A Map of Betrayal: A Novel

by Ha Jin

  His words, though casually said, struck me, and my cheeks heated up. I had known about my half siblings but questioned their paternity. Something like a wash of shame crept over me as I realized I had unconsciously attempted to distance my half siblings from our father ever since I came to know of their existence. Before saying good-bye, I held Chu’s blotchy hand with both of mine and thanked him for speaking to me.

  Now I was more determined than ever to find my father’s first family.

  1950

  Gary had been in Okinawa since the previous winter, working for a U.S. radio station with which his former cultural agency had merged. It was early summer now and rained almost every day. He liked the climate on the whole, mild in the winter but damp in the spring. The clouds, fluffy like cotton candy, looked low enough that you could reach out and snatch a piece. Once in a while he’d sit at the seaside, gazing at the turquoise ocean, its color turning brighter toward the horizon, and as he breathed the fetid whiffs that wafted over from rotten seaweed, he’d sink into thoughts about his homeland. When the tide was coming in, small whitecaps would lap the coral reefs, sloshing up scummy foam. The open flattish landscape hardly changed color through the seasons and could be drab. It was here that for the first time he’d seen palm-tree groves and sugarcane thickets. He enjoyed strolling along the trails on hillslopes alone. On those short excursions, he often ran into locals walking barefoot, women carrying bundles of susuki grass on their heads and small boys, naked above their waists, tending goats or looking for artillery shell fragments, each holding a straw basket. They’d greet him with a smile or a cry of recognition, as if he were Japanese.

  Gary liked the rural feel of this place. Seafood was daily fare, though he still couldn’t eat raw fish and would avoid sushi whenever he dined out with Thomas and his other colleagues. If they happened to end up at a Japanese restaurant, he could manage a few fish rolls wrapped in nori, but absolutely no sashimi, which had once upset his stomach. “Food poisoned,” he’d told the others. Nor would he drink sake with ice in it like his colleagues; he preferred to have it the Asian way, just the plain liquor. To avoid overspending, most times he ate at the canteen that served American food. He disliked cheese, undercooked steaks, meat loaf, and funny-tasting salads. Once in a while he went to a local eatery that offered decent noodles, usually covered with a hard-boiled egg cut in half and five or six slices of pork or calamari, accompanied by half a dozen pot stickers as a side dish. Thank heaven Okinawans used soy sauce and bean paste.

  His workplace was close to the U.S. military base, the vast airfield bringing to mind a townscape at night, but during the day the planes droned and roared continually. He was an official translator now, gleaning and compiling information from Chinese-language periodicals published in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the mainland. On occasion he also translated articles from English into Chinese, mostly short propaganda pieces that the radio station broadcast to Red China. His English was excellent by now, and in his free time he read the novels of D. H. Lawrence, cheaply printed editions from Hong Kong. He liked the novelist’s poetic prose, the spontaneous narrative flow, the earthy myth, and also the daring eroticism.

  Unlike him, his American colleagues would frequent bars and nightclubs, where they picked up girls. Gary seldom went out and was known as a bachelor. He missed his wife and wished he had spent more time with her. How he regretted having left Shanghai in a hurry without writing her another letter. Now any kind of communication was out of the question. Lying in bed at night with crickets exchanging tremulous chirps (chee chee chee chee) and dogs barking fitfully in the distance (wow wow wow wow), he would ask himself why he hadn’t thought about the consequences of leaving his homeland and why he hadn’t voiced to his higher-ups any misgivings about his assignment. Perhaps deep in his heart there’d been the desire to leave home to see the broad world so that he could grow into a man with a wider vision and a mature mind. A professor of his had once told him that he had to read ten thousand books and travel a hundred thousand miles to become a real man. But that couldn’t be true; not everyone had to leave home to grow up.

  Every night before going to sleep, he’d think of Yufeng for a while. The more he thought about her, the more excruciating their separation felt, as though her absence had only tightened the tie between them. He would replay her words and actions in his mind. Some of her phrases and facial expressions had been growing mysterious and more vivid, pregnant with meanings he couldn’t decipher. Sometimes in the middle of the night he’d awake with a start, feeling his wife standing at the head of his bed and observing him. Her breathing was ragged while her eyes radiated resentment. He wondered whether his preoccupation with her was due to his sense of guilt, but concluded it was not. He cherished Yufeng, believing he couldn’t have found a better wife. If only he could again hold her in his arms, caress her silky skin, and inhale the musk of her hair.

  At the radio station there was a Filipino man who spoke Japanese fluently and a Vietnamese man who knew French well. Both of them were formal and polite at work but turned foulmouthed like the Americans as soon as they called it a day. They had their families with them, yet once in a while they’d go to nightclubs to see local girls dance. They would wave dollar bills and packets of chewing gum at the performers while crying, “Shake it! Shake it!” Gary went with them once but regretted having spent ten dollars in less than two hours. He blamed himself for such extravagance as he remembered the rustic life his parents and wife had been living back home. He wouldn’t go to a place like that again.

  As the only Chinese translator here, he handled all the Chinese-language publications and could follow events in China. Time and again the Communists declared they would liberate Taiwan in the near future, but their plan for the liberation was thwarted by the lost battle on Jinmen, an island about six miles east of Amoy. The previous summer the People’s Liberation Army had launched an attack with three regiments—more than nine thousand men in all, assuming that the Nationalist troops hadn’t been able to build their defenses on the island yet. Under cover of darkness the assaulting force landed on a vast beach, but right after they arrived, the tide began falling away and made it impossible for the three hundred boats to go back to fetch reinforcements and provisions. As a result, the landed soldiers, some having seen the ocean for the first time, had no choice but to charge ahead at the defending positions. When it was daylight all the attackers were fully exposed on the beach, so the Nationalist army shelled them with artillery and raked them with machine guns. Then bombers came and destroyed all the stranded boats, a few of which were even loaded with live pigs and chickens, jars of rice wine, crates of liquor, and boxes of cash for the expected victory celebration.

  Before dusk, the invading troops were routed, and some fled to the hills, but they were either killed or captured. All told, about three thousand men were taken prisoner. The lost battle was a huge blow to the Communists’ plan to cross Taiwan Strait, and Mao had no option but to put “the liberation of Taiwan” on hold for the time being. If they attacked any island again, they’d have to be able to crush the defenders with overwhelming force. Gary realized that so long as the People’s Liberation Army was preparing to capture Taiwan, his superiors might not call him back, because they would need military intelligence from him. He dreaded getting mired in Okinawa for good.

  Through reading reports, interviews, and private talks, Gary could see that the Americans didn’t trust Chiang Kai-shek. They believed that the Nationalist government and army were too corrupt to have any future. Just a few years back the United States had granted them two billion dollars in aid, assuming they’d be able to hold the Communists in check, if not to root them out. But all the money vanished in the fire and smoke of lost battles and in some top officials’ pockets, and the whole of China went Red in just four years. It was whispered that the White House had been seriously looking for someone in the Nationalist army to replace Chiang. Gary could also see that the Americans had no plan for defending
Taiwan at all. This meant that on their own the Nationalist forces could hardly defend the island state, so mainland China should attack it as soon as possible.

  In addition, the native Taiwanese didn’t like the Nationalist regime, which had been ruling the island with terror and blood. Thousands of educated natives had been rounded up and killed; many disappeared without a trace. Even some mainlanders who’d fled to Taiwan resented the brutality. The previous summer hundreds of middle schoolers from Shandong, to whom the Nationalist government had promised uninterrupted education, had been forced to join its army; a number of student representatives had protested to the officers but only got bayoneted. Later the military court tried the activists involved in resisting the coerced service—two middle school principals and five students were sentenced to death. The deaths of those men and teenage boys from his home province made Gary hate the Nationalist regime all the more.

  Everything in Taiwan indicated that the government was quite shaky and could be toppled easily. Gary wanted to see his country unified soon so it would be more powerful in fighting imperialism and colonialism. He was excited by the tidbits of intelligence he had gathered, considering them valuable to the mainland, and he even wrote a long summary of what he’d found, a kind of analysis of the current situation in East Asia, but since he was still altogether isolated, he had no idea where to send the intelligence. He felt frustrated and even wondered if his comrades, consumed with building the new country, had forgotten him.

  In the meantime, the storm of war was gathering on the Korean Peninsula. It was reported that Kim Il Sung had claimed he was going to overthrow the U.S.-backed puppet government in Seoul, but no one took his threat seriously. Then, in late June, he launched a full-scale attack with ten divisions, all equipped with Russian-made weapons. Seoul fell in three days. The South Korean forces and the U.S. troops couldn’t stop the invading army and began retreating south toward Pusan. Kim Il Sung proclaimed that his soldiers, “Stalin’s warriors,” would drive the enemies all down into the Pacific in a matter of weeks. But his army soon became battle-fatigued and depleted, unable to break the U.S. final defense line—their T-34 tanks’ rubber-clad wheels were melted by napalm, their troops were slaughtered by American bombers that came from the ocean, and within two months they’d lost more than fifty thousand men. Although they managed to surround Pusan in late August, they couldn’t finish the battle; their offense bogged down.

  Then, in mid-September, General MacArthur succeeded in landing eighteen thousand marines at Inchon. From there the American troops proceeded to cut the North Koreans’ supply lines and attack them from the rear. The Communist army crumbled instantly and had to retreat helter-skelter. MacArthur declared that the U.S. forces would go after them and wipe them out wherever they were. In no time Seoul was taken back, and all Kim’s soldiers were fleeing north. Still, the U.S. army wouldn’t stop pursuing them. It looked like the war would soon reach the bank of the Yalu. In response to the crisis, Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, told K. M. Panikkar, the Indian ambassador to Beijing: “China will not sit back and watch if the U.S. army crosses the Thirty-Eighth Parallel to invade North Korea.” His warning was dismissed by the White House. Indeed, how could a weak, war-battered China confront a global superpower? Who wouldn’t take Zhou’s words for a mere bluff?

  But Gary understood how the Chinese Communist leaders’ minds worked—in general, they wouldn’t have said anything they couldn’t back up with force. He didn’t want to see a war break out between the United States and the new China, which was only a year old and couldn’t afford such a confrontation. It was time to keep peace, reconstruct the country, and let the populace recover from the destruction of the civil war. Yet the two countries seemed unable to understand each other, heading toward a frontal clash. Two days after the Korean War broke out, President Truman had declared that he’d decided to dispatch the Seventh Fleet to blockade Taiwan Strait. To Gary, as well as to most Chinese, this was a blatant affront, because evidently the United States dared not confront the Soviet Union and vented its spleen on China instead. The American warships steaming toward Taiwan Strait shattered China’s plan for imminent national unification, since there was no way it could fight the powerful U.S. navy. Outraged, a Chinese delegate at the UN asked the world: “Can you imagine that because Mexico has a civil war, the United Kingdom is entitled to seize Florida?” Zhou Enlai also announced that Truman’s declaration and the U.S. navy’s blockade constituted an armed invasion of China’s territory. But all the announcements and warnings were ignored by the West.

  In translating the Chinese warnings in the intelligence report he compiled for the CIA, Gary deliberately toned up the original a bit, and whenever possible, he’d render the wording more striking. If there was a choice between “will” and “determination,” he would pick the latter; or he would pass over “resist” for “fight back.” Deep down, he knew no politician or general might notice the nuances of his word choices. Indeed, who would pay attention to his little verbal maneuvers? The sense of futility depressed him, though some of his American colleagues were agog, thrilled that the United States was flexing its military muscles again. Everybody at the agency had more work to do all of a sudden. Gary resented some of his colleagues’ bragging about the might of the aircraft carriers and the battleships equipped with sixteen-inch guns, but he had to keep a straight face. If only he could get in touch with the Chinese side and let them know they should find another way to get their intentions across to the United States.

  Thomas and Gary were eating dinner together in the canteen one evening. “Jesus, it’s hot here,” said Thomas, his face so pale that tiny blue veins were visible beside his nose. His annual furlough had just been denied, and he was upset.

  “The sun’s intense,” Gary echoed. Indeed, at six p.m. the sun was still as fierce and stinging as it was at noon.

  “It looks like we might stay here for another couple of years. I hate Kim Il Sung, the bloodthirsty bastard!” Thomas put a piece of roast chicken in his mouth, his strong jaw moving up and down.

  “I miss home a lot too,” Gary confessed and forced a grin.

  “If I’m stuck here too long, my fiancée might send me a Dear John letter, hee hee hee hee.”

  “No, she won’t,” Gary said, wondering why Thomas laughed like that, as if he were suppressing a hacking cough. The man must feel sick at heart and might go berserk if he lost his woman.

  Unlike Gary, the other Asians on staff were elated by the war on the Korean Peninsula, because it would enable them to work here for a longer time. The pay was good and the food rich; they had PX privileges and free medical care; better still, their children could go to the American school. Gary couldn’t help but envy those men who had their families with them, each living in a cozy Japanese bungalow that had glossy wood floors and black ceramic tiles on the roof. If only he could speak and act freely like others, especially like the GIs, many of whom kept local girlfriends.

  Henry and I emailed each other every day, but I didn’t call him very often. On average we spoke once a week. When he wrote, he sounded at ease and cheerful. He was a large man, six foot one, and weighed more than 210 pounds. I often reminded him not to overeat and to watch his weight. Also, he mustn’t forget to take lisinopril in the morning for his blood pressure. In all likelihood he enjoyed being alone, reliving his bachelor days for a spell. He was fond of reading books, particularly war histories, and must have had more time for them now. In his messages he called himself “a grass widower.” I missed him, his carefree laugh, his small talk, the touch of his hands. I hadn’t slept alone for years, and at night my body was still unused to the discomfort of solitude.

  My father’s home village had been on my mind ever since my meeting with Bingwen Chu. I was my parents’ only child, half Chinese and half Irish; that made me American. I couldn’t stop wondering what my half siblings were like. Already in their early sixties, they must have grandchildren. Even if they were no longer in Shando
ng, there must be relatives on my father’s side down in the country. That’s where I would start to look for them. I scrapped the thought of telephoning the village, which I wanted to see with my own eyes to have a concrete sense of the place and the people. Moreover, there would probably be many Shangs in the countryside, and I might find family connections. I’d go first to Maijia Village in Linmin County, Shandong.

  I bought a SinoMap from Spring Rain Bookstore and perused it. Linmin is approximately two hundred miles south of Beijing, just beyond the border of Hebei province. It’s near the expressway that runs from the capital to Shanghai. Perhaps I could make a quiet trip on a weekend I thought, but I didn’t have a Chinese driver’s license and couldn’t rent a car. Should I borrow one from a friend or colleague? Or ask somebody to rent one for me? No, I mustn’t drive with my Maryland license. If caught, I’d get others and myself in trouble. Should I take a bus then? That might be too much hassle. I was sure there was no direct bus service from Beijing to Linmin. If I took a bus, I’d have to go to a city first, say, Dezhou or Jinan, then switch buses. That would be a long detour. If a train had run through Linmin, I’d have taken it and made a secret trip on my own, but the town had no railroad. In fact, I enjoyed traveling alone in China, where people tended to view me as a Chinese as long as I didn’t open my mouth to speak at length. Somehow since my early forties, my Irish features—sharp cheekbones, grayish eyes, chestnut hair—had begun to fade, and I looked more Asian each year, as if my Chineseness had been pushing out from within and manifesting itself on my face.

  In my graduate seminar I had a student named Minmin, who always wore stone-washed jeans and teardrop earrings. She happened to have a car, a China-made Volkswagen Santana, a popular model among low-level officials and white-collar professionals. I’d seen her drive the green sedan. After class one afternoon I called her into my office and asked whether, as a favor, she’d make a trip with me in her car. Without hesitation Minmin, slender and with dark round eyes, agreed to accompany me to Shandong.