A Map of Betrayal: A Novel Read online

  ALSO BY HA JIN

  Between Silences

  Facing Shadows

  Ocean of Words

  Under the Red Flag

  In the Pond

  Waiting

  The Bridegroom

  Wreckage

  The Crazed

  War Trash

  A Free Life

  The Writer as Migrant

  A Good Fall

  Nanjing Requiem

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Ha Jin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jin, Ha, [date]

  A map of betrayal : a novel / Ha Jin.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-91160-5 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-307-91161-2 (eBook).

  1. Chinese American women—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Moles (Spies)—Fiction. 4. Espionage—Fiction. 5. Family secrets—Fiction. 6. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Fiction. 7. China—Relations—United States—Fiction.

  8. United States—Relations—China—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3560.I6M37 2014 813′.54—dc23 2014008892

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket design by Eric White

  v3.1

  FOR LISHA

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1949

  1950

  1953

  1954

  1955

  1956–1957

  1958

  1959

  1961

  1962–1963

  1964–1965

  1966–1969

  1969–1970

  1971–1972

  1974–1975

  1978–1979

  1980

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  My mother used to say, “Lilian, as long as I’m alive, you must have nothing to do with that woman.” She was referring to Suzie, my father’s mistress.

  “Okay, I won’t,” I would reply.

  Nellie, my embittered mother, had never forgiven my father for keeping another woman, though he’d died many years before. I kept my promise. I did not approach Suzie Chao until my mother, after a tenacious fight against pancreatic cancer, succumbed last winter. Death at eighty—I can say she lived a long life.

  Still heavy with grief, I got in touch with Suzie, first by letter and then by phone. She lived in Montreal, far away from my home state, Maryland. When forsythia began to bloom in my backyard, she mailed me my father’s diary, six morocco-bound volumes, each measuring eight inches by five. I hadn’t known he kept a journal, and I had assumed that the FBI seized all the papers left by him, Gary Shang, the biggest Chinese spy ever caught in North America. The diary recorded his life from 1949 to 1980. He hadn’t written every day, and the journal was more like a personal work log. One of the volumes bears a quotation from Nietzsche on its first page: “Preserve me from all petty victories!” Another opens with Franklin Roosevelt’s words: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The last volume starts with a claim from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech: “Unearned suffering is redemptive.” My father was fond of aphorisms and filled a notebook with hundreds of them, but that little trove of wisdom was in the FBI’s possession now.

  Once I was done for the spring semester, having graded my students’ finals and papers, I began to pore over my father’s diary to piece together his story. I also reread all the newspaper articles about him, which I kept in my file. By the end of the summer of 2010 I had a substantial grasp of his life, but there were still holes and gaps. Those troublesome spots tormented me, and try as I might, I couldn’t figure them out. That was why, in mid-November, as soon as I heard I’d been granted a Fulbright lectureship, a one-semester appointment at Beijing Teachers College for the spring of 2011, I contacted Suzie again and asked to see her.

  “Your mother was a bitch,” Suzie said, looking me in the face. She was seated across from me in Starbucks in downtown Montreal. Her feet were tucked under her legs on a chair while her eyes, bleary with age, peered at me without blinking. She was so old that she reminded me of a puppet, loose-jointed with dangling arms and a silver mane. It was hard to imagine the pretty woman she’d been forty years before.

  “My mother could be difficult sometimes,” I admitted, “but she had her reasons. My dad might not have loved her.”

  “Well, Gary wouldn’t divorce Nellie to marry me,” Suzie said, pursing her lips smeared with a bit of cappuccino foam. When young, she’d been charming, vivacious, and quick-witted. I could think of several reasons my father had fallen for her. Above all, she’d brought to mind the kind of seductress the Chinese call “fox spirit.”

  I went on, “My mother often said Gary loved nobody except for himself and me.”

  “Bullcrap. Gary loved Nellie in the beginning, I’m sure. But the love went sour.” In spite of Suzie’s annoyance, her voice still had a pleasant low timbre.

  “Thanks to you,” I said with studied levity, trying to smile but feeling my face tighten. I don’t think my father ever loved my mother, though in the later years of their marriage he developed an attachment to her.

  “If not me,” she continued, “there’d have been another Chinese woman in his life. Your father was always lonely and couldn’t share everything with your mother.”

  “Because she was white and American?”

  “That’s part of it. I was more useful to him than Nellie. Believe it or not, I’m still proud of being his mistress. I could do anything for him and he trusted me.”

  That caught me off guard. For a moment we fell silent. She lifted her cappuccino and sipped. I was lost in thought, musing about her and my father. Here was another slave of love. I admired her for that, for holding on to the remainder of her lifelong passion and for her total self-abandonment to the man she loved and cherished. How many of us are capable of that kind of devotion without the fear of being hurt or ruined? I turned to gaze out the window at the clean wide street, which was quiet with just a few pedestrians passing by, as if we’d been in a suburban town. It was overcast, the low clouds threatening snow.

  I switched to the topic that had been on my mind for a long time. “Suzie, I know my father had another family in China. Did you ever meet his first wife?”

  “No, I didn’t. Gary missed her a lot.”

  “What’s her full name?”

  “Yufeng Liu.”

  “I wish my mother had known that,” I blurted out, surprising myself, because the awareness of his other family could hardly have mollified Nellie.

  “That would’ve made her crazier, and she would have hated Gary and me all the more,” Suzie said.

  “Do you think Yufeng is still alive?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest idea.”

  “She might have remarried long ago, don’t you think?” I asked.

  “Maybe. Who knows? I had a feeling you might bring up Gary’s first wife. I only know her name and that they married in their mid-twenties. Last night I looked everywhere but couldn’t find her address. She used to live somewhere in Shandong, in the c
ountryside, and I don’t know if she’s still there. But there’s somebody in Beijing who might help you track her down.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Bingwen Chu. Goodness knows if that’s his real name. Perhaps he’s gone too. Here’s the old address of his office.”

  She gave me a slip of paper bearing her slanted handwriting. I liked Suzie in spite of her barbed words. She had moved to Canada in her mid-fifties and married a Malaysian businessman, but the marriage fell through a few years later. She seemed content living alone now.

  HENRY, MY HUSBAND, was staying behind while I went to Beijing so that he could continue managing our apartment building in College Park. The three-story property consisted of eighteen units and sat at the end of a quiet street; it was always fully occupied thanks to its fine amenities and bucolic setting. We’d bought the building four years earlier and were living in a corner apartment on the first floor. I had a studio in the basement where I read, wrote, and prepared my lectures for the history classes I taught at the university. Before we married, Henry had recently been widowed, while I’d been divorced for nearly a decade. Neither of us had children, much as we loved them. Henry was sixty-one, seven years older than me. We often fantasized about adoption, preferably a baby girl, but we also knew that our ages would disqualify us, so we never filed an application.

  The spring semester wouldn’t start in Beijing until mid-February. I arrived three weeks early, intending to give myself plenty of time to settle down and look into my father’s past. The teachers college’s campus was empty, like an abandoned village, but every day I would run into a colleague or two. The few people I spoke with were excited about the democratic demonstrations in the Arab countries. They seemed to believe that the tides of the political tsunami in the Middle East would soon reach the Chinese shore and wash away some parts of the bureaucratic system of their own country. I’d been to China before, had followed its affairs for decades, and knew changes wouldn’t come here easily. In 1988 I’d taught at the same school, and my mother had come to visit me toward the end of my stint. Her view of this country could be summed up in one word, “brutal,” which she had modified with a nervous giggle and this remark: “Like your father’s lot in life.” Yet she was deeply impressed by the people she met here, particularly by their optimism, their hunger for learning, their industriousness, their patriotism. Unlike my Chinese colleagues, I wouldn’t raise my hopes for the arrival of the global democratic waves. China was China and had always done things its own way, though this shouldn’t be an excuse for its resistance to change. I kept reminding myself that I was here just to teach two courses and would head back to the States in the early summer, so I’d better avoid getting involved in politics of any kind. Instead, I wanted to unravel my father’s past and locate his first wife, Yufeng, if she was still alive.

  Bingwen Chu, the lead Suzie gave me, had been my father’s sole handler on and off for three decades. In his diary Gary referred to him as the Torch, probably because the Chinese character bing means “burning bright.” After I settled down on campus I called his number, and as I’d expected, it was no longer in service. I went to the old address in Chaoyang district, but the four-story building was now occupied by a law firm, a British education agency, and other business offices. I asked a few people. Nobody had ever heard of Bingwen Chu.

  In spite of the impasse, I continued perusing my father’s diary and pondering his life. I’d also brought with me a book on him, which had come out a few years before. Titled The Chinese Spook, by Daniel Smith, it portrays him as a brilliant spy, a longtime mole in the CIA, who sold to China a huge amount of intelligence and did immeasurable damage to U.S. national security. The book offers a plethora of information on my father: his education, his unique role in the Chinese intelligence apparatus, his friendship with some American officials in the DC area, his ways of handling money, his tastes in food and drink, his fondness for petite women with abundant hair. But it doesn’t touch on his first marriage and his family in China; his life before he started working for the Americans remains a blank.

  There was no denying that my father had been a top spy, but the more I worked on his materials, the more I was convinced that money hadn’t been the primary motivation in his espionage for China. He was a man with a sizable ego; to me, he seemed too big for his boots and full of delusions. By professional standards I wouldn’t say he was a skilled spy, and his role had largely been thrust upon him by circumstances. As his life was gradually taking concrete form in my mind, I came to believe that he’d been not only a betrayer but also someone who’d been betrayed. Before school began, I immersed myself in reconstructing his story. A historian by profession, I wanted to tell it in my own fashion while remaining as objective as possible.

  1949

  At the beginning of that tumultuous year he arrived in Shanghai from the north. His first name was not Gary but Weimin, and he was a young secret agent working for the Communists. He had come with the task of worming his way into the Nationalists’ internal security system, specifically into the Eighth Bureau, which had been executing a large-scale plan code-named the Trojan Horse. It trained hundreds of agents who were to remain in the city after the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan. The Communists were eager to apprehend all those dangerous elements, who would sabotage factories, disrupt transportation, manufacture counterfeit currency, upset social order, gather intelligence, and would also coordinate with the Nationalist army when it came to retake the mainland. Weimin was a novice in the business of espionage, but as a graduate of Tsinghua University, he was intelligent and better educated than his comrades. In addition, having attended a missionary school for three years, he spoke English fluently and could mix with foreigners.

  He had married a month before, and his bride was still in the countryside in northern Shandong. The marriage had been arranged by his parents, but he liked his wife, Yufeng, even though he didn’t feel deep love for her yet. She had a fine figure, abundant hair, glossy skin; her large eyes would twinkle when she smiled. For the time being he wanted to keep her in his home village so that she could help his mother with housework and take care of his parents. The Shangs were well-to-do and owned seven acres of farmland. Weimin believed that eventually he might end up living in a city, Beijing or Tianjin or Jinan, and he had promised his bride he would come back to fetch her in the near future. As a northerner, he didn’t like the south, despite the better food and the foreign influences in the coastal cities. But living in Shanghai didn’t bother him that much, given that he was supposed to be here for only a short period. The political situation in the country was getting clearer every day; anyone could see that the Communists were defeating the Nationalists roundly and would soon take the whole country. It was very likely that Beijing, where Weimin would prefer to live, would become the new capital.

  He hadn’t made it into the Eighth Bureau. He lacked the practical skills required for the police work: he couldn’t shoot well, nor could he drive or dismantle a bomb, and he failed the hands-on test miserably. But he aced the political exam, in which his answers all hit the bull’s-eye, and he wrote a concise, lucid essay on the Three Principles of the People put forward by Sun Yat-sen (nationalism, democracy, and the people’s livelihood). The colonel reviewing the results of the exam was impressed and summoned Weimin to his office.

  Opening the applicant’s file, Colonel Hsu said to the young man seated before his desk, “Why are you interested in this kind of work, Mr. Shang? As a Tsinghua graduate plus an English major, you can do much better than this. You must agree that none of the jobs we advertised are for someone of your caliber.”

  “I need to eat and have to take whatever is available,” Weimin answered, looking at the officer in wonder.

  “I like your attitude, young man. You’re able to stoop or straighten up according to circumstances. Tell you what.” The colonel was beefy and had a gold-capped tooth. He wriggled his forefinger to get Weimin closer to his desk. “You should look fo
r employment in foreign services, for example, the U.S. embassy or an international bank. They pay much better.”

  “I’m new here and have no idea how to do that.”

  Colonel Hsu uncapped his silver fountain pen and wrote something on an index card. He pushed it across the desk to Weimin and said, “Here’s a place where you might try your luck. They need translators, I heard.”

  Weimin took the card and saw the name of a U.S. cultural agency and its address. The colonel added, “They give tests regularly nowadays, on Monday mornings. You should get there before nine o’clock.”

  Weimin thanked the officer and took his leave. He wasn’t sure he should try foreign services. For such a change of direction he’d have to get the Party’s approval. But to his amazement, when he told his superiors about the opportunity, they encouraged him to apply, saying that the Communists too had something like the Nationalists’ Trojan Horse plan, designed to penetrate all levels of the enemy’s military and administrative systems, including the diplomatic ranks. Yes, he must apply for such a job and do it under an alias, Gary Shang, which sounded savvy and fashionable for a young Chinese man. From now on he must go by this name. The legal papers would be prepared for him right away.

  So Weimin became Gary. He went to take the test at the U.S. cultural agency. It was to translate a short essay by the writer Lao She into English without the aid of a dictionary. This wasn’t very hard for him, except that he couldn’t spell some words, such as “cigarette” and “philosopher.” For those two, he put down “smoke” and “thinker” instead. He was certain he had made a number of silly mistakes. Feeling embarrassed, he avoided mentioning the test in front of his comrades.

  But the following week a notice came in the mail summoning Gary Shang for an interview. Did this mean he had passed the test? “You must have done pretty well,” said Bingwen Chu, a round-faced, hawk-eyed man, who was just one year older than Gary but was his immediate leader. Bingwen was a more experienced agent, sent over directly from Yan’an, the Communists’ base in the north. Gary figured that the foreign employer probably wanted to interview him because there hadn’t been many applicants—clearly the Americans would flee China soon, and few Chinese were willing to get too involved with them.