by Fred Hiatt
Sixty seconds before our ferry was supposed to leave, we tossed our tea boxes into the trash and moved fast, while trying to look like we weren’t moving fast, toward the Lamma pier.
We stepped aboard just before one crewman shut the gate, while another tossed the lines from the giant knobs along the deck. We were the last ones on. If anyone wanted to follow us to Lamma, they’d have to take the next boat.
We made our way to the upper deck, found seats together on a bench, tucked our little packs between our feet and let our heart rates return to normal as the downtown receded and water sounds filled in where city sounds had been.
Oil tankers and cargo ships with giant containers stacked on their decks steamed smoothly past us, while fragile little fishing boats bounced in their wake. The warship I had noticed turned out to be from New Zealand. As we rounded the corner at the top of the island, the buildings gave way to woods, and the chop of the harbor gave way to bigger waves.
It was too windy to unfold the map, so we invented stories for the other passengers on the ferry. Those two boys with bicycles? Training for the Tour de France, but their parents didn’t approve of them doing anything but studying, so they had to sneak over to Lamma to ride.
That plump young lady? Her pet turtle, which she loved more than anything in the world, had died, and she was hoping to find a replacement in the wilds of Lamma, which was famous for its turtles.
As the island came into view, and the blur of green resolved into scrubby vines and banana trees, Ti-Anna grew serious again.
“He said one other thing to me on our way out of the restaurant,” she said.
“Horace?”
She nodded. “On the way out, he said, ‘Be careful about this man.’ ”
“Meaning Radio Man.”
She nodded.
“What does that mean?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. But it doesn’t really matter. Because if we don’t get something from him, I don’t know what we’ll do.”
So there was no Plan B? For a second, that made me mad. What if Kwan had been away when we got here? I had thought Ti-Anna knew a lot more than she was turning out to know.
Then I thought, if she’s been fooling anyone, it’s herself, not me. She wanted to think she had more to go on than she did, because she was that desperate.
And I thought, well, of course she’s desperate. You would be too. Just because she always seems cool and controlled doesn’t mean she has all the answers.
“Then we’ll have to make sure we do get something from him,” I said.
We picked up our backpacks and prepared to disembark. In an announcer’s voice, I said, “Now approaching the strange and exotic island of Lamma. Please enjoy your stay, and do not cuddle the turtles.”
Ti-Anna laughed, or tried to. We let the boys with bikes wheel off ahead of us, and then we jumped ashore.
Chapter 19
We set off immediately in the wrong direction. If anyone was going to report on our movements later, better that they see us leave the village the wrong way.
And it was a village—a few blocks, really, a street that curved along a not-too-appealing beach, lined with not-too-appealing restaurants. I supposed it would be festive at night, with terraces full of merrymakers and red lanterns bobbing in the breeze. But now, nearly deserted, with the sun spotlighting the mold-streaked walls and tin roofs, it all looked surprisingly old—as if it hadn’t changed in fifty years. It was hard to believe we were only a few miles from the technoglass wonders of Hong Kong.
We headed north, away from the restaurants. For a while it seemed very tame, with every tree numbered, and a couple of golf cart–like things parked off to the side. The path was smoothly paved. We might have been in a theme park that had been abandoned a few years before. We even saw a turtle sunning on a rock right off the path—as if the Hong Kong Tourist Board had put it there for us.
But as we rounded the corner and left the village behind, the path started to get wilder. In half a mile or so, I saw what I’d been looking for: a dirt trail that doubled back behind the village, off the beaten track and toward the center of the island.
We started climbing. When we were well out of view of anyone on the paved path, I opened our map. The route looked like a straight shot—well, a winding shot, but only three miles or so to the other end of the island—and I thought we should be able to make it before nightfall, no sweat.
Ti-Anna waited patiently while I turned the map this way and that. She seemed to assume that if we started walking we would automatically end up at the right house, and map-reading was another one of my odd habits, like reading biographies of famous people. But she was willing to put up with it in a good-natured way.
The path was steeper and rougher than I had expected. The air was cooler than in the city, but I worked up a sweat as we climbed. The woods on either side of the path weren’t high, but they were dense, with thick vines winding around each other and sometimes across the path. Atop one hill we came across a small Buddhist temple, red columns holding up a green-tiled, ski-jump roof, but it was untended, its paint peeling in the sea air.
We saw no one, though a couple of times I thought I heard someone, and we’d stop and hold still. Every now and then we’d break through to a view of a curving bay or beach way below us, on one side of the narrow island or the other. We saw no sunbathers. I supposed on a weekend there would be hordes.
At one point we stumbled on an abandoned house so decrepit that it could have been an ancient ruin, but for a rusty fan dangling from the ceiling and a lidless rice cooker forgotten in a corner. We sat on the cool cement floor for a few minutes and shared a protein bar.
“I think we’re almost there,” I said.
Ti-Anna didn’t reply. I guessed she was deciding what she would say to Radio Man.
We were actually closer than I realized, and the house—as Horace had predicted—was impossible to miss. We braked and slid our way down a steep path and around one more switchback to the most beautiful cove yet—though one with nothing but rocks, no beach. On the far spit of land stood a tidy yellow house—two rooms, by the looks of it—with a bright red roof and a sliding glass door facing the water.
We picked our way from rock to rock around the little bay and then followed a sandy path to the door. Most visitors must come by boat, I thought. If he has visitors.
Ti-Anna took a deep breath, tucked her hair behind her ear and knocked on the sliding door.
Nothing happened. She knocked again. Nothing. Knock. Nothing. Knock.
Eventually, a curtain slid back a few inches, and a face appeared, atop a muscular body in a T-shirt, sweatpants and bare feet. The man stared down for what seemed like a long time. Then he unlocked the door and slid it open a few inches.
Ti-Anna bowed slightly and began talking in Chinese. The man listened. She talked some more. He didn’t say anything. She talked some more. Finally, he answered. And closed the door. Locked it. Yanked the curtain shut.
“What did he say?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she knocked again. And again. And again. Until the same thing: curtain, lock, door. He cocked his head. She said something. He said something. And closed the door. Lock. Curtain.
This time Ti-Anna turned around and sat on the cement ledge in front of the door.
“He said he won’t talk with us.”
Funny—I had guessed that much.
“And you said?”
“I said we were going to sleep on the rocks tonight, and come back and knock on his door in the morning. And that we’ll do the same thing the next night, and the next morning. And every night, and every morning, until he does talk with us.”
My first thought was, I’m going to be really, really hungry.
My second was, he doesn’t know who he’s messing with.
On the other hand, he looked as stubborn as she was. I wondered what my brother would think if I died on Lamma Island and he never got his backpack back.
I d
idn’t say any of those things. I sat next to Ti-Anna, facing the lonely cove, and unwrapped a Snickers bar and gave her half. She took it without saying thank you. I ate it without saying I told you so.
Chapter 20
To say that what followed was the most uncomfortable night of my life doesn’t say much. I’m not really the camping type, and all of my nights, to be honest, had been comfortable enough. But I think it’s safe to say that even the hardiest camper wouldn’t have been happy.
Fortunately, Ti-Anna didn’t insist on sleeping on the rocks. I don’t know how that idea had popped into her head. None of the rocks were big enough to stretch out on—and who knew what the tides would do during the night.
We picked our way back across the rocks in silence, with Ti-Anna leading the way and motoring fast. Back around the switchback, up into the woods, until you could barely hear the waves, toward the ruined house with the overhead fan.
I cleared my throat.
“How about here?” I said.
She looked dubiously at the house, and then even more dubiously at me.
“It’s going to be dark soon,” I said. “It may rain. Unless you want to try to find our way back to one of the villages, and see if we can rent a room …”
She shook her head at that idea, as I knew she would. Even out on Lamma, hotels would probably enter our passport numbers into some computer system.
The ruined house it was.
I don’t want to dwell on that night. We got through it, though every time I looked at my watch, thinking an hour must have passed, only five minutes had crawled by.
It turned out the air mattresses were made to be inflated by something other than your mouth, so it took forever to blow them up. Which, given that we had all night to kill, maybe wasn’t such a bad thing. But when they were ready, lying on them didn’t feel much different from lying on the cement, except tippier. And it was starting to cool off, and of course we had nothing to cover ourselves with, and only an extra T-shirt to put on.
“So what are we going to do tomorrow if he still won’t talk to us?” I asked calmly.
She answered with this: “When you bought all this candy and nothing to drink, what exactly were you thinking?”
A few minutes later, I asked, “Did you hear something?”
We did hear things, though to this day I don’t know what. If you Google “Lamma Island” and “wildlife,” mostly what comes up are wildflowers. The things I heard definitely weren’t wildflowers, and they weren’t turtles, either. If they were Chinese security agents in suits and bad haircuts, I hoped they were uncomfortable too.
The worst of it, as I lay on that torturous air mattress imagining poisonous snakes slithering across the cement floor, was that for the first time since we’d left Washington I started really thinking about home again.
You know how things always seem worse at night? If you’ve said something mean to somebody, in the middle of the night it can begin to feel like the worst, most unforgivable thing that one friend has ever said to another, and when word gets around no one will ever speak to you again, and you wouldn’t blame them. But then you wake up, and it’s light outside, and you think, well, it wasn’t all that bad. I’ll just say sorry. And probably your friend doesn’t remember the remark anyhow.
That’s how this felt, except I had a lot worse to worry about than a mean remark. How could I have been so stupid as to think I could fool my brother into believing I was in New York City, when I was really halfway around the world? What if he had told our parents, and right now everyone was desperately looking for me? What if they called the police? And how could I ever repay this much money—assuming I ever got home, that is?
Most of all: Whatever made me think I had any business worrying about a Chinese democracy activist I had never even met? Crazy. You’re crazy. That’s what I kept helpfully telling myself, all night long. All that dark, hundred-hour night long.
I’m sure Ti-Anna tossed and turned through her own version of this, because when a gray smudge of dawn finally leaked into our ruined house, I looked over to her air mattress and found her as wide awake as I felt. And as unhappy.
We stood up, creakily, and walked to the edge of the clearing. Each of us, almost at the same moment, took a deep breath. The air was a mixture of sea-damp, rich soil, and some flowering tree unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Way off in the distance, you could hear the surf. A few gulls were doing wake-up cartwheels overhead.
Ti-Anna put a hand on my shoulder.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I’m sorry I forgot the water,” I said.
“And the coffee,” she murmured. “Some toast with butter and jam would have been nice too.”
“Do you think it’s a coincidence that they built the hardest floor in Hong Kong right behind this guy’s house?” I said.
“You mean, or did we just get lucky?” Ti-Anna answered.
We laughed. And when it turned out to be even harder to get the air out of the air mattresses than it had been getting the air in, that set us off again.
Finally, when we’d packed up what there was to pack up and eaten the last two granola bars, Ti-Anna said, as if answering my question from last night, “I know we can’t stay in Hong Kong forever. When a week is up, we go home, no matter what, okay?”
It was the first time she’d ever hinted at the possibility that we might not find her dad.
“Well, maybe Radio Man is ready to talk,” I said. I didn’t see why he would be, but I wasn’t going to say that.
“We have ways,” Ti-Anna said, in a terrible German accent.
“You do that terribly,” I said. She hit me, and we set off back down the hill.
Day Three: Tuesday
Lamma Island–Vietnam
Chapter 21
This time he slid open the door almost before Ti-Anna knocked. The same bare feet, sweatpants, T-shirt; the same muscles under the T-shirt. He stood aside for us to come in, with a couple of grunted words in Chinese, and then slid the door and curtain shut.
We found ourselves in a large, sunny room. Though the curtain was drawn facing the cove, to the right a bank of windows framed his spit of land and the open sea to the south. A low sofa and two mats with cushions were the only furniture. A barbell was in one corner, an open kitchenette in another. Through the kitchen window you could see his satellite dish. To the left was a door, closed. Presumably his computer and bed were behind it.
“Tea?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you,” I said quickly, before Ti-Anna could interject.
“And some bread and jam?”
“No, thank you,” Ti-Anna said even more quickly. I glared, but she refused to meet my eyes.
For a few minutes we balanced on the low couch while he busied himself with his kettle. When the tea had steeped, he poured us each a cup and then sat cross-legged on a mat facing us. His face looked tired, not unkind, but closed off in an odd way.
“I wish you had not returned,” he said. He seemed to be looking at me as he spoke, and for some reason those were the last words he said in English, though apparently he could speak fluently enough. He turned to Ti-Anna and said something in Chinese, and off they went.
I don’t want you to think it hurt my feelings to be shut out of the conversation. This was his country, and I was the one who had barged in without being able to speak the language. Why should he have to speak a foreign tongue in his own house? That was how I took it.
But it’s harder than you might think to perch on a low, uncomfortable sofa while two people carry on a long conversation you can’t understand. What’s the polite thing to do? Watch them as they talk, as if you’re following? That felt phony. Look out the window, as if you’re bored? That felt rude.
I stared at my tea, really getting to know the bottom of that cup. I listened to the conversation, seeing if I could pick out any words repeating. (Not really; I couldn’t even tell where one word ended and the next began.)
My thoughts
began to drift. I wondered why he had let us in so easily this morning, after being so dead set against it the night before. I thought about the bread and jam sitting ten feet away, and willed it to levitate and float over to the couch. (No luck.) Eventually I closed my eyes. I have to admit, I may even have dozed. It’s not like I’d gotten my usual eight hours.
What I know of the conversation, I had to piece together later from Ti-Anna as we hiked back up the island. But I don’t think there’s any point in making you wait like I had to. I can give you the gist right here.
Yes, he told her, Horace had it basically right: Ti-Anna’s father had come to Hong Kong for the chance to meet with two labor leaders who wanted to meet him. They had gotten in touch through Radio Man, who had passed the message on to America.
“Not that I thought it would come to anything,” he said, a little sourly, as Ti-Anna recalled it. “Democracy will come to China when it’s good and ready; there’s not much any exile can do to hurry it along.”
He spat out “exile” like it was an insult, but then, wasn’t he a kind of exile himself, living at the bottom of this little island? “But they asked me to pass a message, so I passed a message.”
The sense Ti-Anna got was that Radio Man communicated with people inside China in codes, and in other ways he didn’t want to talk about. He didn’t know her father well, and he didn’t think it was safe to send details via email. So her father had to come to Lamma for the specifics. He sat on the same couch where we were sitting now, got directions and left.
“And that’s about all I know; I haven’t heard from him since.”
At that, he seemed ready to end the conversation.
“But what were the directions?” Ti-Anna asked.
“Honestly, it would be better for you not to know,” he answered. “What can a couple of children do about any of this?”
Ti-Anna did not let herself show any anger. I certainly didn’t hear her raise her voice. (Of course, maybe I was dozing.)