by Mai Jia
‘So many people who want to join the Bureau get rejected,’ Gu Xiaomeng said excitedly. She told him how the Bureau had come in secret to the police academy on numerous occasions, to recruit its top students, but their requirements were extremely high – the people they recruited were always the very best in their class. That made her even more determined to say yes: here was her chance and she wasn’t going to let it slip.
‘No, this time you have to listen to me.’
‘No, I won’t. This is my choice and you mustn’t interfere.’
No matter what he said or how hard he tried, Mr Gu simply wasn’t able to change his daughter’s mind. It seems to be a rule that, whenever parents and children disagree on questions of love and marriage, or career choices, it’s always the parents who lose in the end. And so it was with Mr Gu and Xiaomeng.
That evening, Mr Gu felt unusually weak and helpless for all that he was a vastly wealthy and successful businessman. He paced the quiet garden like a trapped beast, and the silvery light of the moon from time to time illuminated the tears that flowed down his haggard cheeks.
4
On another night, when the moon was again shining as bright as silver, Section Chief Song returned to the Gus’ house. This time he brought with him a sheaf of documents, a Nationalist flag, and a portrait of the Father of the Nation, the late Sun Yat-sen. He was to induct both Mr and Miss Gu into the Bureau of Military Statistics. First they had to fill out their forms, one each, in triplicate. Having done that, they affixed their fingerprints and were each allocated a code number. Her father was 036, she was 312. Then they were formally sworn in. The two of them raised their right hands, made a fist and then swore an oath to the Nationalist flag and the portrait of Sun Yat-sen, as dictated to them by Section Chief Song:
‘I swear that from this day forward I will live and die for the Nationalist Party. I will be loyal to the Nationalist Party in the face of all threats and temptations, and I will defend its interests at all costs. I will resolutely carry out every command issued by my superiors without any concern for myself.’
Section Chief Song was now their commanding officer, and he gave Mr Gu his first orders. ‘You must inform everyone that your daughter is going to the United States for the holidays, to visit her two brothers.’
Mr Gu immediately understood that he and Xiaomeng were to be separated. ‘You’re taking her away?’
The Section Chief nodded. ‘You need to be trained,’ he told Gu Xiaomeng.
Shortly after this, Gu Xiaomeng boarded an ocean liner belonging to the Weiyuan Company and crossed the Pacific. She was to do her training as a secret agent in the United States. At that time, the Nationalist government had a secret military base in the suburbs of Washington DC. It was run by the Chinese ambassador to the US, His Excellency Xiao Bo, who was also the head of the American station of the Bureau of Military Statistics.
While she was doing her training in the US, Gu Xiaomeng read in the newspapers that her father had presented a plane to Wang Jingwei. This meant that for years afterwards both Mr Gu and Xiaomeng were regularly accused of being traitors who’d served as running dogs of the puppet regime. After the war was over, the Bureau provided evidence and witnesses to testify that they had merely been obeying orders, which restored their reputations. However, in the 1950s, concerns were again raised about their activities. By that time, both Dai Li and Section Chief Song were dead, so His Excellency Xiao Bo was now their best and most important witness. For many years, Madame Gu had treated his testimony as her most precious possession. I was lucky enough to be allowed to read it:
I can testify to the fact that Gu Xiaomeng was a secret agent working for the Nationalist Party.
In September and October of 1939 she received training at the secret base I had established in Washington for the Ministry of Defence. At that time she was one of seven agents specially chosen by the National Bureau of Investigation and Statistics (that is, the Bureau of Military Statistics). Miss Gu studied very hard and showed her determination to resist the Japanese and rescue the Motherland in both word and deed. This should be beyond doubt.
After she completed her training, she returned to our country, and on many occasions I heard members of the Bureau, including Dai Li himself, praise the patriotism that Miss Gu and her father showed towards our country, and the meritorious service they performed towards our organization.
After the end of the Anti-Japanese War, the Nationalist Party acclaimed the loyalty, bravery and patriotism of Mr and Miss Gu in the most conclusive terms; if anyone now tries to pervert the facts, it shows that they are deliberately trying to malign this family for the most sinister of motives. This should be considered a source of shame by one and all.
Addendum: Two copies of this witness statement have been prepared; one will be kept by the National Central Security Council, and one will be kept by Gu Xiaomeng herself.
This letter was printed on a single sheet of sextodecimo white paper and was the original document. Xiao Bo’s signature in black ink, the red mark of his personal seal and his thumbprint at the foot of the page testified to its authenticity and its historical importance. With Madame Gu’s permission, I took a photograph of it with my digital camera. When the old lady discovered that my camera had only a low resolution of four megapixels, she took another picture on her own nine-megapixel camera and forwarded it to me. I still have her higher-resolution image on my computer and every single part of it is clear and legible.
That was the end of my first interview. Madame Gu had by now completely changed her attitude towards me and very kindly offered to see me out to my car. When I politely declined, she insisted on at least escorting me to the door, where she shook my hand and said goodbye. It was the feeblest hand I’d ever felt – there seemed to be hardly any flesh on it, just skin and bone; it was as light as a feather, as if it might blow away at any moment, and there was no warmth or weight in her handshake. I couldn’t help but think that it was just as well that her memory wasn’t equally feeble. That her mind had not betrayed her was a source of silent delight to me, but I had no idea who to thank.
THREE
1
Even though it was only April, in Taipei it was as if spring had already been and gone; the streets were full of people in T-shirts and sunglasses eating ice creams as the sun beat down on them. Back home on the Mainland, my family would still be in their winter clothes. It occurred to me that coming from my home town to Taipei as I had was also like going straight from winter into summer.
Madame Gu’s daughter told me that her mother couldn’t stand air conditioning, so she always spent the summer out of Taipei, at her villa in the countryside. She normally moved there in the last week of April, but this year, because of me, she’d gone a week early.
There were two gardeners and a housekeeper who lived at the villa all year round, and Madame Gu also had a live-in carer, a Malaysian Chinese woman called Chen. She was about fifty, of middling height and slightly plump, and I addressed her respectfully as Mrs Chen. She could speak Mandarin, English and Cantonese; her family originally came from Guangdong province, and she’d been looking after Madame Gu for the last twenty years. Her monthly salary was about ten thousand RMB, which would put her in the upper pay bracket for a worker on the Mainland.
When I arrived to begin the interview the following day, Madame Gu had not yet come downstairs. Mrs Chen was in the sitting room, carefully arranging the old lady’s special magnifying glass on the tea table, next to a printout of my novel The Code. The manuscript was held in place by a baton-shaped rosewood paperweight, a sign that my work was being treated with respect.
Mrs Chen helped Madame Gu downstairs, bringing with her a small and very shiny dark red lacquerware box, which was obviously an antique. When Madame Gu had taken her seat, she instructed Mrs Chen to open the box and show me what was inside. I could see a yellowing photograph and a comb with three broken teeth, a steel fountain pen (with a white cap), a tube of lip balm, two pills o
f some kind, three silver coins, and various other things – there was even a single strand of hair. The person in the photograph was a woman of about thirty, with her hair in braids. She was unusually good-looking, but her mouth was tightly closed and her eyes were cold – she looked as if she might have been through some terrible times.
‘Do you know who that is?’ Madame Gu asked.
Of course I knew. The moment I saw the photograph, I recognized Li Ningyu and assumed that those things had been hers. But what I didn’t understand was the presence of the steel fountain pen with the white cap and the comb with the broken teeth. I’d seen them in old Mr Pan’s house – how could there possibly be two sets?
When Madame Gu heard that, she cursed old Mr Pan roundly. ‘The ones I have are the real thing – he couldn’t possibly have them! Whatever he has is fake, he’s been lying to you. The old bastard even maintains that Li Ningyu took the message out, so is there anything he wouldn’t lie about? He’s a cheat through and through – he owes everything to his lies, he claims credit for anything he thinks he can get away with. He’s an absolute embarrassment, and I despise the way he behaves!’
I could see that she was getting worked up, so I hurriedly tried to calm her down. ‘Yes, it would be easy enough to find similar-looking items in any antiques market. I’m quite sure that the real ones are the ones in front of me right now.’ To get off the subject, I asked her, ‘When did you first get to know Li Ningyu? Did you meet her when you came back from the United States?’
‘Oh… not that soon,’ she said evasively, gazing distractedly at the sofa.
I persisted. ‘I’ve been told that when you got back from America, you worked for a time in the Shanghai police, is that right?’
‘Yes…’
She told me that by the time she came back from America, her father was already firmly established in Wang Jingwei’s good books, which meant he was also widely regarded as a traitor. He’d been made Deputy Director of the Shanghai Special Governance Committee and every time Wang Jingwei came to Shanghai the two of them would meet. Mr Gu could have got Xiaomeng whatever job she wanted, but as she’d graduated from the police academy, the Bureau decided it would look less suspicious if she worked at the police headquarters first, rather than joining a military unit straight away. Thanks to her father’s connections, she was sent to Nanjing to study wireless telegraphy and decryption techniques. In fact, this was exactly what she’d been trained in while she was in the US, so she was just going through the motions, but once she’d completed her studies, it was straightforward enough to have her transferred into a key military division.
At that point the puppet regime was vigorously promoting reconstruction, and all enemy-occupied areas were busy setting up military units under the nominal control of the collaborationist Nanjing government. In particular, President Wang Jingwei had put enormous effort into creating the East China Counterinsurgency Corps, the ECCC, which consisted of four independent brigades, one of which was based in Hangzhou. It was intended to function as an umbrella organization ensuring the smooth establishment of the puppet regime in the present instance, and stable development in the future.
‘If that region of East China was crucial for the enemy, it was also crucial for us.’ Madame Gu gave a slight smile as she casually related the major decisions that had been taken all those years ago. ‘It was imperative that we got our Nationalist agents into the ECCC. And who was best placed for that? Our superiors decided it should be my father and me.’
‘Because your family was based in Hangzhou?’
‘That was just an excuse.’ The most important reason, she explained, was that thanks to her training in wireless telegraphy and decryption she would be seen by the puppet regime as ideal material for either their Telecommunications Division or their Decryption Unit, both of which would give her access to top-secret information.
‘And in the end you went into the Decryption Unit?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Was that how you got to know Li Ningyu?’
‘And not just got to know…’
Madame Gu sighed and picked up the comb. She stroked it over and over again, as if that might help bring some order into her confused recollections of those long-ago days. It was quite clear that her fingers were no longer as nimble as they had once been, to the point where I worried that she might drop the comb at any moment.
After a long silence, she began.
‘We will start with this comb. The first time I ever met Li Ningyu, this comb was there to witness it, and it was also present the very last time I saw her…’
2
One afternoon in December 1939, the then head of the East China Counterinsurgency Corps, Commander Qian Huyi, took Gu Xiaomeng to the office of Li Ningyu, the head of the unit that decrypted telegraphic communications. It looked as if Li Ningyu had just washed her hair; she was sitting there with her head down, reading a newspaper and combing out her dripping hair. Gu Xiaomeng was amazed at how beautiful her hair was, so black and straight, like a hank of shining silk hanging in front of her face, with the red comb repeatedly sweeping through it. It was like a scene from a fairy tale. In a very real sense, Gu Xiaomeng met the hair and the comb first, and only afterwards got to know the person.
When Li Ningyu straightened up, she didn’t seem at all like someone out of a fairy tale; although very good-looking, and with beautiful pale skin, she didn’t look pleased or smile at all. Her stony expression gave the impression that she would be difficult to get to know.
President Wang Jingwei himself had both written to the ECCC and phoned them to tell them of Gu Xiaomeng’s arrival; when Qian Huyi introduced Gu Xiaomeng to Li Ningyu, he put special emphasis on this. You’d have thought that would have made Li Ningyu be a little more friendly, oblige her to offer her new colleague some warm words, but she remained as unsmiling as ever and simply said in an arctic tone, ‘Welcome.’
This was no chatterbox. She seemed as hard as her comb, and her words were as stiff as if they’d been spoken by an automaton.
Gu Xiaomeng was also wanting to establish a reputation: she wanted everyone to know that she was a spoilt little madam from a rich family, superficial in her dealings with others, arrogant and tiresome, fearless in word and deed. So, faced with her immediate superior’s disdain, she was rude in her reply.
‘Why do I get the feeling that I’m actually not welcome at all?’
That was supposed to make Li Ningyu feel awkward, but Li Ningyu didn’t bat an eyelid. She simply replied, in a loud, clear voice, ‘Of course you’re not welcome here. We don’t have the time or space to cosset a little princess.’
[Transcript from the interview with Gu Xiaomeng]
That was how we started out, like enemies. You might think that I hated her for the way she behaved towards me, but you’d be wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’d decided that I liked her. Strange, isn’t it? Actually, it’s not so strange. I’d spent my whole life surrounded by people who knew I had powerful connections and continually tried to cosy up to me – very few people dared to cross me. You value things more when they’re rare, and she behaved in this extraordinary way, which was a challenge for me. It made me feel that she’d be fun. I was curious about her, I found it interesting. I knew that if she’d been just like everyone else, she’d let me get my own way every time, in which case we could never be really good friends. Of course, I had my own reasons for wanting to get close to her, since that would facilitate the mission I’d been given by Chongqing.
Let me tell you, it’s very easy for enemies to become friends; opposites attract, and that’s a fact. And Li Ningyu and I were completely different. I always say that she was like a polar ice cap: nothing grew in her vicinity, she led a colourless existence, she had a cold personality and nobody wanted to get close to her. As for me… well, I was Nanjing’s very own Mount Zijin, always done up to the nines, always having fun, the centre of attention.
Li Ningyu would spend the entire day in her
office and quite often whole days would go by without her saying a word to anyone – she just sat there in total silence. I, on the other hand, had ants in my pants; if there was nothing to do, I was out of the office straight away, in and out of other people’s rooms, chatting or arguing with them, trying to persuade them to do this or that for me, taking nothing seriously. Of course, that was kind of my natural personality, but it was also a technique to deceive the enemy. Daddy once said to me that it’s impossible to hide your natural personality for any length of time so you might as well show it right from the start; besides which, everyone there knew about my special status, so I figured I might as well exploit the fact that I was both young and very well connected. I wanted to give everyone the impression that I was a silly little brat from a rich family who thought it was all just a joke. I wanted people to think that I broke rules just for the hell of it, and that I larded my conversation with swear words no matter who was listening; I wanted them to think I was a complete idiot.
In our division at that time there were three units – Telecommunications, Decryption and Intelligence – with a total staff of about thirty. Within less than a week of my arrival, I’d managed to get to know all of them. It was easy. With the women, I’d take them out and spend money on them. We’d watch movies, or I’d buy clothes for them, or we’d go out to a restaurant together, or we’d go and have photographs taken of ourselves. With the men, it was the other way round. I let them take me out and spend money on me.
There was one time when I invited all my officer colleagues to my home for dinner and Daddy gave everyone a present. Afterwards, he privately analysed each one of them to me. When he got to Li Ningyu, he might as well have been a fortune teller: he said that in the future we’d become good friends. When I asked him why, he said that many of the things that we wanted to know we could find out from her. In other words, befriending her would help me carry out my mission.