by Fred Hiatt
One afternoon as we rounded the corner to her apartment building, Ti-Anna shuddered as if she’d just sucked on a lemon. She whispered for me to look at a blue Taurus parked across from her front entrance.
“It’s them,” she said. “From the embassy.”
“What for?”
“Who knows?” she said. “Sometimes they sit there for hours. Keeping track of who my father meets with, maybe. Or trying to intimidate him.” She studied the car with disgust. “Good luck with that.”
She said good-bye and went inside; I eventually realized that she never lingered when the Taurus was there.
On afternoons when it wasn’t there, though, she’d happily talk until close to suppertime, though it was hot, and not the most comfortable place. A lot of the time, we talked about China. She’d never been back, and her memories were fragmentary but vivid, she told me.
She could close her eyes and feel the padding as she clutched her mother’s jacket, her mother bicycling through a freezing Beijing morning with Ti-Anna perched behind. She could remember the cracks in the beige paint on the wall beside her bed, in the room she’d shared with her grandmother. She thought she could still hear police hammering on the apartment door when they took her father away one night, though her mother insisted she’d been fast asleep and couldn’t possibly remember.
Sometimes, she said, a smell from a diesel truck, or a restaurant exhaust fan, or something she couldn’t even trace, would carry her back with dizzying force.
“Though I know it’s changed completely since my parents left,” she said. “It was crazy in the old days, like you were saying about Mao. But it’s not like that now.”
Her parents sometimes talked about what it was like when they were her age, and you couldn’t do anything without Communist Party permission. The Party decided whom you could marry, where you could live, whether you’d go to college or spend your life growing rice. You could wear any color you wanted, as long as it was drab gray or faded blue.
Now the government pretty much left people alone. They could marry, get rich, stay poor, buy or sell their apartments, dress as they pleased.
The one thing they couldn’t do—and here’s where her father came in—was say anything bad about the Party, or suggest that maybe other people should have a chance at running the country.
“The Communists are stubborn, but my dad is as stubborn as they are,” Ti-Anna said. “He spent four years in prison for believing in democracy. Came out, wrote another letter for democracy, and went right back in. They only let him out again after he promised to leave the country. For my sake, and my mother’s, he promised, but he hated to do it. He’s sure he’ll go back one day.”
“And what do you think?”
Ti-Anna didn’t answer right away.
“I think he’s the bravest man you could imagine, and I think everything he says about what China needs is right,” she said finally. “But I’m not sure so many people in China are interested in hearing about it right now, since in so many ways their lives have improved.”
Just then a small, gray-haired woman got off the bus that stopped by the apartment building. Ti-Anna bolted off the bench. “Pretend you don’t know me,” she said.
At first I thought I must have heard wrong. But she strode away, toward her mother—because of course that’s who it was—and I bent down, pretending to fix my gears.
As they passed, I heard them talking in Chinese. I looked up in time to see Ti-Anna open the door for her mother, who was about a foot shorter than Ti-Anna and was carrying a cloth shopping bag. Then they were gone, and it was suddenly very quiet on the sidewalk.
I waited by my bike for—well, for a long time. I was sure Ti-Anna would come out and apologize, or at least explain what was so repugnant about me that she had to pretend I was a stranger. But she didn’t come out, and she didn’t come out, and eventually I got nervous that some other tenant would wonder why this curly-haired kid was loitering outside the apartment building.
So I shouldered my backpack and wheeled away.
Chapter 5
That was a Friday, so I had the whole weekend to stew. At lunchtime on Monday I chose a bench down toward the practice football field, away from where we usually sat. After about ten minutes, I heard someone behind me.
“Sorry,” she said as she sat down next to me. She looked at me as though she meant it, and just like that I wasn’t mad anymore. I shrugged, as if to say, no big deal.
“Your mom doesn’t approve of boys?” I asked.
“American boys,” she said. “Or American girls, for that matter. Like I told you, being in America is just a temporary and unfortunate condition, as far as my parents are concerned. Anything that might distract us—anything that might get us more connected to life here—is a bad thing.”
“But you have friends,” I said. “You’re always hanging out with Janice Twersky, right?”
“Janice has been my best friend since forever,” Ti-Anna agreed. “My parents like her and her family, and on one level they understand that every child has to have friends.
“But—well, pretty much the only people they talk to are other exiles in the democracy movement. Or people who pretend to be in the movement and are probably spies for the government. And so on another level, they don’t see why I should be any different.”
“And what do you think about that?”
“Well …” She paused again, as if studying something on the field, except this time there were no cheerleaders—just one skinny ninth grader running laps in shorts that were too short. “I agree that what my father is trying to do is more important than anything in my life could be. But still …”
She looked at me, as if wanting me to finish the sentence for her. I nodded, hoping she would understand that I got what she meant.
“Trade you for half your sandwich,” she offered, handing me the container of rice with cold vegetables she brought every day.
“Really?”
I love every kind of Asian food, as I had told her. She said she would take bread over rice anytime.
“So what got you interested in China?” she asked after we had swapped lunches. “I mean, I know you take great satisfaction in knowing more than Mr. Stoltz does, but there has to be more to it than that.”
Besides, that’s a pretty low bar, I thought. But I didn’t say it.
“Well, that is good motivation,” I said. “But—” I paused, and then thought, What the heck. What’s the worst that can happen?
So I took a deep breath, screwed up my courage—feel free to add any cliché that comes to mind—and said, “It’s kind of a long story. Maybe we could do something Saturday? Go to the Freer or something?”
I went back to my rice as if it were no big deal whether she said yes or no, and thought, Did you really just ask yourself what’s the worst that can happen? How about she turns you down? Or laughs? Or even worse, politely blows you off in a way you know is designed not to hurt your feelings?
“The Freer?” Ti-Anna repeated.
“The gallery?” I said. “On the Mall?”
I started chattering nervously. “There’s an exhibit of ancient jades and bronzes that’s supposed to be pretty cool. Late Shang dynasty, early Western Zhou …”
“Okay, now you’re just showing off,” Ti-Anna said. “Nobody’s heard of the Shang dynasty. I’m not even sure there was a Shang dynasty.”
Around 1600 B.C.E. to 1060 B.C.E., if you want to know. Not as important as the Qing or Ming dynasties, it’s true, but it had its moments.
But I let that pass.
“It sounds fun,” Ti-Anna said as though she meant it. “Let’s see how much homework we end up with, and if it’s not too bad I’ll ask my mother.”
Knowing how seriously Ti-Anna took her homework, and having seen how eager her mother was for Ti-Anna to know me, I wasn’t encouraged.
But I also didn’t think Ti-Anna was the kind to say things just to be polite.
Sure enough, late
Friday afternoon she called and asked what time we should meet. We agreed on noon at the Bethesda Metro station.
“By the way, Janice wants to come too,” she said. “Is that okay?”
What could I say?
Chapter 6
We had to wait for a train, like you do sometimes on weekends, so we stood around making awkward chitchat on the platform.
When we finally boarded, the car was mostly empty. The girls sat on a two-person bench, and I sat across the aisle. They gossiped. I pretended to use my phone. (I don’t get service on the Metro.) The expedition was beginning to feel like a big mistake.
But as the train slowed into Dupont Circle, they both stood up. Janice gave Ti-Anna a quick hug, shot me a breezy “Bye, Ethan” and jumped off. Ti-Anna nudged my shoulder. “Slide over,” she said.
“Did I say something wrong?” I asked.
“Oh, it has nothing to do with you,” Ti-Anna answered. “Janice wouldn’t be caught dead in a museum.”
“So why did she come?”
“Well, my mother suggested I ask her,” Ti-Anna said. “So I did. She’ll take the bus over to Georgetown and meet some other friends and have a fine afternoon shopping.”
I guess I looked surprised. Ti-Anna looked at me and then looked away.
“I’m usually totally honest with my mother,” she said. “But I thought, how ridiculous is it to worry about my going to the Freer Gallery with someone as, well, wholesome as Ethan Wynkoop?”
“Thanks a lot,” I said. She laughed. At least she hadn’t said “harmless.” Or “dorky.”
We rode the rest of the way in what I thought was a comfortable silence. And when we got to the Freer, we did amble through the exhibit. We did both notice a figurine of a small toad that looked a lot like Mr. Stoltz.
But I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more about the ancient jades and bronzes of the Shang dynasty, or the Western Zhou, for that matter. We were so focused on our conversation that we (or at least I) didn’t notice much else.
At one point I asked about her friendship with Janice. “You seem so, well—”
“Different from each other?”
I nodded.
“I think that’s one reason we’ve always gotten along so well,” Ti-Anna said. “She’s not dumb, but she likes having fun. Music, clothes, the usual. She jokes that all she wants to know about China is how to pick out a pattern when she gets married. If you knew my parents, you’d get why that’s appealing.”
“They never do anything fun?”
“Not often.”
On hot summer Sundays, she said, her father loved to rent a rowboat at Seneca State Park and take the family out on the lake.
“He goes in his long pants and black shoes, and spreads a handkerchief over his bald spot, and looks totally ridiculous, but he doesn’t care,” she said. “He’s very proud of his skill as a rower.”
Once, she said, a thick black snake wriggled under their boat, and Ti-Anna’s mother was so startled she flung her straw hat into the water. Her father started to laugh, and when neither Ti-Anna nor her mother dared put her hand in to retrieve the hat, he laughed harder, and pretty soon they all had tears rolling down their cheeks. Ti-Anna laughed just thinking about it.
“But there aren’t too many times like that,” I suggested.
She shook her head.
“What about you?” she asked. “You promised to explain how you got interested in all this.” By now we were sitting on a bench in the Freer’s shady courtyard.
I told her how when I was a kid I’d gotten interested in hieroglyphics and the methods archaeologists had used to puzzle out their meaning. Which had led me to Chinese characters, so different from our puny twenty-six letters. Which led, somehow, to Asian martial arts.
“But of course I couldn’t go to the karate place in Bethesda like everyone else,” I said. “Somehow I fixed on a kendo studio across the county.”
“Kendo?”
“Japanese swordsmanship,” I said. “I still train there a couple of times a week.”
I tried to explain why I liked it so much—the predictability, the ritual, how bit by bit and with a lot of hard work you can feel yourself getting quicker and more balanced, but how when you reach a higher level you always discover something you didn’t know or couldn’t do.
The master at the studio had taken me and my friend James under his wing, taught us to use chopsticks at the Korean restaurant down the block, lent us books on Japan and Korea (where James’s parents came from) and then, when I had devoured those, on China.
“For some reason, I fell in love with China,” I said.
The Great Wall. The Mongol hordes. The court rituals, the sages, the emperors who had hundreds of their concubines buried alive with them when they died—I soaked it all in. China’s civilization is four thousand years old. Comparing China to America is like putting a hundred-year-old guy next to a kindergartner. The Chinese invented not just gunpowder and rockets and fireworks, which everyone knows about, but earthquake detectors, printing presses, even toilet paper. And their art is amazing.
“Then I started reading about modern China,” I said. I began with Edgar Snow’s book about Mao and the Long March, with its romantic view of the Communists, the hardships they endured before taking power, the poverty of the peasants they wanted to help. Then I started reading memoirs of the Cultural Revolution and realized things were a bit more complicated.
“So who’s James?” Ti-Anna asked after I had finished rattling on. We had left the museum and were walking slowly up Fourteenth Street, toward the White House.
“I met him at kendo, and even though he lived pretty far away we became best friends,” I said. “Our parents got us each an Xbox so we could play together without them having to drive one of us to the other’s house all the time.”
“What happened to him?”
“He moved with his family to New York a couple of years ago,” I said. “I visited him the first summer, but it wasn’t the same.”
I might have explained how empty it felt to visit a best friend who for no good reason wasn’t a best friend anymore. But we had reached the Metro station. And by the time we boarded a train, Ti-Anna seemed to have lost interest, almost as if I’d said something wrong.
I realized soon enough that I’d been right about something distracting her. But it wasn’t anything I’d said.
Chapter 7
It was almost two weeks later that she confided in me.
Things had been going well between us. In fact, my main worry was how I’d manage to keep seeing her during the summer.
And then, at lunch, on a Thursday, she sat down and said, “My father is gone.”
Actually, she sat down and didn’t say anything for a long time.
She hadn’t brought lunch. She waved away my sandwich.
I asked what was wrong, and that only made her look more as though she would cry.
Then, finally, she told me.
“What do you mean, gone?” I asked.
I knew her father traveled sometimes—to conferences in Providence, or Vancouver, or Berkeley. He could hardly afford it, but activists in a town would raise enough money to pay his expenses and a bit more, to hear him speak. Sometimes Ti-Anna would go along, helping translate, but often he went on his own. So his being away was nothing unusual.
“He’s disappeared,” Ti-Anna said, almost without expression. She looked around as if someone might be eavesdropping, but of course there was no one. It was a normal sunny day on the track-and-field bleachers.
I waited for her to explain, and gradually she did, in bits and pieces.
Two weeks earlier, she said, her father had flown, much to her mother’s dismay, to Hong Kong.
This was news to me.
“I know, I know,” she said. “I didn’t tell you. My dad is totally paranoid about the agents keeping tabs on him, and it’s just easier if I can answer honestly when he asks, ‘You haven’t mentioned this to anyone, right?’ And
it didn’t seem like such a big deal.”
I nodded. I believed it wasn’t that she didn’t trust me.
“So what was he doing? I thought he wasn’t allowed to go back to China?”
“He’s not,” Ti-Anna answered. “But he thought Hong Kong might be different.”
Hong Kong, I knew, is a gray zone, part of China but with its own government and more freedom. It was a British colony for a hundred years, and when Britain gave it back in 1996, China promised not to impose its Communist system. So far they’ve kept the promise.
“Even so, he wasn’t sure if they’d let him in once he landed.”
“So why did he go?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure. He’s always looking to get in touch with people on the inside. Like I told you, he believes China is just a spark away from a democratic revolution, and nothing will ever stop him from thinking so. He must have gotten some news from someone he trusted that a meeting could be arranged or something like that.”
“Your mother has no clue?”
She shook her head again. “She’s practically catatonic.”
Her dad had called once to report that the immigration people in Hong Kong had let him in. Ti-Anna and her mother didn’t know where he was staying, but he’d bought a SIM card and told them he’d call to let them know he was all right.
He had called once more. And then nothing. Radio silence. Not a word.
“Maybe he’s really busy,” I suggested. “Maybe his phone died and he forgot his charger.”
Ti-Anna gave me one of her little half smiles. “My father doesn’t leave things like that to chance,” she said.
Then she did start to cry, big, almost silent sobs that shook her narrow body. “Something is wrong. Something has happened.”
I wanted to put my arm around her hunched shoulders, but I didn’t. After a minute the sobs stopped. She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand.
“We called the Hong Kong trade office here, and they claim not to know anything—said they didn’t even have a record of his landing, which is odd, since we know he landed.”