A Map of Betrayal: A Novel

by Ha Jin

  Then one day he confessed, “I am in the United States, on the East Coast.” That was a shock, and I wanted to know more. “Don’t interrogate me, please,” he wrote. “I am sure we will spend a lot of time together in the future.”

  I wouldn’t let it go at that and kept asking him. He avoided answering fully but would reveal something from time to time. I tried to form a picture of him with the scraps of information I had. He’d been in the States for more than two years, running a small business outside Boston that dealt in software and computer parts. He’d been assigned there by a Chinese company and seemed to be enjoying himself. The reason he hadn’t told his family his whereabouts was that he felt he might be called back or sent elsewhere after his current assignment; also because he came back to China for business or vacation every two or three months. I said I’d love to see him remain in the States for many years, which he said was what he wanted too. I was excited that I would have a family member on my father’s side living near me after I went home. The world suddenly felt smaller and more mysterious. If only my father could have seen his grandson in America.

  1961

  The Shangs were living in a quiet cul-de-sac at the end of Riverview Street in Alexandria. Their home was a raised ranch with an attached carport; a huge rock sat beside the house, and holly hedges demarcated the property. A pomegranate tree, rare in Virginia but already more than ten years old, stood in a corner of the backyard, reminding Gary of the same kind of tree back in his home province. He had paid twenty-three thousand dollars for this place, a little higher than the market price, but he loved the tranquil location, the brick exterior of the house, the living room with oak-paneled walls, and the finished lower floor, where the windows were just above the ground and where he could have a room for a study, so without haggling he had clinched the purchase. Nellie also liked the home, particularly the bay window in the kitchen and the French doors between the living room and the dining room, which made the house feel more spacious than it was. She was fond of the peaceful neighborhood too and devoted herself to taking care of Lilian and to the housework. The girl was going to be four in July, and once she started preschool, Nellie would look for a job, doing something she liked. But what did she want to do? She wasn’t sure yet, though she thought about it now and then.

  Gary would mow the half-acre lawn and trim the shrubs. All the work outside the house belonged to him, including digging out the weeds in grass—dandelions, creeping charlie, mallow, clover. He hated slugs and would get rid of every one he saw. He was good with his hands and maintained their car and household appliances. Sometimes when he was free, he’d take a walk in the nearby park, where the air would quiver with scattered birdsong. He’d bring along his daughter if the weather permitted, either holding her in his arms or leading her by the hand, and once in a while he would carry her piggyback. He’d teach her some Mandarin words or phrases. To some extent he was a good family man, gentle to his family and polite to their neighbors, who were all impressed by the chrysanthemums he had planted around his house. Yet he was detached from what was going on around him and wouldn’t mix with others, except for the fact that he followed the NBA on his own and could talk with his colleagues about the games. Try as he might, he couldn’t get excited about baseball; the game was too slow for him. Fortunately, his wife never complained about their lack of social life. Rarely would the Shangs invite people over. Not until their daughter was old enough to make school friends and to hold a pajama party once a year, around Halloween, did they begin to have a few visitors.

  Although Gary was calm in appearance, 1961 was a tumultuous year for him. In the spring he was naturalized. At the citizenship ceremony he pledged allegiance to the Star-Spangled Banner and swore he’d bear arms to defend the U.S. Constitution, a document he had read with great admiration for its careful attention to the citizens’ rights defined and protected by the amendments. It was like a contract between the country and the people. He went through the whole ceremony with a numb heart, though he was deeply impressed by its solemnity and forced a smile when he showed a woman official his expired Chinese passport. With a pair of scissors she cut a corner off its front cover, handed it back to him, and congratulated him on his brand-new citizenship. By now Gary could honestly say he loved some aspects of American life—the orderliness, the plentitude, the privacy, the continuity of daily life, the freedom of travel (domestically with a car and internationally with a U.S. passport or green card). Nevertheless, his mind couldn’t help but wander to the distant land where his other family was. He had decided not to have more children with Nellie, not wanting further complications. For him, happiness lay elsewhere, and he could visualize it only in his homeland and in the reunion with his original family.

  With his U.S. citizenship in hand, he had to pass a lie-detector test in order to become a regular CIA employee. He read about how the polygraph worked and knew that as long as he wasn’t disturbed by any question and didn’t make the needle jump, he should be able to fool the machine. To keep himself calm, he began to put into his teacups two herbs—schisandra fruit and tuckahoe, both of which he’d bought in San Francisco years before. For days the herbal tea made him slightly sedated, and a week later he passed the test without difficulty. Now he had access to documents classified as Top Secret, some of which were sent to him for translation directly from George Thomas, who had earned his PhD the year before and was now addressed as Dr. Thomas by his colleagues. He and Gary, though, were still on a first-name basis. They continued to frequent jazz bars together. Most times Thomas would talk while Gary just listened. Afterward he would recall their conversations, write down snippets of intelligence, and squirrel them away.

  Now able to read more reports on the Far East, Gary could see that China was in shambles. The Great Leap Forward had been a catastrophe, and the whole land had been ravaged by a continuous famine. The collectivization in the countryside ruined the agriculture. People wouldn’t work hard anymore because they were no longer paid and could eat for free. During the previous fall a lot of crops were left in the fields, to be eaten by birds and animals or just to rot. Even fruit was not picked in some orchards. When people had consumed all the food before the winter set in, they began to eat the seeds. As a result, many fields couldn’t be sown in the spring. This reduced grain production drastically. Now in both cities and the countryside people were starving and dying. Many secretly left their villages for provinces where the famine was less severe.

  Bad news came from all over China, but Gary focused his attention on his home province, Shandong, because he wasn’t sure whether some of the information had been doctored by Taiwan’s intelligence service to influence the White House and the Pentagon. (They were always eager to present a chaotic China to the Americans.) By following the events in a place he knew, he might be more capable of assessing the severity of the situation. Yet he could find little news about his hometown, though he gathered quite a bit of information on some nearby counties. Most country folks there suffered from dropsy, with swelled bellies and their legs puffed out like small barrels. Many women had prolapsed uteruses; even those in their twenties and thirties underwent menopause. An official in charge of birth control admitted that she no longer needed to hand out contraceptives because people were too feeble to conceive. The government tried to help some, issuing six ounces of grain per day for a grown-up and four for a child. But the emergency rations were distributed through echelons of cadres, many of whom would embezzle some for themselves and their families. As a result, country folks received hardly any food. According to one account, in the Huimin area, the prefecture where Gary’s home county was located, tens of thousands had died of hunger and some villages were deserted.

  For a whole summer he followed the reports anxiously, still a tad incredulous. How could it be possible for the China that used to be poised to surpass the United Kingdom to collapse into such havoc in the blink of an eye? When dining at Chinese restaurants, he would prick his ears to catch
bits of conversation and would talk with others about the situation back home. One day, he saw Suzie Chao, a Mandarin broadcaster at Voice of America, sitting alone in Bamboo Garden, an eatery that had only six tables and offered a lunch special for seventy-five cents. He asked her, “Can I join you?”

  “Of course, welcome,” she said pleasantly, her almond-shaped eyes smiling as she waved her slim hand.

  He placed his bowl of noodles on the table and sat down opposite her. She looked worried in spite of her bright face. She had a vibrant voice, which had struck Gary as tinged with yearning whenever he heard her on the air, as though she were speaking to somebody she knew well but couldn’t reach. They talked about the famine back in China. She was also anxious to learn more about it. Gary told her about the reduction of population in Shandong but added, “A lot of folks fled their homes or just disappeared, so the figures we got might have been exaggerated. Still, it looks awful.”

  She sighed and flipped back her hair to keep her pageboy in shape. “I’ve just heard that my uncle’s family lost their home. The villagers went to tear down his house and used the bricks and timber to build a pig farm.”

  “Why would they do that?” Gary asked, thinking it might have been because of her relatives’ connection with her family, who had fled to Taiwan.

  “All the houses belong to the commune now. This makes me sick.” She sniveled, on the brink of tears.

  “But can they still raise pigs—I mean, do they have something to feed to the pigs?”

  “Actually, the pigs are all gone. Either died of disease or were slaughtered for food. People were too desperate to think about their future livelihood. They even ate grass and elm bark. A lot of them starved to death. I heard there was cannibalism in my home county.”

  That came as a surprise. Suzie was from Jiangsu, a province known for its fertile paddies and abundant water supply, generally called “a land of fish and rice.” If the famine had wreaked havoc in a place like that, then the whole of China must have become hell.

  After that lunch, Gary and Suzie often met at noon or talked on the phone. Initially he was cautious when speaking with her and suspected she might have a complicated background, with her family both in Taiwan and on the mainland. She was poised and somewhat pretty and had a fine figure and a distinct voice. As they got to know each other better, he was surprised to find her single. Unlike most young women, she was not in a hurry to look for a man, though she was already thirty-one. She even claimed she could never make a good wife (“Domesticity is not my strong point,” she confessed), so it would be better for her to remain single. She’d once had a boyfriend in Kao-hsiung, a journalist who’d died in a ferry accident seven years before. That man was an overseas Chinese from Indonesia but had lived in Taiwan most of his life. These days whenever Suzie heard something about the famine on the mainland, she would share it with Gary, who was good at analyzing the information and could see numerous implications. She was impressed and said, “If I had your brain, I’d go to law school or do a PhD in the history of science.”

  The more time they spent together, the more intimate their conversations became. One day over dinner Suzie revealed to Gary that a few years ago she had dated an American man, an audio engineer at the Capitol, but they broke up because he looked down on things Chinese. She told Gary, “In the beginning Michael was all right, but he got spoiled. I was too easy on him, I guess. One evening I made rice crust soup and he said under his breath, ‘It’s impossible to eat Chinese shit every day.’ I heard him and shot back, ‘If you sleep with a Chinese woman, you ought to eat Chinese food.’ We had a row, and I just couldn’t stomach it anymore, so we split. Afterward I gave up dating altogether.”

  Gary chuckled softly. Her story reminded him of Nellie, who never complained about the food he liked. For that he was grateful. Then Suzie sighed and said, “No matter where I go, I always feel I’m Chinese.”

  For some reason her words moved him, though he pressed on, “But you’re a U.S. citizen, are you not?”

  “I am. I don’t mean I can’t be a citizen of another country. I mean something inside me cannot be changed, was already shaped and fixed in China. In that sense I’m damned.”

  “To be honest, I feel the same,” Gary said. “If you had come to the States before your teens, you might have been more adaptable.”

  “Probably.”

  They slept together a few weeks later on a late fall evening, in her apartment on Duke Street. After an early dinner she had invited him to tea at her place. Her apartment had one bedroom and a living room, a tidy cozy nest decked with flowered sofa covers and sage-colored window curtains that had big rings at the tops. They didn’t drink tea but shared a jar of rice wine instead, which a friend of Suzie’s had brought back from Taipei. Then one thing led to another. The sex that followed was bone-shaking and tempestuous. Her pillows dropped on the hardwood floor, next to their clothes crumpled in a pile. They panted out coarse words that neither of them had ever heard spoken here. “Ah!” she gasped, her mouth open like that of a fish just out of water. Holding her nipple in his mouth, he kept plunging, his back arched. They’d been raising a tremendous din, unafraid of being heard by others, assuming nobody in the building could understand their love cries. Engulfed in the whirlwind of desire, they’d lost the sense of shame and shed the armor of self-respect. The vulgar expressions gushed out of them with force, as though the words were forgotten incantations, coming back with a vengeance to drive them to copulate for the sake of self-preservation. They fucked like animals.

  Suzie was in tears after she came for the second time. Her hair was mussed, but her flushed cheeks gave her a youthful glow. For a moment even her neck was ruddy. She confessed, “You made me feel like a woman again. Guess I won’t be able to sleep well for a couple of days. I will miss you.”

  Her words unsettled Gary, and he checked his impulse to ask in jest what part of him she would miss. Then it struck him that she too was a lonely soul, homesick and restless in spite of her composed façade. What amazed both of them was that, lying shoulder to shoulder in bed, they became chatterboxes, as if there were endless things they could talk about—from their childhoods in the provinces to their college years in Beijing, from the local foods they missed to the mountains and beach resorts they had both been to, from the family members persecuted in the Land Reform Movement to the class statuses in China’s countryside now, from the differences in the sense of beauty between Asians and Westerners to some plain-featured Chinese women married by handsome foreign men. They talked and talked until around one a.m., when he had to climb out of bed and go home.

  It felt chilly outside. Gary fastened the middle button on his light duffle coat. A thin blaze of moon was high in the sky, which was thick with stars, a few twinkling through the spiky branches. An oak tree dropped an acorn on a nearby roof, the nut thrumming down the shingles until it hit the ground with a tiny thud. Walking in the limpid moonlight to his car parked behind Suzie’s building, for some reason Gary remembered the English expression “talk a blue streak.” And he envisioned the two of them caged like a pair of birds that could chirp and warble only to each other.

  IN THE PRACTICE OF ESPIONAGE, gathering intelligence is just the first step. After that, there is the task of analyzing the information, and then comes the challenge of how to make the best use of it. So much intelligence had gone through Gary’s hands these last few months that he couldn’t possibly photograph all the valuable pages, so he had adopted the role of analyst as well. He chose what he believed were important passages, and compiled and synthesized them to make a coherent report. In his analyses he highlighted the U.S. awareness of the catastrophic situation in China. He meant to convey to the Chinese leaders that if they didn’t get out of their mess soon, China might open itself to attacks from other countries. Unlike the United States, with oceans on the east and west and no powerful country to the south or north, a weak China, surrounded by hostile neighbors, many of which had territorial dispu
tes with it, would be like an exhausted body floating in shark-infested water. He knew his analyses might sound a little far-fetched at times, but he couldn’t help himself and even mentally cursed the stupid Chinese leaders.

  He went to Taipei in late December 1961 and from there made a short trip to Hong Kong. He told Nellie that his cousin’s mother-in-law had just died, so he felt obligated to pay a visit, but his cousin was living with his in-laws in Taiwan now. Bingwen was in Hong Kong to meet him again. The man looked sickly and emaciated, which further convinced Gary of the severity of the famine. But his friend shook his bushy head and said, “I just had hernia surgery and haven’t fully recuperated yet. Everything’s swell back home.”

  That couldn’t have been true and must have been what Bingwen had been instructed to tell Gary. Plainly the man had a famished look, and when they dined in restaurants, Bingwen would order a tableful of food for just the two of them and would wolf down whatever he could. He informed Gary of a big promotion—now his rank was the sixteenth, which was equal to a major’s in the army. Gary was pleased, and together they downed three shot cups of Maotai in a row. Bingwen assured him that Yufeng and the twins were well but that his parents had passed away the previous winter—his father died first, then his mother, three months later. Both of them had been slowed by rheumatism in recent years and coughed some during the winter, but other than that, they’d had no major health problems. Bingwen assured Gary that their deaths were due not to hunger but to old age. They’d been in their sixties, so Gary believed they’d met their natural ends, even though his mother’s was caused by a bout of fever. Bingwen told him that he’d gone to the countryside personally to see to their funerals, whose expenses the local government had paid. Gary’s parents were interred in the Shang clan’s burial ground, both clad in new clothes, and a dozen or so wreaths were presented to them. Everything was handled in a proper manner.