by Ha Jin
After breakfast the next morning Henry and I gave Ben a brief tour of our property. We took him through the three floors of the building and then to the grounds behind it. On the boughs of a sycamore hung two transparent bird feeders filled with mixed grains and sunflower seeds. We stopped to watch some goldfinches, red crossbills, and robins eating the feed. A handful of birds, already done with breakfast, were chattering while bathing and grooming at a granite birdbath next to a kidney-shaped flower bed, but most of the other birds stood quietly on the maples and hornbeams nearby, waiting for the two at the feeders to finish and fly away—then another two would go over to the plastic tubes and eat. They’d mostly been standing in line patiently, though a few scudded from branch to branch.
“Gosh, they’re more polite than the subway riders in Beijing,” Ben quipped. A red-breasted robin fluttered its wings as if in response.
Henry laughed. “They know each other.”
I joined in, “They’re not as tough as birds in China for sure, poor competitors.”
This time it was Ben who broke into laughter. He said, “They’re blessed without the need to compete.”
On the eastern side of the backyard spread a tennis court surrounded by a high chain-link fence; a few balls dotted the green court, some tattered and mildewed like overripe fruit. “Wow, you two are real landlords,” Ben blurted out at the sight of the court.
For a moment I was at a loss for words. Then I said, “Henry keeps everything in order. We take care of the property by ourselves.”
“You know I’m pretty good with my hands too,” Ben said and then turned to Henry. “If someday you want to retire, please hire me. I can do carpentry and plumbing. Last fall I helped my friend Deon fix his roof.”
“Can you really do those things?” I asked.
“Sure I can. I can do basic masonry too. You saw the floors in my parents’ home, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“I laid the bricks in all the rooms.”
“That’s impressive. Tell me, why didn’t you use grout instead of cement to seal the bricks?”
“That was too expensive.”
No doubt Ben was a handyman of sorts, but I wasn’t sure he knew how to do all the maintenance jobs here. It wouldn’t matter—he always could learn.
After rush hour, Henry took Ben into DC to visit some museums, while I returned to my study to finish the paper on Cold War movies. These days I had also been perusing my father’s diary, on which I’d spent hundreds of hours but which I still had to read time and again, especially some fragmented sentences, to connect all the dots, though by now I had grasped his story on the whole. Today, however, I had no time for my father’s journal, having to provide dozens of endnotes for the paper. That would take several hours.
Late in the afternoon Ben and Henry came back. My nephew couldn’t stop raving about the museums on the National Mall, which were all free to the public. He told me, “We even saw many original pieces by Rodin—they all stand in the sculpture garden, in the open! Amazing. I can imagine how privileged the people living in that area must feel. All those great museums must be like amenities in their lives. This is unbelievable. I wish I could live in DC so I could take friends to those museums when they come to visit me.”
“Which of the museums do you like most?” I asked.
“The air and space museum. I had never seen one like that.”
Before dinner I showed him my study. He looked through my little library, shelves crowded with books floor to ceiling, and admitted, “I’ve read only seven or eight of these books. I wish I were a scholar like you, Aunt.” He was seated in a rattan lounge chair, drinking almond milk.
“You’ve been doing pretty well in your computer business. I’m just a woman of books, not suitable for anything else.”
I showed him the six volumes of diary left by Gary. He opened one and began skimming some pages. I said, “I’m still working on your grandfather’s story. Once I’m done, I’ll let you have his journal.”
“Well,” he replied thoughtfully and put down the volume, “I might have to know more about his life to make sense of this.”
“I’ve been trying to understand him too.”
Ben and Henry seemed to have hit it off. They talked a lot about basketball and football games; both were fans of the New England Patriots. After Ben had left, my husband kept saying about him, “What a fine young man. I wish I had a nephew like that on my side.”
“You’ve met him just once,” I said.
“Look, Lilian, I’m about to be sixty-two. In a couple of years I won’t be very active anymore. If Ben can manage this building for us, that will make our remaining years free of lots of trouble. Don’t you think?”
“Can you trust him entirely?”
“Not yet. Like I said, we can try to get to know him better. I’m fond of him, that’s the honest truth.”
I was pleased to hear that. Sometimes I did feel a stirring of maternal feeling for my nieces and nephew and couldn’t help but try to get involved in their lives. Yet Ben seemed too ambitious to become a building superintendent. He’d once told me that he dreamed of living on Cape Cod, in a colonial home with a garden and a dog. And a boat, if he could afford it.
1964–1965
This was the third time Gary had resolved not to see Suzie anymore. He wanted his life to be simple and focused, but a few weeks later she called him and wanted to meet again, saying she missed their “confabulations.” Could he see her just one more time? She promised she wouldn’t misbehave or yell at him again. He did not agree at first and urged her to find something that could fill her idle hours, like yoga or meditation, both of which had come into fashion recently. Or it would be better if she could see another man, a bachelor. He wouldn’t give her the illusion that he’d leave his wife, non-Chinese though Nellie was, and abandon his child on account of another woman. No, under no circumstances would he further complicate his life. But there was no way to communicate the deeper reason to Suzie. She kept calling him, at times even when he was in meetings. She knew he was a kind man at heart in spite of his phlegmatic appearance, so she was not afraid of pushing him. What she liked about him was that he wouldn’t impose anything on her and always treated her as his equal, as a friend. When they were together, she felt at ease, didn’t need to suppress a hiccup or a cackle, and could always speak her mind. Never had she been so relaxed and comfortable with a man. If only she could spend some time with him every day.
At last he agreed to see her just one more time. When they met in a café near Christ Church on an early summer afternoon, she said to him, “You must admit there’s a lot of chemistry between us.”
“Suzie,” he countered, “please don’t act like this, don’t mess yourself up. My life is more complicated than you can imagine. You’ll be better off if you stay away from me, a married man with a child.”
“I’d have done that long ago if I could.” She lowered her eyes, her lashes fluttering a little, as though she was ashamed of her confession. “Sometimes I wonder if this is due to bad karma. It feels like I owed you something in my previous life and came to this world just to pay you back.”
“We’ve known each other for only a few years,” he said.
“But I feel we’d met generations ago.”
Her words touched him to the core, so the affair resumed and lasted till the end of his life. He’d go and see her once a week, usually in the evening, giving his wife the excuse that he had to put in extra hours at the CIA. Nellie never questioned him about the evenings he spent away from home. Besides the secretive nature of his work, she assumed that a man, especially a professional man, should have another life outside his home. As long as he brought back a paycheck every month and took care of their family, she didn’t complain.
Yet in the early summer of 1964 she discovered the affair, informed by a neighbor, Mrs. Colock, a tall string bean of a woman whose husband had often bumped into Gary and Suzie together in bars and restaura
nts. Nellie and Gary fought that night, hurling furious words that frightened their daughter. This was the first time Lilian had heard her parents shout at each other profanities they had forbidden her to use. She locked herself in her room, crying and listening in on them.
The next morning her father drove her to school as usual. They spoke little, though the girl still kissed him before running to the school entrance. She was glad that summer break was about to start, that soon she wouldn’t need her father to drive her to school anymore. But her mother seemed to have changed from that day on; she’d become more subdued and taciturn, as if she had a sore throat and had to save her voice. Actually, Nellie was thinking of divorce, which Gary said he would accept if she let him keep their daughter. In truth he couldn’t possibly raise the girl alone, given his career and his absentmindedness; he insisted on sole custody of their child in order to save the marriage. That made Nellie hesitate, because she couldn’t entrust Lilian to Gary alone.
But their fights had affected their daughter differently—the girl began daydreaming about leaving home. How she wished she could live far away. If only her piggy bank were full.
It was in the fall of 1964 when Nellie started her own affair with her boss, John Tripp, Jr., the manager of Outstanding Fences. John, a beefy man in his early forties with a lumpy face, would take Nellie to a nearby motel after they lunched together, and they would stay in bed there until her daughter’s school was about to let out.
In fact, Nellie didn’t enjoy the time she spent with Tripp, because he was too demanding in bed. He’d make her do difficult things for him as if she were “an entertainer.” As a result, her body would grow sore and she feared there might be damage to her insides; still, she dared not refuse to give him what he wanted. Finally one afternoon, with a pounding heart, she asked him whether he might be willing to form a family with her if she asked her husband for a divorce. Tripp was taken aback, then said, “No, Nellie, I’m sorry I can’t do that. I’m awfully fond of you, but I’ve been single all my life and it’s too late for me to change my ways. But I’ll be around.”
She had asked that mainly to see how much he cared for her; she hadn’t made up her mind about a divorce yet. His answer upset her and cooled her down. What a flameout.
The affair, which had been halfheartedly carried on by both parties for about three months, finally came to an end. Soon Nellie quit bookkeeping for the fence company and stayed home, knowing that for better or for worse Gary wouldn’t abandon her and Lilian. He had promised her to keep the family together and wasn’t a man who’d break his word.
Still, Nellie couldn’t suppress her thought of divorce altogether and would talk about it with her sister, Marsha, on the phone. Lilian didn’t like her aunt, a blonde with thin arms and long dimples on her cheeks. When the girl was a toddler, Aunt Marsha had called her China Doll, a nickname Lilian hated. It was good that the woman lived on the West Coast now.
One day after school, as Lilian was stepping into her house, she heard her mother talking on the phone. “To be honest, Marsha, I already feel like an old woman. It’ll be too hard to find a man willing to share family life with me.… Okay, I’ll think about what you just said. You know Gary’s very stubborn about child custody.… Maybe he and I should be separated for a while, just to give each other more space. That might be good for Lilian too.”
But that wasn’t what the girl wanted. That evening after mother and daughter had sat together and read two chapters from The Story of Crazy Horse, Lilian told Nellie that she would stay with her father if they were separated. “I don’t mind going to another school,” said the daughter. Her mother looked stunned and remained pensive for hours.
Lilian later tipped off her dad that Nellie sometimes talked with Marsha about divorcing him. “Thanks for the info,” Gary said with a weak smile. “Does your mom often drink beer or wine when I’m not home?”
“Uh-uh, I didn’t see her drink.”
“That’s good. If she uses alcohol, let me know, okay? I don’t want her to become an alcoholic like her father.”
To her credit, Nellie wasn’t fond of drink. Despite her many years of waitressing, she couldn’t taste any difference between red wine and white wine. In contrast, Marsha often took a glass when chatting with Nellie on the phone. Once tipsy, Marsha would confide all kinds of unseemly domestic troubles, such as her husband’s addiction to gambling—whenever he went to Las Vegas, a row would wait for him at home—and the couple’s regular use of marijuana and other drugs. As a result, they often fought over money. And their son pilfered cash from his mother’s purse (but she wouldn’t tell his father, afraid he might beat the boy black and blue). Yet whenever Marsha urged her to leave Gary, Nellie would say, “Well, I mustn’t rush. I must think more about this.”
Without fail, Lilian would give her father an update on their chat.
THE PREVIOUS NOVEMBER John Kennedy had been assassinated. At first Gary was so overwhelmed by the news that he couldn’t respond to it. Some of his colleagues grew emotional as they talked about it. David Shuman was mumbling about the event with his mouth slightly lopsided while tears glistened in his camel eyes. As he was listening to David, Gary burst out sobbing. He cried wretchedly, burying his face in his arms on his desk. That astonished his colleagues and convinced them that he was a true patriot, even more heartbroken and devastated than they were by the national tragedy. In fact, though saddened by the news, Gary wept also for another reason. He dreaded that the assassination of the U.S. president might trigger a world war if another country was implicated. His gut told him that the Soviet Union might have been behind it. Even China could have been an accomplice, if not directly involved.
For the whole spring and summer of 1964 he was restless, expecting the outcome of the FBI’s inquiry into the case and hoping that Beijing had had nothing to do with it. After a ten-month investigation, the results were announced in late September: Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in the assassination. Many of Gary’s colleagues shook their heads in disbelief, saying that the man couldn’t possibly have done it single-handedly, that there must have been an organization behind him. If not the Mafia, it could have been a hostile foreign power. Unlike them, Gary in secret heaved a sigh of relief.
Nevertheless, China made big news that fall. In mid-October it shocked the world with the explosion of its first atomic bomb. The country, though ravaged by famine and revolutionary hysteria, began coming back to the arena of international politics with a vengeance. All at once Mao was feared and condemned as a monster, but he was also celebrated by some as a farsighted statesman who’d had the aspiration and determination to put his country on the map regardless of the odds against it. A major Japanese newspaper even proclaimed: “With the success of the nuclear test China has become the number one power in Asia.”
Gary began to look into this matter and found that originally Mao had looked down on atomic bombs, though the United States had dropped two on Japan. In an interview conducted by the American correspondent Anna Louise Strong in August 1946, Mao said, “A-bombs are paper tigers that the U.S. reactionaries use to threaten people. The bombs appear fearsome but are not really that powerful.” Mao’s ignorant defiance alarmed even some leaders of the socialist countries. The French physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a Communist who was Madame Curie’s son-in-law, had these words passed on to China: “Comrade Mao Zedong, to fight against nuclear weapons, you must first possess them.” That startled the chairman and set him thinking about how to make the bomb. He asked Khrushchev to help.
After long negotiations, the two countries signed an agreement in October 1957: the Soviet Union would provide for China a model of the atomic bomb, the blueprints, and the technical specifications. It would also send scientists to help China with the project. But the first expert did not arrive until the beginning of 1959, and he did nothing. More unfathomable and frustrating, in his pocket he always carried a handbook, which he would consult from time to time but wouldn’t let any Chine
se see. The other Russians who came after him didn’t do much either. Then, in July 1960, quite unexpectedly, Khrushchev went back on his promise and withdrew all the two-hundred-odd Soviet experts serving in various areas of China’s nuclear industry. The Soviet leader had never liked Mao, though he showed his respect because the Chinese leader was more experienced. “Comrade Mao Zedong always acts as if God must serve him,” Khrushchev once observed.
Gary and his CIA colleagues all had thought that with the Russians gone, China would abandon its nuclear ambitions, but to everyone’s amazement, it pushed ahead. Hundreds of factories and thousands of scientists participated in the project. Many of these people lived in the desert in Xinjiang, working around the clock, totally dedicated though they were underfed and underpaid. Some died there, of illness or from becoming lost in the desert. The country was so resolved to build the bomb that Vice Premier Chen Yi declared at an industrial conference: “Even if we reach the point that we have to pawn our trousers, we must continue developing nuclear weapons!”
The relentless effort had finally produced a bomb and gave China a huge boost. The explosion also threw the United States a little off stride. More reconnaissance missions were flown by U-2s, but the planes were mostly shot down by Chinese SA-2 missiles. It was impossible to bring back photos of the nuclear base in western China. For months the White House had been pondering how to snuff out that dangerous program. Air strikes were no longer an option, a fact Gary gloated about in his diary. As an alternative, the CIA and Taiwan put together a contingent of paratroopers, all Nationalist soldiers specializing in demolition and night fighting and newly equipped with M16s. They would be air-dropped into the interior of China and proceed to destroy its nuclear facilities. This operation was code-named Thunderclaps. Together with the scores of commandos, some secret agents had already been sent to the mainland to prepare the operation.
