Dedication
For Tom Mallory
1988–2005
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction. All characters, including the narrator, are entirely imagined and bear no relation to any living persons.
Contents
Dedication
Author’s Note
Chapter 1 一
Chapter 2 ニ
Chapter 3 三
Chapter 4 四
Chapter 5 五
Chapter 6 六
Chapter 7 七
Chapter 8 八
Chapter 9 九
Chapter 10 十
Chapter 11 十一
Chapter 12 十二
Chapter 13 十三
Chapter 14 十四
Chapter 15 十五
Chapter 16 十六
Chapter 17 十七
Chapter 18 十八
Chapter 19 十九
Chapter 20 二十
Chapter 21 二十一
Chapter 22 二十二
Chapter 23 二十三
Chapter 24 二十四
Chapter 25 二十五
Chapter 26 二十六
Chapter 27二十七
Chapter 28 二十八
Chapter 29 二十九
Chapter 30 三十
Chapter 31 三十一
Chapter 32 三十二
Chapter 33 三十三
Chapter 34 三十四
Chapter 35 三十五
Chapter 36 三十六
Chapter 37 三十七
Chapter 38 三十八
Chapter 39 三十九
Chapter 40 四十
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
一
姦. Jian, the Chinese character for woman repeated three times, implying conspiracy or treachery. I was reminded of it as I watched the three female immigration officials huddle over my passport. They spoke to each other in rapid whispers that came out in machine-gun bursts. They glanced at me, looked back at my passport, and then flipped through the pages—again and again. It was unnerving. I was alone in this new country and barely spoke the language.
I didn’t understand enough Chinese to know exactly what the problem was, but I suspected it had something to do with my visa. I reached over the counter and tried to point out the visa page in my passport, but the first immigration official jerked my passport away and snapped at me. The three women huddled together. I heard one of them repeat shi si sui, the words for fourteen years old, several times, but I didn’t understand much else. I guessed they couldn’t figure out how or why a fourteen-year-old boy had a diplomat-level visa. Someone at the Embassy had arranged it as a favor to my father. Since retiring from investment banking, my father had served as a senior business advisor to the Chinese government on privatizing state-owned enterprises. Trying to explain the situation to these women would only complicate matters.
I had been at the desk for close to an hour, and for the last thirty minutes, I had been the only passenger left in the immigration hall. Finally, the two women who had been called over to help shook their heads with an indifferent sense of disapproval and walked away. What made these women finally give up, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, the first immigration official reluctantly stamped my passport and waved me on. Along the back wall, four armed guards stood motionless with arms pressed behind their backs and feet shoulder width apart. I walked past the guards and down a long, still corridor to the baggage claim. I expected to see other travelers. But there was no one else. Only me.
By the time I arrived at the baggage claim, my bags were circling alone. Too tired from the sixteen-hour flight to chase them down, I sat down and waited for my bags to circulate around the oval track. The baggage claim area was stark and unlike those in other airports I had passed through at the beginnings of holidays in Italy and France. The billboards featuring tanned models who beckoned with their blue eyes and white smiles that decorated the Florence and Nice airports were nowhere to be found. In their place were official notice boards and signs with unintelligible Chinese characters. The carousel’s metal plates scraped together as they rounded the corner and beat a steady rhythm like an oversized metronome marking the room’s silence.
I hauled my bags off the belt and headed toward the exit. As I walked past the customs counter, I realized that this was the first time I was leaving an airport on my own. It felt strange not to be following an adult with a trolley loaded with bags. I looked back and saw the long columns of trolleys perfectly aligned, and I remembered how my older brother Tom and I used to take them and race them around like pushcarts as we waited for our father or our nanny to collect the bags. We stopped a few years ago. It was what kids did, Tom said. I dropped my bags to pull out the photograph my father had given me of the young Chinese woman he had hired to act as my guardian for the year. Victoria—with her straight black hair and glasses—would be waiting for me on the other side of customs.
The walk was long and the emptiness of the airport made me wonder if my flight was the last to land. The strap of my heavy duffel bag cut into my shoulder. As alone as I felt walking down that long hallway, I suppose I felt a sense of relief to be going to a place where nothing was familiar—no shared language, no remembered faces, no recognizable landscape, nothing to remind me of what had happened. I had no idea what I would be heading into—it would be harder than I, at the time, had the ability to imagine. But looking back—knowing what I know now—I would never send my son off like that.
ニ
The truth is that it was never my decision to go to Beijing. My father decided I would go, and that was all there was to say. I’ve come to understand that he must have believed time and distance were correlated, that somehow the farther away he sent me the faster things would heal. Perhaps he didn’t understand that memories have a way of finding you wherever you are.
I knew I needed to leave home, I knew I needed to be somewhere else for a while, but I didn’t understand why I had to go to Beijing. I wanted to go to Florida where I could play tennis for six hours a day against the top players in the United States. I once told my father that, but he dismissed me and said it would be much better for me to go to Beijing. I didn’t agree with him, but I didn’t object because I didn’t want to disappoint him. If our father had decided to ship Tom off to Beijing, he would have stood up for himself. But I have never been very good about confronting my father. I suppose my hesitation came from a fear that he would think less of me.
Maybe it was Tom’s imagination that had allowed him to resist in ways I could not. I remember once when Tom was twelve, he convinced all the kids in his class to act in a play he had written. He allowed me to believe that I was his assistant director, writer, and general sidekick. The work was titled Macbeth in the Internet Age—the plot was true to Shakespeare, except that Macbeth’s addiction to surfing the Web with Dunsinane’s recently acquired high-speed internet derailed his ambition, and Lady Macbeth had to carry out the gruesome murders by herself. Tom ended his play with me walking out onstage with a shark mask and asking the audience, “What do you want out of life?”
He died on a Saturday in January when he was sixteen and I was thirteen. The official cause of death was listed as “MDMA intoxication.” The drugs he and his friends took were cut with something toxic, and Tom’s body had reacted badly to it. That was what it said in the newspaper anyway. It didn’t make sense to me at the time. I didn’t even know what any of that was back then. All I knew was that there must have been some mistake because drugs were something drug addicts did, not my older brother.
The day after he died, I loc
ked myself in my room and refused to open the door. My father had to call a locksmith to remove the lock completely. He didn’t want there to be any chance that I did it again. I don’t remember a lot from those first few weeks, but I do remember being afraid to fall asleep because I was scared of the dreams and nightmares I might have. And I remember always feeling as if I were on the verge of throwing up. It wasn’t just sadness. It was some horrible combination of anger and guilt. I remember feeling that in some way it was my fault. It wasn’t, of course, but that guilt nevertheless was there. I couldn’t escape the thought that if I had done something differently that night, Tom would still be alive. If only I hadn’t gotten mad at him over the PlayStation. Or if I had asked him to take me to see a movie, or if I had told my father that I had a math test I needed Tom to help me study for. If I had done that, he never would have left to meet up with his friends. And he wouldn’t have died. I couldn’t get that out of my head.
The day after he died I took a tennis racket and started smashing it into my PlayStation as hard as I could. I only stopped when our housekeeper came in and wrenched the racket from my hands. By the time she came in, the game console was already scattered across the floor, broken fragments of plastic and metal. The last time I saw Tom we had an argument over that PlayStation. I had told him he wasn’t allowed to use it anymore because he always cheated when we played. I smashed it into pieces because I couldn’t bear looking at it anymore. Every time I looked at it, I was reminded of that conversation and it filled me with this terrible guilt over what I had said to my brother the last time I had seen him alive.
After that incident, my father canceled a business trip and drove me out to East Hampton to spend a week at his sister’s summerhouse. The Hamptons were deserted at that time of year and we had the house to ourselves. Getting away for that week helped. It was too much being at home. Everywhere I looked I was reminded of Tom.
I didn’t want to go back to school, but the therapist they made me see told my father that I should start school again. She said being reintegrated with my peer group would help with my recovery. I don’t think it was the right decision. Everyone at school treated me differently. They were too nice; their averted eyes and muted voices made me more aware of Tom’s absence. My friends had become afraid to laugh or make jokes in front of the boy whose brother had just died. I could tell that my presence had become a burden on them.
I couldn’t get myself to care about school. I didn’t do my homework, I didn’t study for tests, and I began to get Ds and Fs when I had previously received mostly As and some Bs. But my father only pulled me out of school after I got in a fight with Jake Green during a game of basketball at recess. Jake started cracking jokes about my brother and when he didn’t stop I ran over and pushed him so he fell down on the ground, and I started kicking him as hard as I could in the stomach. He started crying but still I didn’t stop, and then I kicked him in the face, and I broke his nose. I don’t remember stopping, even when there was blood all over my sneakers. My father pulled me out of the school after that. He pulled me out because the school told him that they were going to expel me if he didn’t. I finished the eighth-grade syllabus with tutors at home.
I started playing tennis again around the time I was sent back to school. While I struggled in school, I did well in tennis. Each day I would exhaust myself up to the point where I had nothing left in me. All my energy and emotions were concentrated on the simple action of hitting a ball back over a net. My father must have picked up on the fact that tennis was helping me, because about a month after he pulled me out of school, we started talking about the idea of my taking a year off to play tennis.
It was about that time that one of his business associates, Mr. Richard Zhang, came and stayed at our house for a weekend to discuss a real estate venture my father had proposed setting up with him in China. He and my father spent most of the weekend in my father’s study talking, but on Saturday afternoon they came out to the tennis courts to watch me practice. At dinner that night, my father quizzed Mr. Zhang about the tennis standards in China. It turned out that one of Mr. Zhang’s close friends was a senior official in the Chinese government and currently served as Minister of Sport. Over dinner, I saw the idea of sending me to China begin to take shape. Theoretically, my father asked Mr. Zhang, would a foreigner be allowed to practice within the Chinese State’s sport system? Could Mr. Zhang’s friend arrange for that to happen? Did he know any good language schools in Beijing? I watched as each potential obstacle was dismissed by Mr. Zhang, who either had a ready solution to each problem or simply said that he was sure that something could be arranged. As my future was being decided in front of me, I waited for the one question I longed for my father to ask. What did I think about the idea? But the opportunity never came.
It took me some time to understand that sending me to China was my father’s way of protecting me. That was the way he was. I never had the kind of relationship with my father many of my peers had with theirs who were present at every soccer match, every science fair, every school play. Though I knew he cared deeply for me, he was aloof and reserved, rarely showing signs of approval, which of course made me strive for it all the more. Besides, I had my older brother, Tom. Tom was not only my hero, the person I looked up to more than anyone else in the world, he was also my best friend. After his death, my father became even more remote.
I think that his aloofness allowed him the illusion of control. I have no memory of my mother. She died when I was only two and Tom was five. It happened just after she had dropped Tom off at kindergarten. The weather was bad and a truck in front of her hit a patch of black ice and lost control, jack-knifing and sending my mother’s Range Rover into an airborne spiral down an embankment. Sometimes late at night Tom would wonder out loud to me that if he had taken five more seconds to get dressed or to eat his breakfast or to give her one last kiss before he got out of the car, she would still be alive. I have no memory of my mother. I used to envy Tom for his, but now that he’s gone, I am glad I don’t remember her. No one should have to feel that kind of loss twice.
Before I left for China, my father handed me a copy of a letter his father had received from his father—a short note written by my great-grandfather, a Presbyterian minister, who counseled his son that in confronting choices, the three most important things to remember were duty, honesty, and courage. Duty was about shunning temptation and fulfilling your responsibilities to others. Honesty was about always being truthful. And courage was about having the strength to do the right thing. I never knew whether this point of view came from the New England fierceness of my great-grandfather’s maternal line or the Scottish stoicism of his paternal side, but I suspected the latter. If you had asked me, before that year, about courage, I would have given you a crisp, clear answer. On the tennis court, it was straightforward. Courage was about honesty, about always being brave enough to tell the truth—the ball was either in or out, nothing unclear or ambiguous.
I guess the message in this handed-down letter was my father’s version of a St. Christopher’s medal, but over the course of the next year, I realized that what my father had passed on to me was, at best, incomplete. I came to understand that duty and honesty and courage were lines that crossed and overlapped—they weren’t always straight or compatible. The difficulty was in knowing which of the lines was most important.
三
As I walked through customs out into the airport lobby, I searched for a woman who matched the photograph I had been given. Victoria Liu had worked as a journalist for a news network in Guizhou Province. She had recently come to Beijing with her husband, who was an artist, but she hadn’t been able to find any work in the city as a journalist. My father had interviewed Victoria on one of his trips to Beijing and thought she would be a good person to look after me.
My father had told me that most Chinese people who deal with Westerners have two names, their real name and an English name. In China, the meaning of their adopted Engli
sh name is very important. Men preferred strong, masculine names like Michael or Jack while women often chose the names of flowers such as Lily or Ivy or Violet. Victoria’s real name was Zhong. She later told me that she had chosen the name Victoria as her English name because of Victoria Beckham.
I heard someone call my name. A slender young woman with short, spiked black hair, tight jeans, a neon purple sweater, and orange and brown rubber-topped tennis shoes waved at me with one hand as she held a pink cell phone to her ear with the other. Could this be Victoria? I looked back at the photo and then back at her. The two women looked nothing alike, but the board she held had my name misspelled, Chas Robretsn.
The woman tucked the sign under her arm, spoke a few words into the pink cell phone, and then approached me with a wide smile. She held her hand out and introduced herself as Victoria and then pulled the pink phone out again. She said she was calling the driver to pull the car up. As she spoke on the phone I examined my new guardian more carefully, unsure what to make of her. She seemed cooler than I had imagined. I felt relieved she didn’t appear to be too strict or overbearing.
I followed her out to the curb where we waited for the car. The air was thick, and even though it was early August, the sky had the kind of white-gray look that presages the coming of snow. The thick, smog-filled air obscured the horizon, and buildings appeared as little more than hazy outlines, like faded charcoal lines drawn on a cloud. Victoria waved her hand as a black Audi sedan pulled up. Once we were in the car, Victoria called Richard Zhang, who had offered to let me stay with his family in Beijing, and informed him that we were on our way.
“Maybe one hour to get to Beijing. Not long way, but traffic very bad.” Victoria tumbled through her words. I was tired and after a few minutes I closed my eyes and dozed off.
I awoke to the sound of fireworks. It was dark and we were in the midst of the city. Cheaply built apartment buildings, four or five stories tall, lined the streets lit by dim orange streetlamps. All around us fireworks exploded in the night air. The rockets traced blurred red and green and yellow lines through the dark smog. There seemed to be no pattern as to how and when they were set off. Unlike the precise, choreographed performances I had seen on the Fourth of July, these fireworks were fired in a series of mistimed, unordered volleys.
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