by Fred Hiatt
She’d emailed her father, even though before he left he’d told them not to, and gotten no reply. The people at the embassy despised him, there was no point in calling them, but Ti-Anna had called her father’s friend on the China desk of our State Department. He had made inquiries, and the Chinese claimed to have no information.
“My mother is paralyzed with fear,” she said. “She was furious at me for making any calls. She thinks if we call any friends in Hong Kong we’ll get them in trouble and make things worse for my dad.”
She sighed. “Short of going to Hong Kong, I don’t know what else to do,” she said.
I’d say that was the moment when the trouble started.
Chapter 8
I could complain about my dad: how he isn’t around enough, how he drifts off in the middle of a conversation when he’s focused on a physics problem. But really, he is a good father. If I lost him, I would never be the same. Ever. I know that. And to not even be able to say good-bye …
What must she be feeling?
After school the next day I biked to the Barnes & Noble, bought the densest, smallest-type guidebook to Hong Kong I could find and biked home.
I liked to think of myself as someone who cared about people’s rights. I’d stay up reading about a Burmese monk who had walked straight at soldiers with their guns pointed at him, the monk carrying nothing but a begging bowl and his belief in freedom, because—because why? I couldn’t quite fathom it. Because it was the right thing to do.
I’d think, Would I have the guts? Would I ever do anything? Or would I just read? And mouth off in history class?
In ninth grade I’d started a human rights club. The idea was to pick a prisoner of conscience somewhere and start a letter-writing campaign.
Only a few people showed up for the first meeting, and fewer for the next. I never called a third. I blamed the other kids, but it was my fault. I didn’t like clubs. I didn’t want to share my obsessions with people I hardly knew.
Here was a chance to do something.
If I could just get to Hong Kong, Ti-Anna had said. Well, why not? Wasn’t her father’s cause more important than anything in our piddly tenth-grade lives?
I sat at my desk, my world history textbook propped up in front of me. Our final was in two days. I wasn’t taking in a word.
Ti-Anna had looked so miserable. And so alone. I was the one person she trusted. Would it be so crazy to try to help a friend?
If she were in Hong Kong, Ti-Anna had told me, she could track her father’s movements. People who were afraid to talk over the phone would be more open face to face.
I slammed the textbook shut and went downstairs. My parents weren’t home. At the back of my mom’s closet, behind the shoes, with the other important documents—like her favorite drawings of mine from elementary school—I found my passport.
We’d gone to the post office to apply for it two years earlier, when my parents had announced that we were going to take a family vacation to Mexico. We never take family vacations, and sure enough, at the last minute one of them was nearing some breakthrough and we didn’t go. But the passport had arrived and was valid for another three years.
“Honestly, I don’t think he’s dead,” Ti-Anna had said.
I had winced, but she hadn’t.
“Because if he were, why wouldn’t the Hong Kong police tell us? Even if they”—and here she hadn’t meant the Hong Kong police—“had killed him, they would want to cover up how he had died, not that he had died.”
I gave up pretending to study, lay down on my bed, read the guidebook from preface to index and then started at the beginning again.
Ti-Anna had tried to persuade her mother that the two of them should fly over, but her mother wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t so much the money, she had told me, though that was scary enough. The real problem was that her mother was used to following instructions. Living in a strange country, she’d never learned much English. She hardly ventured beyond the bus route between their apartment and the grocery store. When there was a problem with a bill, Ti-Anna would handle it.
Ti-Anna’s mother was pulling even further into her shell with her husband having disappeared. She was sure he would call, or so she said, and she didn’t want to be away from the phone even for a second until he did. Ti-Anna was grocery shopping for the two of them.
I went online and studied airline schedules and visa rules and currency exchange rates. We can do this, I thought.
Why not? I asked myself.
Because it is crazy, I answered. You know it’s crazy.
I decided that at lunch on Monday, after our world history exam, I’d tell Ti-Anna what I had figured out.
Chapter 9
We had agreed to meet out on the bleachers, in our usual spot, with whoever finished first waiting for the other. It was me; I couldn’t stand to go back and review my answers once I finished a test, whereas Ti-Anna liked to use as much time as they gave you.
So I waited.
“It’s so hot,” she said when she finally came out and sat down. She stood right up again. I followed her back toward school and around to the front, where a giant old oak shaded the lawn.
We didn’t talk about the exam. It wasn’t that long ago that I had dreamed about how happy I’d be when tenth grade was over. Now it didn’t matter.
I had made two sandwiches, figuring her mother wasn’t doing much cooking, and I handed her one. She stared at it like she wasn’t sure what she had in her hands or how it had gotten there.
I asked whether she had a passport.
“Of course,” she said. Her father had wanted them to be ready to go back to China on a moment’s notice, to jump when—as he was sure would happen—its frozen politics began to thaw.
“Good,” I said. “I was thinking we could go to Hong Kong. You know. Together.”
“What are you talking about?” Ti-Anna asked.
Speaking in a rush so she couldn’t break in, I explained my plan. I told her that you didn’t need a visa to go to Hong Kong. I’d scoped out the cheapest tickets. We could charge them, go for a week, find her dad and get home before the charges showed up on my mom’s account. By then, if we’d succeeded, how could anyone object?
It took her a few seconds to process what I was saying
“Ethan, why would your parents pay for me to go to Hong Kong?” she said. “And why would they let you go to Hong Kong for something that has nothing to do with you?”
I have to admit, that stung.
Which maybe showed on my face, because in a softer voice she said, “Listen, I appreciate what you’re offering, really I do. But how could I let you pay for me to go to Hong Kong? Or go with me? It could be really dangerous.”
“I’ve thought all that through,” I said. “Your father, and what he stands for, are more important than either of us, right? You’ve said so yourself. I wouldn’t be paying for you, but for democracy in China. And you could pay me back, eventually. Well, my parents. You’d pay them back.
“And as for danger,” I continued bravely, “I think you’d be in less danger if I were with you.”
She gave me one of her looks. “Because your Chinese is so fluent? Or is it your kung fu skills you have in mind?”
“Ha ha,” I said. “Kendo, not kung fu. What I have in mind is that I’m an American-born, middle-class kid from a nice middle-class suburb, no connection to anything political—they would know that if I disappeared, there would be a pretty big fuss, don’t you think?”
I tried to say they with the right intonation, as if I’d been keeping an eye on Chinese security goons all my life.
For the first time Ti-Anna seemed to think seriously about my idea.
“Ethan, you think your parents will say ‘Sure, go ahead, take a trip to the other side of the world with some girl we’ve never met to find her missing father’?”
“Ah, well,” I said. “That is a good question. So we come up with a better idea: ask permission, but only after we get back.”
My big brother, who lived not far away in College Park, was supposed to look in on me. (My sister lives in Pittsburgh.) But he was almost as absentminded as our parents, and not all that wild about babysitting. So I thought I could persuade him that I’d gone to New York to visit James, like I had a couple of summers before, and that he’d known about the trip all along but hadn’t been paying attention when my mother explained it to him. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Not an option for me,” Ti-Anna said. “Not with my mother.”
“No,” I said. “I see that. We’d have to figure that one out.”
Lost in thought, chewing on the sandwich without seeming to notice, let alone appreciate, that I’d added jam to the peanut butter, Ti-Anna didn’t answer for a long time.
Then she looked at me with a half smile, as if to say, maybe it’s not such a crazy idea after all.
Of course, we had no idea right then how crazy an idea it was. By the time we did realize, it was way too late.
Chapter 10
Through the rest of exam week I tried to study as if everything were normal while also booking flights, changing money, poring over maps. Two worlds, one purpose: to keep from thinking about what I was about to do.
Because when I did think about it, I was terrified. Ironically, the calmer and more convinced Ti-Anna became, the more terrified I felt, and the guiltier about some of the things we were about to do.
I had learned that the airline required minors traveling alone to have a signed letter from their parents. And even though we would have letters by the time we got on the Metro to go downtown and find the Metrobus that would take us to Dulles airport, it wasn’t our parents who would have signed them.
Then there was the email I sent my brother just before shouldering my backpack—well, actually, his backpack, but I didn’t think he’d need it in the next week.
Think I can make the ten a.m. Vamoose bus, I wrote. See you in a few days. I watered the plants.
The Vamoose goes from Bethesda to Penn Station in New York City. I emailed instead of texting, because my brother doesn’t check his email that often. I said that I could make the ten a.m. bus; I didn’t say I was going to. And I had in fact watered the plants.
When I thought about what I was doing, I knew I shouldn’t excuse myself, because I was trying to give my brother the wrong idea, and I knew my parents would never approve. Instead, I justified my actions by telling myself I was going to explain everything as soon as we got back. If I was being dishonest, it was only for a short time.
Ti-Anna said she would never disrespect her mother that way, even if it were possible. She’d decided to explain everything in a letter, leave it on the kitchen counter and slip out early, before her mother woke up. Well, not everything: she didn’t mention me.
She knew how upset her mother would be. But she promised to be careful, and she promised to be in touch soon, and there was plenty of food in the apartment. She told herself her mother would be all right, and she was pretty sure her mom wouldn’t do anything to stop us. Whom would she call, after all?
And once we found Ti-Anna’s dad, all would be forgiven.
Chapter 11
As we rode the escalator down to the Metro, though, it really began to sink in.
Not that long ago Ti-Anna had been riding these same stairs a step below me, like now, laughing with Janice and pretending not to notice how sulky I was that Janice had come along and how nervous I was about our first sort-of date.
Now I stared at Ti-Anna’s tight ponytail. Her neck and shoulders were taut, her body tense with the misery of deserting her mother. And I thought: This time you should be nervous.
It sank in a little deeper when, as we boarded the subway, I noticed a man boarding the same car through a different door. Navy suit, hair cut short on the sides and standing up on top, an alert way of taking everything in while seeming not to look at anything. A man, in other words, a lot like the ones I’d seen in the blue Taurus across from Ti-Anna’s apartment.
When he stood as we stood, as the train approached Farragut North, I thought: It’s not too late to forget the whole thing.
But he wasn’t on the escalator as we left the station. I didn’t see him following us to the bus stop, or in line with us there, or on the airport bus after we found seats toward the back. I told myself to stop being paranoid and relax.
And though I wouldn’t say I relaxed, for a while everything did go more smoothly than I had expected. Ti-Anna and I had worked out our stories, in case anyone asked: she was visiting relatives; I was going to stay with her while I worked on a summer service project.
But no one asked. The check-in lady never asked for our letters, maybe because she was so harried by all the families with mounds of luggage and crying babies and kids hooking and unhooking the line dividers.
Check-in, security, X-ray—it all went smoothly, like this was something we did every month. I thought my phone might not work from Hong Kong, so from the boarding area I sent one last message to my brother: Made it. Everything fine. Once again, not technically a lie.
And then we were on the jumbo jet, squished into middle seats way at the back. The plane taxied, took off, leveled. Ti-Anna turned on her iPod and closed her eyes. Now, I thought, you can relax.
Instead, it really hit me. What on earth were we doing? What had I been thinking? New York City was the most exotic place I’d ever been. Now, just because I had read about China, I thought I could make my way in a huge strange city, with nobody knowing where I was, and no idea where to go? What had I been thinking?
Then I glanced over at Ti-Anna. She had pushed her seat back a few inches, and her eyes were closed, so I could really look—the dark eyebrows, the cheekbones. That vulnerable hollow at the base of her neck. Her serious mouth, which could take you by such surprise with one of her unexpected smiles.
A smile I’d hardly seen since her father had disappeared. Luckily, right about then, they came around with food. Ti-Anna took out her earbuds and we studied the movie listings as we ate, and I began to feel better. When I asked the attendant, simply as a point of useful information, how long it would be until the next meal, she brought me a second dessert, at which point Ti-Anna plugged back into her iPod and pretended not to know me.
A few minutes later, though, I noticed a half smile on her face, so I tapped her hand and asked what she was listening to.
She slipped off her earbuds and said, “The only thing I’ve ever seen my parents dance to.”
They’d been invited to Janice’s bat mitzvah, she said. About an hour into the party, her mother took her dad’s hands, pulled him up and led him to the dance floor.
“It was Taio Cruz,” Ti-Anna recalled. “But they were dancing cheek to cheek, like it was Frank Sinatra or something.”
“Sounds mortifying.”
“At first,” she said. “But they both looked so happy. I thought—it’s hard to explain—I thought, this is who they might have been, if their world had been different.”
“Or if he hadn’t decided he needed to change that world,” I said.
The attendants dimmed the lights and told people in the window seats to pull down the shades. Everyone around us was dozing. Ti-Anna asked if I remembered the first time I’d heard of her father.
“When I was reading about the Democracy Wall,” I said. “I thought that was so amazing.”
In 1979, when China was just recovering from the Cultural Revolution, a few people started painting big character posters and hanging them on a park fence in Beijing. The posters talked about how modernization couldn’t be only about getting rich but had to lead to liberty too. For a while the reform wing of the Party let it go on, but eventually they got nervous and shut it down.
“That’s when I got interested in your d
ad and people like him,” I said. He’d been a student back then. “People who will risk everything for what they know is right.”
You could find them, I had discovered, anywhere governments tried to keep people from saying what they want to say—Venezuela, Ethiopia, Russia. They would write letters, give speeches, organize protests, knowing they would get thrown in jail, beaten up, tortured, maybe put in solitary confinement and forgotten.
But the Democracy Wall—there was something completely Chinese about it too: China had always had its Confucian scholars and poets willing to speak truth to power.
“It takes an incredible certainty about what’s right and what’s wrong, I guess,” I said.
Ti-Anna nodded. “Probably it’s a good thing that only a few of us are born with that,” she said.
While I was mulling that over, she put her earbuds back in and closed her eyes.
When I thought I glimpsed the guy in the blue suit sitting a ways ahead of us, I didn’t say anything. If I was having paranoid fantasies, there was no point in alarming Ti-Anna too. And if she thought I was so nervous that I was already having paranoid fantasies, she’d regret coming with me before we even landed.
Which we did (land, that is), about fourteen hours after we’d taken off. And which it seemed she did (regret, that is), pretty much as soon as we were on the ground.
But Ti-Anna’s moods could go up and down. That was one of the many things I would learn over the next nine days.
Day One: Sunday
Hong Kong
Chapter 12
I don’t know if I can make you understand how spectacular Hong Kong is, even if you’ve seen some of those cheesy movies that supposedly take place there. Especially if you’ve seen those movies—Hong Kong is nothing like that.
Imagine six million people living on a few tiny islands and a little fingernail of mainland China, crowding in more and more every year, and as they get more and more crowded, building in the only direction they have to go: up.