by Mai Jia
Because of that, I assumed that nobody could possibly see my books as anything other than works of fiction and that therefore I couldn’t be held to account by anyone. The strange thing is that in recent years some of my better-known novels have been taken as fact, and people have contacted me in various ways, wanting to point out inaccuracies. When In the Dark was made into a television series (and I’m told it was watched by several hundred million people), there were even more people who wanted to discuss its rights and wrongs, and so I ended up having to go into hiding for quite a while. There were too many people trying to find out where I was; it was impossible to live a normal life.
Among their number was a very powerful general, as well as several individuals who had worked for or were currently working for organizations not dissimilar to the Unit 701 where my characters Abing, Huang Yiyi and Qian Zhijiang were employed. Some of them came on their own behalf or on behalf of their families; others were there to represent their work unit or organization; some had come to say thank you, others to complain. It didn’t matter what had brought them, I still needed to make time to see them, to offer explanations and answer questions. Mostly, I was ending up repeating the same things over and over again, until I felt as if I were caught in an echo chamber. I felt a certain kinship with poor Sister Xianglin of Lu Xun’s famous short story ‘The New Year’s Sacrifice’.
There was one person, though, who came not to thank me nor to complain but to tell me a story of his own. He came from the city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, his name was Pan Xiangxin, and he was a recently retired professor of chemistry. He told me that he’d read pretty much everything I’d ever written, that he’d watched the films and television series based on my work, and that he thought I was very good at constructing a story.
‘However,’ he said, ‘real life is the very best storyteller.’
‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘All kinds of things happen in real life.’
‘I have a story for you,’ he said, ‘which happened to my father. It is absolutely true.’ He asked me if I was interested in hearing it.
‘I’m not interested in true stories,’ I said. ‘My novels are fiction. I like fiction.’
‘Why not hear me out anyway,’ he said. ‘You might be interested.’
What he told me is the story that you have just read.
This story was handed to me on a plate; I didn’t have to do a thing. But, hey, it’s a great story.
I have to admit that compared with the fictional writings I produced in the past, the story that Professor Pan told me was more complicated, more bizarre and more perfect in its own way. I found it fascinating. Afterwards, I came to believe that the professor had told me the story for a very specific reason: he wanted me to reshape his father’s image and experiences. And he certainly achieved that.
In order to get the full story, I visited Hangzhou three times in the days that followed, where I met face to face with Professor Pan’s father and four other witnesses to the events concerned. They were all extremely elderly. Thank God they’d managed to survive that long and that they still remembered what had happened more than half a century earlier. In this case, the past had not been blown away on the wind. What surprised me, though, was that the story the five of them had to tell was amazingly similar, even though they were all interviewed at different times and in different places. It was an almost identical version of events in each case. So I was confident that it had to be true.
As you will have grasped, Mr Pan senior (Professor Pan’s father) was able to clear up the remaining secrets; he was an important witness to much of what occurred. In this story, old Mr Pan was an agent in the Communist underground. His code name was Heaven and he was charged with maintaining wireless communication between the underground in Hangzhou and the Communist military. Radio waves travel through the sky, which is presumably how he got his code name. He was also responsible for transmitting all intelligence that came from Ghost.
So who was Ghost?
‘It was Li Ningyu!’ Mr Pan senior said.
Mr Pan senior was the Liangming that Li Ningyu mentioned in one of her suicide notes: her ‘estranged husband’. ‘But that was just our cover,’ Mr Pan explained to me. ‘We were actually brother and sister – comrades too, of course – and we pretended to be married to facilitate our work.’
2
In the earlier part of my story, when Li Ningyu herself said that her older brother had been murdered by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, she was talking about Mr Pan senior. As a young man he’d been a Communist agent infiltrated into the circle around Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, but then his cover had been blown and he’d been condemned to death. He was lucky: the man charged with shooting him dead was one of his own comrades, and he was able to fake the execution. Mr Pan senior survived. After that he changed his name, went undercover, and moved around a lot.
When the puppet government headed by Wang Jingwei was established, the Communist Party sent Mr Pan senior to Hangzhou, to join his sister, Li Ningyu. She was already working undercover as an anti-Japanese agent at the ECCC. They were to pretend to be husband and wife, but to make it easier for them – so that they didn’t have to do the things expected of a married couple, like going shopping together, going out for walks, taking the children on trips, and the rest – they made sure everyone knew their marriage was an unhappy one. Which was why Mr Pan senior turned up that time at her ECCC work unit on the military base and beat her up in front of everyone. She was then able to tell her colleagues that she’d fallen for someone else and that she wasn’t going to be living with him any more, but at the same time she still had a reason to return to the marital home, to see the children and so forth.
‘That’s what we wanted,’ Mr Pan said. ‘Our house was a station from which a great deal of vital intelligence was transmitted.’
At that time, a lot of intelligence was coming from Li Ningyu. If she picked up something at the ECCC that needed to be urgently communicated back to her comrades, she would use Turtle to take it off base straight away. She and Turtle were able to meet regularly without causing suspicion, and there was a secret signal. If she dropped a piece of rubbish in his presence, that meant he had to go and collect a message immediately. But if Li Ningyu had intelligence that wasn’t so urgent, she would just wait until lunchtime and take it home with her, ready for Mr Pan to transmit later that evening.
When Li Ningyu was being held at the Tan Estate, the cover story put out by Colonel Hihara and Commander Zhang was so plausible that from start to finish her comrades never discovered what was really going on. When he mentioned this, old Mr Pan became upset. ‘The fact is that I was a little worried. It all seemed very strange. She was only going to be gone for a couple of days, but they were making such a fuss about it, inviting us relatives to eat at the Louwailou restaurant and then taking us out to the Tan Estate to look at them. It was as if they were afraid we might not believe them.’
He kept shaking his head as he told me this.
‘And then Warrior (the concubine) happened to get arrested on the same day. There were holes in their story, but we didn’t treat the situation as seriously as we should have. The main reason for that was because when Turtle went to the estate, Li Ningyu didn’t signal to him at all. Turtle thought that if something really had happened, she would definitely have found a way to make contact – she always had before. He had no idea she was under such close guard that she simply didn’t dare make the slightest sign.’
‘But why, when Turtle came out of the kitchen a second time, did he simply leave?’ I asked.
According to old Mr Pan, that was because he’d seen a steel fountain pen with a white cap in Li Ningyu’s breast pocket. That was one of their signals. If Li Ningyu displayed a steel fountain pen, it meant Turtle mustn’t approach her.
‘That was a dreadful mistake,’ Mr Pan said. ‘He quite misunderstood her signal with the pen. Li Ningyu undoubtedly meant that he should not approach her because s
he was afraid he’d be unmasked. But Turtle interpreted it as a simple sign that she had nothing to communicate. So he reported back that everything was fine. Tiger then took this to mean that Li Ningyu was indeed engaged in some kind of official mission for the Imperial Japanese Army and that there was no need to worry about her.’ Emotion almost got the better of the old man at this point in his story, but he soldiered on nonetheless. ‘I only realized that things had gone terribly wrong when they delivered her body to me.’
‘But her suicide note claimed that she’d died of an infectious disease. How could you know that something had gone wrong?’
He sighed. ‘Well, first of all, it seemed very strange that she’d died so suddenly. That didn’t seem right at all. What disease could she have caught to die so quickly? And if she was dying like that, how did she manage to write a note? Also, she addressed her note “To my husband Liangming”, when, given our true relationship, she could have just used my name – why did she need to stress “To my husband”? And another thing, she said, “I have no regrets about dying in the performance of my official duties.” That was very odd. If she had died carrying out a mission for Hihara, how could she say, “I have no regrets”? The children were still so little, and the Revolution had not yet been accomplished – how could she rest in peace? It was that line that told me that she must have left a message to come out with her body. That was the only way she could say, “I have no regrets about dying in the performance of my official duties.”’
3
But Mr Pan searched her body and everything with it and didn’t find anything.
How could he have? Hihara had got there first, he’d been all over Li Ningyu’s corpse and her belongings, and everything she was now wearing was brand new – of course there was nothing to find.
‘But I was quite sure there must be something, so I didn’t give up. I kept on searching, thinking about where it could be, trying to guess where she might have put it.’
Old Mr Pan frowned, as if confronting the conundrum all over again. ‘I began to wonder if she’d used some secret method to hide it. If it were on her body, it would have to be in her stomach – she’d have swallowed her message. But there was nothing in her note to suggest that, and I didn’t like the idea of trying to find out, so I left that for the moment. If it wasn’t on her body then it had to be among her belongings. The only place she could possibly have concealed a message was in the painting, and she had mentioned her painting in her note to me. I studied it very carefully, hoping it would tell me something. But no matter how hard I looked, how many times I came back to it, whatever angle I tried, I didn’t see anything.’
To this day, the painting hangs in old Mr Pan’s study. It’s been mounted on silk and placed in a brown frame. It’s a monochrome ink painting, very expressive, with the trunks of the trees and their canopy of leaves depicted in broad brushstrokes. The effect is bold, dramatic. The grass is more simply indicated, with long and short strokes, very impressionistic. It’s such a simple, straightforward picture and I felt sure there could be no message hidden there, even if I were to put it under a magnifying glass.
However, Mr Pan assured me that the message was right there in the painting. He asked me to guess where it was.
I began by remarking that the paper was comparatively thick, so perhaps it would be possible to peel apart the layers and hide the message between them. Then I said that the tree canopy looked a bit like a road map, so maybe that was it. And finally, I guessed that there might be something in the inscription Li Ningyu had written for her children.
Old Mr Pan shook his head at each of my guesses. When he saw that I had run out of ideas, he gave me a clue. ‘Have you noticed the grass? Do you see anything special about it?’
I had already looked at the grass several times. There was a long line of it in the foreground, long and short blades, dense in some places, sparse in others. It looked to have been painted very casually, with only a stroke or two of the brush. If I’d had to say what was special about it, I’d have said that it was painted very freely. It would be impossible to hide something there.
Mr Pan senior laughed. ‘You’re going about this quite the wrong way. You’re looking for something obvious, but think about the situation she was in – how could she possibly communicate something openly? Everything that was allowed off the estate would have been searched over and over again, so if you can see it, the enemy would have seen it too. That would never work. She would have put her message somewhere that only I would discover it. And what is different about me? Do I have some amazing superpower?’
His eyes twinkled mischievously at me.
‘As I mentioned, I was a wireless operative. I was in charge of the radio station that maintained communication between the Communist underground in Hangzhou and our Communist military, the New Fourth Army, and Li Ningyu was a cryptographer, perfectly familiar with Morse code.’
Mr Pan stopped and asked me if I knew about Morse code.
Of course I knew about Morse code. If I didn’t, how could I have written In the Dark? Abing was a surveillance agent specializing in the subject. Nowadays, there are lots of people who will tell you that I used to work in a top-secret department like his, and there’s even a story that I was fired for writing Decoded and In the Dark. I have nothing to say to that, because I don’t know what to say. It’s not worth trying to argue. I used to imagine that people valued what I wrote, my books, and that my own circumstances were irrelevant. To me, it really is totally irrelevant whether my work unit fires me or promotes me. That’s never been my main concern. I just want to write good books, for readers who appreciate my work. I want to allow my readers to imagine another world. To put it differently, what concerns me is holding on to my readers, keeping them interested, and that’s harder than some people like to suggest. It’s actually just thoughtless and ill-informed of people to say that being an author is easy.
4
Okay, back to the story. Let me tell you something about Morse code.
I’ve always thought that Samuel Morse was an amazing man to have come up with such a simple language. It’s composed of two sounds, dot and dash, which you can write using just two signs: • and —. The relationship between the dot and the dash is set at 1:3. That means that three dot sounds together make one dash: three • put together make one —. And, what’s more, Morse code can be used to transcribe every language in the world. It can be transmitted through the air, through the clouds, and out into space. As long as you’re out there, you can use this language.
Thirty years ago, when I was in the second year of elementary school, my aunt’s mother-in-law passed away. Her son was working in Beijing, and she needed to get in touch with him as soon as possible to have him come back for the funeral. My father took me to the post office. The person who sent off the telegram was another relative (I called him uncle), and that was the first time I had the privilege of seeing a Morse key and observing the process by which the message was transmitted.
I watched my uncle as he sat at the table, the middle finger of his right hand operating the steel key, filling the room with the sound of dots and dashes. In less than five minutes, he announced that he’d now sent the message to our relatives in Beijing and that they’d received it. It seemed incredible – how could such a thing be possible? He had to be lying! But that evening my uncle came round to our house with a telegram informing us that my aunt’s son was already on a train heading home and that we were to delay the funeral until he got back.
I could already read quite well at that age, so I grabbed the telegram, but all I could see were numbers, line after line of them, and all of them in groups of four. I asked my uncle how he could understand what it said, and he told me that there was a book, but because he’d been doing the job for a while, he’d memorized pretty much all of it. He could read a message without having to look anything up.
In those days, when you went to the post office to send a telegram, you would always see a
big book on the desk of the operative, sextodecimo, really fat, about the size of the Chinese–English dictionary that we had at home. In this book, every Chinese character and punctuation mark was given as a string of numbers. For example, China was 0022 0948; the United States was 5019 0948; and a comma was 9976. It was all done like that. In the hands of a telegraph operator, these numbers changed again into the sound of dots and dashes, so the number 1 became dot dash, 2 became dot dot dash, and so on and so forth:
1: dot dash
2: dot dot dash
3: dot dot dot dash dash
4: dot dot dot dot dash
5: dot dot dot dot dot
6: dash dot dot dot dot
7: dash dash dot dot dot
8: dash dot dot
9: dash dot
0: dash
That gives you the sounds, what you hear. When writing it out, it looks like this:
1: • —
2: • • —
3: • • • — —
4: • • • • —
5: • • • • •
6: — • • • •
7: — — • • •
8: — • •
9: — •
0: —
Now supposing we write dash (—) as a vertical stroke. Then the numbers 1234567890 written out in Morse code, will look like this:
• | • • | • • • | | • • • • | • • • • • | • • • • | | • • • | • • |
•|
This is a printed book, so everything is all the same size and very stiff; perhaps you can’t imagine these symbols drawn out to look like grass. But as we know – in fact, as I mentioned above – dots and dashes are arranged in the proportion 1:3, so you could equally well describe them as short and long. Blades of grass can also be either short or long; indeed, as old Mr Pan said, the fingers on your hand are short and long, so why not grass?