A Map of Betrayal: A Novel

by Ha Jin

  “What is it that makes him so attractive?”

  “I feel happy and confident around him. I like mature men who have lived a bit.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “My, don’t you think he might be too old for you? Twelve years is a big age difference.”

  “That’s not a problem. The problem is he’s still married and has a nine-year-old son.”

  “Well, does he plan to get a divorce?”

  “He’s been separated from his wife, and they’ll reach a settlement soon.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s going to file for divorce.”

  I started having a sinking feeling. “Juli, in this situation, try to use your head, not your heart. You’re not a teenage girl anymore. Don’t let love eat you up.”

  “You mean I shouldn’t be too serious about Wuping?”

  “I’m afraid he might be taking advantage of you.”

  “You’re so prehistoric, Aunt Lilian. The fact is, you could say I’ve been using him—he can help me advance my career. He’s well connected in show business here. On top of that, we love each other.”

  “Are you sure he loves you enough to leave his wife and son?”

  “Not a hundred percent yet, but it doesn’t matter. Truth to tell, whenever he spends time with me, I feel he’s doing me a favor. So long as he allows me to hang around, that will be okay with me. As a matter of fact, he says I’ve been sucking him dry, but he won’t mind. That’s the price for love he’s willing to pay.”

  Basically she was telling me she was content to be a “little third,” a term referring to a young woman who specializes in seducing married men and wrecking families. There are additional monikers for such a woman, like “fox spirit,” “evil flower,” “professional mistress.” Juli admitted that she had joined the online club called Little Thirds, whose theme song proclaims that their mission is to take men away from dull, obtuse wives. One of their slogans is “If you can’t take care of your husbands, let us help.” They’d just held their first conference on March 3, a covert event in Shanghai attended by scores of “little thirds” from all over the country. Some of the twenty- and thirty-somethings were quite brazen. One young woman posted five of her photos online and even boasted that her beauty had “startled the Party,” as if she’d swept numerous high-ranking officials off their feet. Her pictures showed nothing out of the ordinary.

  Juli was a good woman, I was sure, but she could have found a better man than Wuping, who I felt was too smooth. I always believe that if you love and marry someone, that person will become a kind of investment, because together you two will build your home, your family, and if you are lucky, your wealth. But the Chinese dating scene is quite unusual. Most girls won’t consider any young man without his own housing. In a city like Beijing or Guangzhou, an eight-hundred-square-foot apartment costs over three hundred thousand dollars, but the wages of a regular worker or clerk are around six hundred dollars a month. How on earth can a young man come to own any decent housing by working an ordinary job? So a lot of men are kept out of the dating scene. To make matters worse, most well-off older men are interested only in twenty-somethings, and as a result, many professionally accomplished women have been excluded from the dating arena as well. There are pretty, well-educated, financially secure thirty-somethings galore, but they won’t date younger, poor men. These young males, disenfranchised and sexually frustrated, can be a major source of social unrest.

  Juli’s concert was to take place in a small theater near the city’s stadium the next evening, and I was looking forward to it. During my teens I’d been fascinated by Woodstock—the star performers, the crazed audience, the camping tents, the VW buses, the drugs, the sex, the freedom, the harmony, but I was too young to go to the festival by myself. (Although there was a coterie of budding hippies in my prep school, they were so full of themselves that I couldn’t get close to them.) Neither of my parents liked that kind of wild music. I always wondered if my mother was tone-deaf—she hardly enjoyed any song. My dad had never outgrown his attachment to Hank Williams. He often said that all the other singers were too mannered and self-conscious, without the spontaneous magic of Williams’s voice, which came out of him as naturally as breathing. The only other singer Gary was fond of was Frank Sinatra. During my grad school years, I’d attended some open-air concerts in New England and enjoyed them immensely. Now I was looking forward to Juli’s performance.

  The event was much smaller than I had expected. It wasn’t Juli’s concert exactly. She and her band were to play for only fifteen minutes, and the rest of the show would feature other groups of artists. The theater was like a lecture hall that could seat four hundred people, but it was only half filled. As I was walking down the aisle, the walls seemed to be quavering and thumping with music that sounded familiar—earthy, tumbling, raucous, and forceful. It was rock, probably American, but I couldn’t place it.

  Juli came over the moment I sat down in the second row. She told me that the song was called “Summertime,” performed by a Ukrainian band named the Mad Heads.

  The lights dimmed and the audience was quieting down. A pudgy emcee in a pin-striped suit and a crimson tie sashayed to the lip of the stage and called out, “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please!” He clapped his hands and repeated the request. When the hall hushed, he began to describe the program, which was titled “Mad in Love,” saying this was going to be an unforgettable night for everyone. He promised that the show would be nothing shy of bona fide dramatic art and asked the audience to silence their cell phones. As the stage turned dark he faded away.

  The first group to perform was a heavy metal trio. The music was too loud, virtually thundering from start to finish. The audience seemed puzzled and hardly responded; perhaps many of them had no clue what to make of this cacophony. Next, Juli’s band went onstage. She was sporting a scarlet hip-hugging miniskirt and fishnet stockings and began strumming an electric guitar. On her right arm, near the shoulder, was a tattooed butterfly. She started singing, “All the years I’ve been looking for you / In my dream and in my memory / You are so close by, yet beyond reach …” She looked jittery, and her voice was a bit harsh, halting now and again. But little by little she got more confident. The music, somewhat like rock, wasn’t impressive, but the lyrics were pretty good, full of pathos. Her voice was becoming more guttural as she belted out, “Till then I won’t say good-bye / And I won’t say good-bye.” The audience was moved, especially the young people, and started clapping their hands. Some got to their feet, swaying with the music and waving their arms while colored bars of lights ricocheted above their heads. By now Juli and her fellow musicians were playing and singing with total abandon. I was impressed—onstage my niece appeared more daring than in life. She was in a way like her grandfather, demure in appearance but bold at heart.

  Two other local groups took the stage after Juli’s band, but neither was as good. A pair of young men did a break-dance routine, but they were out of sync with the music and didn’t move in unison either. When one was done and stood up, the other was still spinning on the floor like a top. Following them was a kind of strip show—four girls, all wearing sooty eye shadow, spike heels, and canary two-piece swimsuits with frills, strutted, wiggled their hips, and frolicked around. Every one of them seemed to be a bundle of nerves. Their fists were drawing tiny circles in front of them as if they were boxing with someone invisible. Now and again they kicked their feet high, revealing the pale undersides of their legs. Someone in the audience gave a shout of laughter. “Take it off!” a male voice boomed from the right front corner of the hall. I noticed that no matter how erotic the girls’ movements were, their faces remained wooden, slightly worried, as if they’d been alert to someone, their director or boss, observing them from the side. The performance felt robotic, though loud catcalls rose from the back.

  Then the emcee stepped onstage again and announced, �
��Dear friends, brothers and sisters, let me remind you that tonight’s show is called ‘Mad in Love,’ so our finale is going to be enacted by two performance artists who will demonstrate our theme to the max.”

  The stage went dark while the room kept buzzing. When the lights came on again, a couple, both sporting red underwear, the man in his mid-twenties and the woman a few years older, were making out on a large mattress on the stage. The audience was too transfixed to let out a peep. When both performers seemed aroused, they got into a sitting sex position. The woman, straddling the man’s lap with her back to his face, peeled off her cherry-red bra and dropped it to the floor. She went on to bump and grind her fleshy backside while they both faked orgasmic cries. Some in the audience grew disgruntled, swearing under their breath. A few snickered and hooted.

  Then the two performers changed positions—the woman got on all fours, swaying her hips a little, ready to take the man. As they were slowly stripping off their underwear with exaggerated gestures, a team of police arrived. They rushed onstage, pulled the couple to their feet, and shoved them. The male actor swerved to escape, but a cop tripped him. At once another two pounced on him and pulled him up. One slapped his face while the other punched him in the gut. “Ow!” The man doubled over, holding his sides with both hands.

  The two performers had sheets wrapped around them but were still barefoot. The police handcuffed them to each other, led them offstage, and proceeded toward the side exit. Though shaken, the couple kept shouting, “Long live artistic freedom! Wipe out oppression!”

  Juli was close to tears, muttering that she too was in hot water now. I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and tried to calm her. Wuping was frantic and hurried up to the emcee to demand an explanation. Why hadn’t they informed him of such a harebrained finale beforehand? Why had they invited that pair of freaks to enact sex publicly? Who was supposed to take responsibility for this show now? Several others also surrounded the chubby emcee, who apparently hadn’t breathed a word about the finale to them either. I took Juli out of the theater and hailed a cab.

  We went to Stacy’s apartment, afraid that the police might be after Juli. My friend was out with her students, so I sat Juli down at the dining table and put the kettle on the stove. She was still in a daze and kept saying, “They’ll haul me in tomorrow for sure. Aunt, I’m in big trouble.” She shielded a part of her face with her narrow hand, which had callused fingertips and square nails.

  After a few mouthfuls of pomegranate tea, she calmed down some. She asked me whether what the performance artists had done was art. “Certainly not,” I said. “Millions of people are doing the same thing every day in this province alone. How in God’s name can they justify the crude sex act as art? At best it’s part of life, an experience but not art.”

  “So the cops should nab them?” Juli asked, her cheeks still tearstained.

  “I don’t think they deserve to do jail time. At most they should be charged with public indecency.”

  “So even in the United States people are not allowed to make love onstage?”

  “Not like that. It was too vulgar, beyond the pale.”

  The more we talked, the more distraught Juli became. She was so terrified by the prospect of getting arrested that she dissolved into tears, sobbing in my arms. Patting her shoulder, I murmured, “I won’t let that happen. I won’t leave until you’re safe.”

  She hugged me tighter. “Aunt Lilian, you’ve been so good to me, like my mother.”

  I wouldn’t let her go back to her place that night, afraid that the police might turn up there, so we slept in the same room, sharing a queen-size bed.

  The next morning when we saw Wuping, he said that the two performance artists were a married couple, notorious for being flaky, but their marital status might help lighten their penalty, because the charge might simply be public exposure. His prediction turned out to be correct. Rather than being treated as serious criminals, the couple were each given half a year in forced labor, and the chubby emcee lost his job.

  I spent three more days keeping Juli company. Convinced that the police were not after her, I returned to Beijing. But the week after I was back, they summoned her. They asked her a host of questions, which she answered truthfully, so they were convinced that she’d had no inkling about the sex performance. She insisted she too had been outraged by it. Lucky for her, they let her go.

  1959

  The electric fan whirled while Gary slept in his study. Suddenly his daughter burst into tears in the living room. He sat up with a start, rubbing his eyes. He hadn’t gone to bed until three in the morning, having to finish a report for Thomas on China’s covert campaign to root out the remnants of the Dalai Lama’s followers. The Tibetan leader had fled to India a few months before.

  “Mommy, I can’t get up! Help me!” hollered two-year-old Lilian.

  Gary ran into the living room and found his wife lounging on the sofa, watching Leave It to Beaver. Her blond hair was in ruby rollers that made her head twice its normal size. Lately Nellie had been so moody that she often threw tantrums. Their baby was lying faceup on the floor in a flowered pinafore and a diaper, one of her legs motionless, apparently in pain, as her other leg kicked the air.

  “Leave me alone,” Nellie grumbled and pushed Lilian with the side of her slippered foot.

  Gary rushed up to his wife and asked sharply, “Why don’t you help her?”

  “I’m just tired of the little bastard.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I’m tired of her and you!”

  He slapped her, then grabbed hold of her forearm and pulled her off the sofa. She yelped. He went on beating her. “Don’t ever abuse my children again!” he hissed and kicked her thigh and rear end. Her denim sundress was disheveled; her pink panties showed. Then he caught himself using “children,” the plural, and that brought back his presence of mind. He reached down, picked up their daughter, and carried her into his study. The girl kept gulping down her tears. Gary looked at her shin, on which was a bruise the size of a nickel. She had just tripped over a kiddie chair.

  From the living room came his wife’s wailing. “Goddamn you, Gary! I know you have lots of bastards elsewhere!”

  It was out of the question that she could know about his first family, because he’d left their photo in his safety deposit box in the Hong Kong bank. Wait, had he let slip the truth in his sleep? Impossible—Nellie didn’t understand Chinese. But couldn’t he speak English about his twins? Damn, anything could happen in a dream. He pushed back those unanswerable questions, went into the kitchen, and opened the freezer for ice cubes. He wrapped them in a hand towel and pressed it on Lilian’s shin. As his anger subsided, he regretted having beaten Nellie. How could he have lost his head like that? How had he degenerated into a wife beater? A surge of shame sickened him, but he remained unapologetic.

  That was the only time he beat his wife. In their twenty-five years of marriage they often quarreled, but he would just walk out if he couldn’t stand her fits of temper anymore. He would roam the neighborhood and the parks until he thought she’d cooled off. Yet neither his wife nor their daughter could forget that beating. Even long after he died, Nellie would remind Lilian of the humiliating episode, saying, “It was all thanks to you.” Lilian, then in her forties, would remain silent, knowing her mother might blow her top if she responded.

  Ever since Lilian began teething, Nellie had been complaining about their apartment, calling it a “henhouse.” Their neighbor’s television was on most of the time, blasting music and commercials through the poorly insulated wall. The Jamesons, in the unit overhead, would squabble raucously even in the middle of the night, shouting out obscenities and threats. Even their kitchen knife would continue to chop chop chop above Nellie’s head every afternoon. She’d given up on the couple, who would never mend their ways however much she pleaded with them. She was sick of all the scuffles and the noise, including that from the front street, where cars would whoosh by even
in the early hours of the morning. Just a week ago an old Hungarian woman had broken her hip while descending the stairs, which were worn and slippery. There was also the recent four-dollar increase in the rent, eighty-one dollars a month now. It would surely go up again the next year.

  Nellie wanted “a real home,” a house on a quiet street where their child could ride a tricycle without their needing to watch over her. Gary agreed to move, but he said they had to wait until they had saved enough for the down payment on a house. Nellie suggested selling their car, but he wouldn’t do that. They had a good part of the loan for the Buick yet to pay, and they needed that car. He didn’t trust Nellie’s opinions about financial matters and often said to her, “You’re so extravagant. I never thought you were such an expensive girl when we were dating.” Indeed, in spite of her modest origins, she wouldn’t hesitate to splurge on clothes, cosmetics, groceries, and toys for their daughter. To be fair, Nellie didn’t have fancy taste. When dining out, she didn’t mind having hamburgers or fish and fries. Even burritos would do. Her spendthrift ways might have been due to her years of waitressing in bars and restaurants, where she’d seen rich people throw cash around. To some extent, she was pleased that Gary took charge of their money, because he was frugal by American standards and also prudent about household expenditures. Sometimes she joked that she wished her father were a Chinese man. (Grandpa Matt would uncork a bottle of Jack Daniel’s or Johnnie Walker on any excuse, and money burned a hole in his pocket.)

  Gary also had a good head for investment. Enlightened by a hurricane that had blacked out parts of the DC area for two days the summer before, he’d bought some electricity stocks, which had been rising in value ever since. Nellie was impressed that it was so easy for him to make money.

  In truth, he took a casual approach to the investment, which eventually didn’t yield much. His mind was preoccupied with other matters. Following the news in his homeland, he came to know that the previous year China had scored a bumper harvest. Then the collectives called “the commune” began to be formed in the countryside. He had misgivings about that, knowing the kolkhozy, the commune system in the Soviet Union, had turned out to be a nightmare. The collectivization in China went to such an extreme that even household kitchens were banned. The country folks began to have meals at communal dining centers, where free food was plentiful enough that everyone could eat their fill. People seemed too optimistic and giddy with fantastic visions, which promised to realize a Communist society soon, a utopian world where everyone would work diligently while taking whatever they needed free of charge. (“You can eat beef stewed with potatoes as much as you want,” according to Khrushchev’s depiction of Communism.) The Chinese government propagated this slogan nationwide: “Surpass the UK in ten years, catch up with the USA in fifteen.”