The Wounded Muse

by Robert F Delaney

  Jake clenches the phone. Perhaps if he throttles it, a different message might come through.

  “So I guess Andrews is too scared about the photos.”

  “Guess what, Jake. Andrews is no longer working for McKee. He’s been fired.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, Jake. Maybe he divulged the details of your night with him in Tianjin, or maybe those photos were sent to McKee’s office, or maybe this is all a coincidence. McKee’s office is in turmoil because of Iraq and everything else, right? All we know for sure is that we don’t have an advocate in Congress now.”

  Standing between the China World Towers, looking helplessly at a procession of suited professionals filing into a Haagen Dazs outlet, Jake wants to knock them all over like bowling pins. Or just stand in place and scream. Anything to release the anger and shame that’s sloshing through his gut like bile from a ruptured appendix.

  “I fucked everything up, didn’t I?” He says in a voice that starts to crack as it morphs into something closer to a sob.

  “Too early to say. Do you know if Diane is going to make this public? Because that’s our only hope now.”

  Jake takes a deep breath. Falling apart never solves a problem, he reminds himself. One of the few useful pieces of advice he heard his mother say on a near-daily basis as he was growing up. The words served her like a crutch when boyfriends disappeared or when bills arrived that she didn’t know how to pay.

  “She said she’s going to.”

  “Good. Now we need to use that to start a shit storm. I’ve got a few irons in the fire but I’m not going to go into detail about them because we can’t afford to run down your pre-paid accounts. I’ll check back with you tomorrow. How much time is left on this account?”

  “Maybe fifteen minutes as long as the call is incoming. Three minutes tops if I need to call you.”

  “Right. Obviously, I need to call you.”

  “Yes, keep using Adam’s Morgan. Once this is drained, I have one left, which we’ll use when I mention Georgetown.”

  *****

  “His sister is ready to talk. She’s setting up a blog,” Jake tells Gavin, a Tokyo-based managing editor at Toeler, as he cradles his cell phone between his shoulder and ear.

  Previously a London-based bond trader, Gavin moved up quickly through the editorial ranks by covering bond markets with more accuracy than anyone else on his team. Jake heard the backstory even before HR sent the email around, chatter he picked up while covering events with reporters from other regions. Word had it that Gavin got market-moving tips from his former colleagues, the sort of activity that might lead to disciplinary action by market regulators if it were ever discovered.

  “Her blog will get a lot of attention,” Jake adds, dangling the prospect of a hot story.

  After Gavin racked up enough bond market reporting wins, he wanted to – as he put it in his first conversation with Jake – “experience the Orient”. Single, thirty-something, and looking for adventures that will mainly play out in bars, bedrooms and brothels, Gavin is everything Jake dislikes about expats. Someone who’s made a living trading bonds in London can’t make decisions about what constitutes news in Asia, especially one who refers to the region as ‘the Orient’.

  “How does this differ from any other dissident story that we don’t cover?” Gavin asks in a snarky tone.

  Jake fumbles with his keys and wants to groan but can only roll his eyes. He enters his apartment, lets the backpack slung around one shoulder and his laptop bag on the other drop one by one and switches on the lights. He leans against the foyer wall with the bags by his feet.

  “Because this guy has an interesting backstory, Gavin. A Silicon Valley whiz originally from Chongqing who got scholarships at good schools in the U.S., got a green card and now he’s missing.”

  “Sounds like pure tabloid junk to me. What else is there about this story that’s so interesting to you?”

  The question sounds like an accusation. It’s not just that the story is personal and, therefore, would need a finer editorial filter. This dissident case is killing Jake. Does Gavin know about his relationship with Qiang? He’s aware that others in his social orbit know about this but can’t believe the information would have surfaced in Tokyo. Perhaps Gavin does have a knack for news.

  “Let’s talk about it again next week,” Gavin says.

  “Right, thanks,” Jake says just before cutting off the call.

  He looks down at the full laptop bag. It has an IBM ThinkPad, a digital voice recorder, extra batteries and lists of questions he’ll lob at the Chinese Central Bank governor from the sidelines of a conference he’s covering tomorrow in Zhengzhou. He’ll need to leave the apartment in less than five hours to catch the flight and he hasn’t eaten dinner because he had to file a series of templated stories that cover each of the Central Bank governor’s likely comments.

  Hungry and tired, Jake lacks the energy to metabolize the anger he feels towards Gavin. He needs to redirect these feelings into something more constructive, a strategy to get the story about Qiang written, a story that the editors in Washington won’t want to spike.

  As he reaches for a bottle of wine from the refrigerator, Jake starts thinking about other publications, ones that will recognize what’s at stake politically and not be bothered that it has zero market relevance. Now that Diane plans to start blogging, he’s free to make noise. Perhaps he will write the story that creates enough interest, and enough pressure, to get Qiang out. How would that change things between them? He plays with that thought for a moment and then tries to suffocate it. Love doesn’t grow out of gratitude.

  Jake needs to pack for tomorrow but clothes from the last trip a few days earlier, carrying the pungent stink of frayed nerves and deodorant gone sour, still occupy his luggage. He’ll need to put all of it in the washer and stay up long enough to throw them in the dryer. The collision of mortal urgencies and mundane tasks leaves Jake stuck, staring at nothing. He empties his pockets of a wallet and a few bent name cards, his own mixed with those of government and corporate spokespeople. Then one of several coins he drops on the table rolls onto the floor and under a bureau. The silence that ensues after the coin settles hypnotizes him. He wonders how much damage he’d cause if he just got on another flight – to Auckland or New Delhi or Johannesburg – and started a new life. Do Diane and Ben really need him? Do the stories he writes make any difference? He could just resurface in a few days, in a different city, and tell his employer that his parents died in car crash or some similar tragedy. Or he could just tell the truth. His psychological tethers snapped and he followed the rapids. And wound up in Buenos Aires.

  A knock at the door breaks the spell. Jake looks at the display on his cell phone. 11:29 p.m. He hasn’t had unannounced visitors since that guy kept showing up two or three years earlier. He forgets his name.

  He doesn’t want to answer the door. It could only be someone who’s been to his place and doesn’t have his number, a particular category of people who don’t have his number for a reason.

  “Jie-ke,” says the voice on the other side of the door. “Is that you, Jie-ke? I am Dawei.”

  Dawei waits on the couch while Jake puts a load of clothes into the wash. Jake has set him up with a cup of tea and McVitie’s digestive wafers. As he waits for the water to start sloshing into the machine, Jake takes a sip of wine, wondering what might unfold between him and Dawei who looks exhausted. Sitting with his backpack on his lap, Dawei wears a blue hoodie with brownish grime around the pockets. The drawstring is missing.

  “So, how long has it been?” Jake asks as he comes back into the room. “At least two years, maybe three?”

  “Yes, something like that,” Dawei says.

  “Are you still delivering air tickets?”

  “No. I lost that work after only a few w…w…weeks because people started getting tickets through their computers.”

  The
stutter reminds Jake of how awkward their connection had been.

  “So, did you get other work?”

  “No, I had to go back to my job at the restaurant in Macau. I used the rest of my m…m…money to get back there.”

  Dawei seems anxious. He’s looking around. Not so much out of curiosity like during the first visit. The washing machine fills the silence by clicking into the steady whir of the first spin cycle, changing over from the periodic swish of agitation. Jake doesn’t want to ask what’s brought Dawei back to Beijing. There’s something about the fatigue and anxiousness Dawei projects that suggests a long story.

  “I’ve been in Beijing for some time now. It took me a while to figure out which building is yours and then which unit is yours.”

  “Yeah, they all look the same, don’t they? Sometimes when it’s late and I’m tired, I walk to the wrong–”

  “Do you remember that script I gave you when we saw each other last?” Dawei asks, cutting Jake off and looking at him directly. A fixed stare that prompts Jake to put his glass down. Dawei had only ever made eye contact through split-second glances.

  Jake remembers that Dawei left a few items in a folder, including a memento of Sino-Canadian diplomatic relations in the form of a maple leaf and a lotus flower, flattened and encased in clear laminate. He doesn’t remember exactly where that folder is, so he doesn’t answer straight away. He scratches his chin.

  “Um, yes I think I remember.”

  Dawei focuses on Jake intently, his eyes now so wide and searching that Jake moves a few inches away. Moving slowly, like a cat fixing on a kill, Dawei puts his backpack on the floor. He then stands up, looking over into the computer room and then back at Jake. The stare demands action, or at least some kind of movement. This visit clearly isn’t a reunion. There will be no small talk or exploration of roads not taken when they hung out years earlier.

  Prompted by Dawei’s apparent desperation, Jake walks into the computer room and flips on the light. Two of the room’s walls are lined with shelves full of file boxes and stacks of binders, folders and files. Workbooks from his courses in China, tote bags full of material from the dozens of conferences he’s covered, some books that he’s read, some untouched. Abandoned GMAT study guides, brochures from attractions like Xian’s Terracotta Soldiers.

  With his hand still on his chin, Jake eyes the shelves. It occurs to him that he’s thrown some things out. Could Dawei’s folder have been among them? He remembers that Dawei’s mementos were somewhere in the various heaps but years have passed and, with them, any obligation he’d felt to keep the items safe. They probably got tossed amid various attempts to restore order on his shelves. Dawei stands behind Jake as he surveys the banks of shelving stacked with file boxes.

  Jake can’t bring himself to tell Dawei that his items are probably gone.

  “Dawei, I can’t look through all of this right now and I need to leave for a work trip early tomorrow. Actually, in just a few hours. I can go through this when I come back and call you if I find what you’re looking for.”

  Dawei continues looking at the shelves as though he hasn’t heard anything Jake has said. The more Jake thinks about it, the more likely it seems that he’s ditched Dawei’s mementos. He’s aware that Chinese place more importance on thoughtful gestures than the always-too-casual laowais but Dawei’s concern for what’s happened to these items seems to go far beyond sentimentality.

  “I can go through these boxes myself,” Dawei says, his stare still fixed on the disarray in front of them.

  Jake wants to ask why Dawei feels so strongly about the things he’s trying to retrieve but knows how such a question might come across as callous and flippant. It would seem reasonable at this point to ask why Dawei would have left these items in his place for so long if they were so important. A few months, yes. A few years? That doesn’t make sense, especially since they hadn’t established much of a friendship.

  “That’s not a good idea,” Jake says. “Besides, I’ve moved many of my things around. I’ve moved some things to my office here in Beijing and even some things back home to the U.S.”

  He puts a hand on Dawei’s shoulder and Dawei steps away.

  “Dawei,” Jake says firmly. “I need to get ready to leave and I’m not going to find your items before I do. I understand that you want these things back and I’ll do my best to get them. Please don’t give me any trouble about this.”

  Jake puts his hand on Dawei’s shoulder again and leads him out of his office. Once they’re in the foyer, Jake grabs a post-it note and scrawls his cell phone number onto it.

  “Here, if it’s so important for you to have these things, call me on this number in a week. That’s when I’ll be back and can look through all of my things more thoroughly.”

  By the time Jake gets Dawei out his front door, he’s issued at least a dozen assurances that he’ll find the screenplay. He had started by saying that he’d jin liang, try his hardest, but Dawei wouldn’t reach for his bag or motion that he’s ready to leave until Jake started using more definitive language.

  “Wo hui zhao dao,” Jake says. I will find it.

  “What time is best to stop by?” Dawei says as Jake grips the door handle.

  “You have my cell number,” Jake replies. “Just call me and we’ll set a time.”

  He remembers that Dawei doesn’t have a cell phone.

  “Oh, right. Here,” Jake says as he pulls his wallet from his back pocket and lifts a 100 kuai note from the bills inside. “I know you don’t have a cell phone so you can use this to call from a public phone.”

  SATURDAY, April 21, 2007

  TO: jbradley@toelernews.net

  FROM: KendraEMonahan@gmail.com

  Saturday, April 21, 2007,

  Jake, my op-ed in tomorrow’s World Chronicle…

  I’m pasting it below in case they’re jamming this link in China.

  This is what I didn’t have time to tell you about on the phone yesterday. Note the link to the translations I’m doing for her. Spread the word.

  Kendra

  Shattering the China Dream: Unlawful Detentions Undermine Respect for Beijing

  By Kendra Monahan, Sunday, April 22, 2007; A25

  On Feb. 16, Sun Qiang, an independent filmmaker and U.S. permanent resident, became another victim of Chinese state kidnapping. It is unclear why state agents abducted Qiang (his given name) on March 25, but his friends think it may be related to his work on a documentary about the redevelopment of neighbourhoods in Beijing, and attempts to keep at least some residents in the newly redeveloped communities.

  Qiang’s ordeal involved no courts, arrest warrants, official paperwork, police stations or jails. While his captors work for China’s State Security Bureau, what happened can only be described as a kidnapping. The extra-legality and the lack of official records make it impossible to count such cases. Human rights organizations try to keep count, but the outside world generally hears about only those victims whose friends and family manage to overcome police pressure to stay quiet and who are also well connected or savvy enough to get the story out somehow.

  Qiang turned 34 this week. He personifies a generation of urban Chinese who have flourished thanks to the Communist Party’s embrace of market-style capitalism and greater cultural openness. He and his sister, Diane Sun, who works in finance and lives a comfortable middle-class life in Shanghai, have enjoyed freedoms of expression, travel, lifestyle, and career choice that their parents could never have dreamed of. They are proof of how U.S. economic engagement with China has been overwhelmingly good for many Chinese.

  Problem is, the Chinese Dream can be shattered quickly if you step over a line that is not clearly drawn – a line that is kept deliberately vague and that shifts frequently with the political tides. Those who were told by the Chinese media that they have constitutional and legal rights are painfully disabused of such fantasies when they seek to shed light on social and religious issues the state prefers to keep in the dark.


  Since Qiang’s detention, Diane has spent countless hours pleading with police officers for information about his case, location, and condition. After a month of getting nowhere, she’s just started to chronicle her ordeal on a Chinese-language blog at http://spaces.msn.com/sunqiang. It is a heartbreaking account of how China’s regime eats its young. In her first entry she holds out hope: “China is a just country, and this is why I have hope for my dear brother, Qiang, who was detained one month ago for working on a project that only sought to create harmony between developers and ordinary citizens who comprise ideal communities.”

  Diane also describes her disillusionment: “the people I dealt with never showed police credentials (despite repeated requests), and never called each other by name. I was angry at myself for my political naiveté, and angry at this place that displayed the police insignia but did not actually ‘Serve the People.’ “

  With an ever-increasing interdependence with China in terms of trade and investment, Americans need to re-asses this relationship. What is this country to think? On the one hand Qiang’s government has raised the living standards of millions of its citizens with economic reform and international trade. On the other hand, his underlings trample shamelessly on his people’s basic human rights.

  The careers of some politicians in both countries – not to mention military budgets – would no doubt benefit if our two nations became enemies. As an American who lived and worked in China for more than a decade, however, I continue to believe that peaceful engagement between the United States and China is in the best interest of both nations’ people.

  But we have a serious problem that won’t go away: How can Americans respect or trust a regime that kidnaps our friends?

  *****

  In the press room in Zhengzhou, Jake sends Kendra’s opinion piece to the printer. Twenty copies. He walks it over to where Regine is seated and slides it in front of her.

  “I thought you’d find this interesting,” he says. “The link is now blocked unless you have a VPN.”