talking to the man in the booth, and I hoped it had been their last sweep of the night. The ticket man himself had deliberately looked the other way as I walked off, I thought. The booth was shuttered now.
I wondered where Ti-Anna was at that moment.
I thought I finally understood what she had done.
When she had called from Sydney’s office, her mother’s reaction must have been even more unbearable than Ti-Anna had let on. It had eaten at her until she decided she just couldn’t return with the news that her father was, once again, in a Chinese prison, and that neither of them could do anything about it.
It made me angry. Somebody I loved—yes, on the gritty floor of a dark, deserted train station, I admitted that to myself—somebody I had done so much for had betrayed me. While I was fast asleep, she had lifted my phone from my backpack and my Visa card from my wallet. She hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me her plans, and she had left me on my own and close to broke.
I felt sad—sad that she felt so desperate that she couldn’t tell me what she was going to do.
By keeping it a secret she’d been trying to protect me, I understood that, and to make sure I wouldn’t try to stop her. On some level she had to know that her plan was crazy enough that this time I wouldn’t have tagged reluctantly behind. I would have done everything in my power to wrench her onto that jet to Washington.
I was still going to do that, if I could.
All I could do was lean against the wall and miss her—miss the real Ti-Anna, the one who had disappeared not from the noodle shop but somewhere high over the South China Sea.
I set my phone to buzz at five a.m. and closed my eyes.
Of course I couldn’t sleep. I played and replayed how Ti-Anna had pulled this off, imagining slightly different details each time.
From the airport bathroom, she had arranged to meet Wei somewhere near the noodle restaurant, that much was sure. She had pulled off her surprise while we were eating, had run off and—for once not getting lost—found Wei. Then, after pocketing Wei’s ID, she had used the Visa card, maybe at a few different machines, to get enough cash to buy a ticket to Kunming.
She would have wanted to fly straight there, and not waste time on buses or trains. I was sure of that now too. At nine-fifty a.m., traveling as Wang Wei, law-abiding Hong Kong high school student, she’d be sitting on Dragon Air Flight 2435. As for what she would do from there on in, I didn’t have a clue. But maybe she did. At a minimum, I knew the set of her jaw would make it look like she did.
I was sure I was right this time about her plans. I wasn’t at all sure how I would keep her from carrying them out.
I just knew I had to find her.
Chapter 44
I guess in the end I did doze off, because my stomach growled me awake before my phone had a chance to buzz. I think I’d been dreaming of that bowl of noodles I’d abandoned when Ti-Anna disappeared. I didn’t dare use any of my scarce remaining money on food.
At first it seemed as though things would go my way. I boarded the first train with a few sleepy Monday-morning commuters. Back at the Hung Hom station I had to wait only five minutes before the airport express bus pulled in. A couple of other travelers stood aside for me and my crutches.
But when I pressed my Octopus card to the fare machine, it answered with an angry buzz, like I’d answered wrong in a quiz show.
“Need more money,” the driver said in heavily accented English.
The fare was forty-five dollars (Hong Kong). I had thirteen dollars left on my card. I took what I had out of my wallet, and then dug into my pockets, trying to separate Hong Kong coins from Vietnamese dong while the others waiting to board began to shift and press impatiently.
“Pay or step away,” the driver said.
“I don’t have quite enough,” I finally had to admit, and then held out my bills and coins. “Is there any way you could let me on with this? I really, really need to get to the airport.”
“Everybody really, really need to go somewhere,” the driver said. “Please step away.”
Then, throwing me a crumb, he said, “City bus A33 much cheaper. Change at Tung Chung.”
So I stumped off to find city bus A33, which was in fact much cheaper.
And much, much slower.
Everyone will tell you Hong Kong is a tiny place, and if you compare it to China of course that’s true. But if you’re driving to the airport through the jumble of Kowloon, instead of on those airy causeways, it doesn’t seem all that tiny.
To me it seemed endless—block after block after congested block. My bus driver seemed to want to savor every storefront. He stopped at yellow lights. He slowed for green lights, as if hoping they would turn yellow. When they stayed green, there was always someone waiting to board at the corner, usually a bent-over old lady, and by the time she made it up the steps and finished fumbling through her purse, the light was red. Or yellow. Or about to turn yellow, which seemed enough to persuade the driver that he ought to wait a cycle.
I began to sweat.
The longer we drove, the worse the traffic seemed to get. I went forward to ask how long it would take, but the driver didn’t speak English. I sat back down, staring at my watch, cursing every red light, and every elderly passenger, and most of all, my infuriating driver. I had had plenty of time. Now it was going to be close.
At the Tung Chung terminus it got worse. I couldn’t find the airport shuttle, and the information line seemed frozen. I stood in it for a while, gave up to go looking for the bus, came back to find the line even longer.
When I finally boarded what I thought was the right bus, it sat for what seemed an eternity, before a driver showed up and finally got us moving.
By the time I reached the airport it was eight-forty a.m. I had figured I’d be at the Dragon Air counter by seven, which would have been plenty of time. Now as I hobbled to Dragon Air check-in, I was despairing. She’d probably spent the night in the airport—maybe on the same patch of floor we’d staked out before flying to Hanoi—and been the first to check in. Even seven might have been too late. Eight-forty was hopeless.
At the counter I had to wait in another line, of course, and when I reached the counter they wouldn’t tell me if Wang Wei had checked in, or even if she was on the plane.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I have to know.”
I was nearly shouting
, realizing even as I did that I was doing myself no good. I can only imagine how I looked and smelled, crazed, having spent part of the night in a beery bush and the rest on a train station floor.
Ti-Anna was a few hundred yards away, about to take a step that would ruin her life. And I couldn’t even talk to her.
Then I had one last thought.
“Where’s the United counter?” I asked.
Chapter 45
It was a distance. Everything was a distance in the Hong Kong airport. But when I got there I found no line whatsoever.
“You’re here awfully early,” the lone woman behind the counter said when I showed her my ticket to D.C. “Check-in won’t start for four more hours.”
“I promised my mother I’d go through security first thing in the morning, she’s so worried I’ll miss my plane,” I said, in as earnest a voice as I could muster. “Is there any way you could check me in?”
She gave me a long look but eventually took my ticket.
“Let me see what I can do,” she said.
She scanned my passport into her machine and then gave me an even longer look. Had Brian put me on some no-fly list? My heart was beating so hard I was sure she’d hear it.
“No luggage?” she asked. “And aren’t you rather young to be taking such a long trip on your own?”
“I guess that’s true,” I said. Please, give me my boarding pass. There’s no time for small talk. “A school trip. I stayed a little longer than the others, to finish my project. Sent most of my stuff back with them.”
“Oh?” she said, as if she had all the time in the world. She was a middle-aged Chinese lady, more like a schoolteacher than an airline employee. “What did your project concern?”
“Urban ecology,” I blurted. Now I had no idea what was going to come out of my mouth. “Wildlife in an urban setting. Especially snakes on Lamma Island.”
“How unusual,” she murmured, as her machine spit out my boarding pass. Please don’t be a herpetologist, I thought.
