A Map of Betrayal (14 page)

“I’m pleased to hear that,” I said. “I’m proud of you, Juli. What’s a good life? A combination of vocation and avocation—to make work and fun one thing. That’s from Robert Frost.”

“Who’s he?”

“An American poet.”

“That’s cool—the way he put it.”

“It’s wisdom, simple and clear.”

“Thanks, Aunt Lilian. This is the first time somebody has said such heartening words to me about my wild life. I’ve never dared to tell my parents about this; they might send someone to bring back their bad daughter on the loose.”

We both laughed. We also talked about her twin brother, Benning, whose exact whereabouts Juli didn’t know. She was sure he’d been working for the government, often in other countries. That was all she knew. Sometimes Benning seemed quite aloof and secretive. Juli told me that he was the scholar of the family, the only one who’d gone to college. He also spoke English well; he had learned it as a foreign-language major. The more she talked about him, the more mystified I became by this nephew of mine, who seemed like a phantom my mind couldn’t grasp. I asked if Juli had a photo of him. She had some but not with her.

“Benning used to be a wild thing,” she said. “In high school he was obsessed with automobiles, but he was underage and couldn’t get a driver’s license. Whenever possible, he’d sneak into a car or tractor, monkeying with the gearshift and the dials on the dashboard. One evening our granduncle, my grandma’s brother, gave a dinner party at his home. We all went. When most of the men had gotten drunk, Benning slipped out and stole a truck that belonged to one of the guests. He drove it away, but the minute he got out of the village he lost control and ran into a pond used for soaking hemp. Lucky for him, the water wasn’t deep and he could get out of the flooded cab. My parents spent five hundred yuan repairing the truck.”

“I’d love to meet him,” I said. “He’s the only nephew I have.”

“I’ll send you his email address.”

“Please do. Do you have a scanner?”

“I have one.”

“Email me some of his photos.”

“Sure I will.”

Juli asked me what my father had been like. It struck me that
part of her purpose in visiting me might have been to find out something about her granddad. I would not reveal his true profession; for the time being I was reluctant to introduce him to his granddaughter as a top Chinese spy. Instead, I told Juli that my father had missed her grandmother Yufeng all the time (which might have been partly true). I added that he’d been a loving father to me but a feckless husband to my mother, that he had lived a displaced life because of the separation from his original family, and that he’d also made many sacrifices for China and should be regarded as a hero by the Chinese.

I didn’t share my thoughts and questions about my father with Juli, though my mind had been full of them lately. In the center of his plight may have resided this fact: mentally, he couldn’t settle down anywhere. It was true that in his later years he began to like America and grow attached to my mother, but he could not imagine spending the rest of his life with Nellie. His heart was always elsewhere. Wherever he went, he’d feel out of place, like a stranded traveler.

1958

Gary and Nellie didn’t have many friends, but that didn’t bother them, since they preferred a quiet life. They were no longer in close touch with her parents, who had come to see their granddaughter the previous winter but stayed only three days, having to head back for the endless work on their vegetable farm. Since the birth of Lilian, Gary and Nellie seldom went out together, because they were reluctant to hire a babysitter. Once a man who had dated Nellie many years before phoned and chitchatted with her for more than an hour. Gary blew up and exchanged angry words with his wife. He threatened to move out if she kept answering that man’s calls. She caved and told her ex-boyfriend to leave her alone. She knew that her husband’s threat was not idle. Sometimes when Gary worked late into the night, he’d sleep in his little cage of a study, on a futon that he had insisted on buying over her objection. She was alarmed, afraid he might have lost interest in her, revolted by the ten pounds she had gained after giving birth. (In reality she was still trim with long limbs and a twenty-eight-inch waistline. She took great pride in her figure, and it would easily outshine her daughter’s in the future.) Nellie noticed that Gary was sometimes absentminded, seated at his desk doing nothing. That made her wonder why he looked so sad.

Indeed, his mind was elsewhere, shadowed by the memories of his other wife. One of those moments he always remembered was an evening soon after their wedding. Yufeng was sitting cross-legged on the warm brick bed, needle in hand and thimble on finger, mending a tear in his quilted overcoat. She was wearing a green tunic printed with tiny jasmine blossoms, which set off her smooth face, calm and shiny with concentration. He was lying with his head in her lap and observing her raptly, though she kept
urging him, “Close your eyes and take a nap.” The light thrown by an oil lamp was soft but sputtered from time to time, and the bridal chamber was so peaceful that he felt he’d love to repose like this for the rest of his life. If he died then and there, he’d be happy. This tranquil image of Yufeng plying her needle would rise in his mind every now and then, haunting him and misting his eyes. If only he could rest his head in her lap again.

He felt she must still love him, but in a perverse way of thinking, he hoped she had betrayed him by finding another man. That would have made her life easier and assuaged some of his guilt, though it might cause her to lose his salary. It was too cruel to let her wait for his unforeseeable return. She’d be better off if she stopped being his wife. On the other hand, without her in the household no one was there to take care of his elderly parents. Like him, Yufeng was misused relentlessly. Someday he’d have to find a way of making it up to her, if he could.

Yet his thoughts about Yufeng did not totally incapacitate him in his current marriage. He was fond of Nellie, and once a week they still had sex, even with abandon. He would kiss her on the mouth and nibble her earlobes, and when inside her, he would move slowly and gently, feeling her blood pulsating in his loins, so that they both could reach climax. He’d do anything to make her come and loved to see her ecstatic face clench as if she were in pain. Much as he enjoyed her body, sometimes he preferred to sleep alone, giving the excuse that he had to work late into the night and was reluctant to disturb her. In a sense that was true, but he also meant to keep a clear head for his day job and secret mission.

In DC’s intelligence community Gary had gradually acquired a reputation as the best translator of Chinese. He was nicknamed the Linguist. His good name was partly thanks to his friendship with George Thomas, who was in charge of Chinese affairs in the CIA’s East Asia Division and often assigned Gary projects. To further his own career, Thomas had resumed his work toward a PhD in Chinese literature at Georgetown, writing a dissertation on the Tang
poet Du Mu, whose lyrical poems he loved so much that he could quote some exquisite lines off the top of his head, especially those about mist-swathed Nanjing, the capital of many dynasties. Besides the primary texts, Thomas needed to read some secondary sources written in classical Chinese, but his grasp of the language wasn’t up to the task, so he asked Gary to translate some key passages of the conventional poetry diaries, which had been left by many major poets and had over the centuries become an essential part of Chinese poetry criticism. This was easy for Gary. He checked out a thick anthology of the diaries from the Library of Congress, a place he loved and visited at least once a month. Thomas wanted to pay him out of his own pocket for the translation, two dollars an hour, but Gary adamantly refused to take money from him. He did the work out of gratitude, and also to deepen their friendship now that Thomas was a senior officer in the heart of the U.S. intelligence business.

In return, Thomas invited Gary to a club named Bohemian Alley that offered live music. The place smelled of cigars and whiskey and had a poolroom in the back. The waitresses were young and lovely, wearing high heels, knee-length skirts, and tiny flowers, mostly forget-me-nots, in their hair, though the fluorescent lighting made their faces appear a little greenish. Gary and Thomas would drink beer and munch nuts and chicken nuggets. Thomas would ogle the waitresses’ behinds unabashedly while Gary tried to bridle his own impulses, and soon his neck grew stiff. He wished he could have Thomas’s bold wandering eye. Once in a while the two also had dinner there, steaks or barbecued pork chops or chicken enchiladas. When eating, Thomas would pick Gary’s brain about problems concerning the Far East.

It was there in the summer of 1958 that Gary discovered jazz. He enjoyed the spontaneous ebb and flow of the music, the swings and plunges, and the assured improvisation by the black musicians, one of them wearing dreadlocks, a hairstyle Gary hadn’t seen before. In spite of the mercurial notes, the music was so comforting and
relaxing. Unpredictability—that was what he loved about jazz—everything was freewheeling, unprepared, yet always under control. He was so enamored of it that he began collecting jazz records, in particular those of Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman.

One evening Thomas told Gary over a glass of Chablis, “You’d better get naturalized soon.” His green eyes were snapping meaningfully, as if to hint that once Gary became a U.S. citizen, there’d be more lucrative work for him.

“I’ll do that,” Gary said.

Since he wasn’t naturalized yet, Thomas could give him only less classified documents to translate, mainly the type listed as Confidential. Above that there were levels, such as Secret and Top Secret, to which Gary, as a noncitizen, was denied access. Nevertheless, every once in a while Thomas would use Gary for rendering secret orders for the spies in China that could not allow any ambiguity or inaccuracy. By translating these directives, Gary came to know some agents’ code names, their missions, their communication plans. He just kept notes on them and did not attempt to send out the intelligence right away, because he remembered the instructions from Bingwen: he was a strategic agent, not a petty spy specializing in sabotage or stealing technology. In addition, time is a determining factor in the espionage business. Generally speaking, the information before an event takes place is intelligence, whereas the information on an event that is already unfolding has become news. If the event is over, any information about it is nothing but archival material. Without a direct delivery channel, Gary couldn’t pass urgent information to Bingwen quickly, so he didn’t make an effort to collect the kind of intelligence whose value hinged on a time frame.

At the same time, his mind had been preoccupied with the ongoing events in China. At the end of July 1958, Khrushchev visited Beijing, and the two countries signed a joint communiqué that highlighted the cooperation and solidarity between them. A month after the Soviet leader had returned to Moscow, Mao ordered a
massive bombardment against the Nationalist troops on Jinmen Island. One evening five hundred artillery pieces—cannons, howitzers, heavy coast guns—fired all at once, shelling the military positions, wharves, airfields, supply lines. Within hours hundreds of soldiers were killed outside the bunkers and in the trenches. Three generals, all vice commanders of the Jinmen defense, were also among the casualties. The top brass were eating dinner in a dining hall when a barrage of shells landed on them. Two generals were killed on the spot and the other one died on arrival at the field hospital.

For days the Nationalist army was too crippled to fight back. Then the United States gave them twelve 8-inch M55 self-propelled guns, which were delivered under cover of darkness. With the deployment of these heavy howitzers, the Nationalist troops began to fire back and managed to suppress some of the Communists’ artillery (though one of the big guns was blown up by a hostile shell that landed right in its barrel). Soon mainland China declared that it would bombard the island only on odd-numbered days to give the civilians and the defending troops a breather. Such a practice, which was also a way to dispose of expiring shells, continued till 1979, when China and the United States finally reestablished a formal relationship.

Following the events after the attack, Gary came to know that John Foster Dulles and Chiang Kai-shek had recently held secret talks about how to deter Red China’s aggression. The secretary of state suggested using nuclear weapons, which Chiang agreed to in principle, saying that a handful of small tactical bombs might do the job. But when Dulles revealed that the warheads should be at least as powerful as those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chiang was aghast. After the talks, his government informed the White House that nuclear weapons should not be an option—the fallout might endanger Taiwan and the U.S. military bases in East Asia.

Another piece of information also took Gary by surprise. Some
political analysts in Southeast Asia believed that the Communists’ artillery attack served two purposes: one was to sabotage Khrushchev’s new policy of promoting world peace because Mao, an advocate of confrontation, was always spoiling for a fight against the imperialist West; the other was to form a link with Taiwan—in other words, the bombardment signified a territorial claim. It was reported that the moment Chiang Kai-shek heard of the attack, he’d said in praise of Mao, “What a marvelous move!” That was because he didn’t want to see an independent Taiwan either, still viewing himself as the leader of the whole of China. Initially Gary was baffled by Chiang’s words. All three of the generals who had died were noted for their ability and bravery, and Chiang must have known them personally. So how could he call the bombardment “a marvelous move”? Evidently, to the top commander, even generals were expendable. The whole affair felt as if Mao had stretched out his hand and Chiang had shaken it with appreciation, so that Jinmen Island would serve as a link between the mainland and Taiwan. The two sides seemed to have worked in tandem, and only the soldiers were the losers.