*China*
Soon after we returned from Harbin we had lunch with Noah and Larry in Number Nine dining room at the Youyi and we spent most of the meal swapping tales of our travels. Noah had gone to Hong Kong for two days and he was rhapsodic about the Peninsula Hotel with its magnificent white and gold lobby and the wine list and the line of hotel-owned Rolls Royces waiting in the circular drive at the front entrance for the use of special guests. Larry had flown down to Guangzhou to give a lecture and then had stayed on a few days to sample the food he’d heard so much about. We listened with delight to his descriptions of the eels and sea slugs and still-alive carp, the latter served only at the fancier restaurants, but when he started on the snake bile and the monkey brains Noah and I let Talya do all the oohing-and-aahing. When Larry finished giving us the details of how he selected the live snake that was then to become his dinner and how the monkey brains were served, steaming, in the center of a specially-designed table, Noah held up both hands in dramatic surrender.
“Enough, enough – please! You know, I’ve heard it said that Indians will worship anything, Americans will buy anything, and the Chinese will eat anything. I now believe it. I’m just surprised you didn’t try dog while you were there.”
“That’s really more of a Hunan specialty,” Larry, in all mock seriousness, explained, “not really a Cantonese delicacy. And besides, I’ve always assumed that those of us who eat here regularly are already quite familiar with the taste of dog, whether we know it or not.”
We were just about to get up from the table when Carol Sleeper, Ted’s wife, came over to talk to Talya. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy and she was making an effort to control herself.
“Have you heard about Ted? I don’t know what to do.”
“Here, sit down” Talya said, nodding to me as I got up and pulled over a vacant chair from the next table. “What happened?”
“I’m not really sure. Ted needed to see some people in Urumqi about something he wanted to use in his book. He said he was having a little difficulty getting the travel permit and he thought he might have to resort to using hou-men, the back door, if it didn’t get approved soon. He knows someone in the Travel Service who owes him a few favors. Last Friday the permit came through and he flew out to Urumqi. He called me on Saturday as we had arranged and he said the material he was after seemed to be more sensitive than he thought it would be – he was working on a chapter on the development of China’s heavy industry after 1949 – and he was having trouble getting permission to see it. He said he might have to stay on there longer than he had planned. He said he would call me again on Tuesday. I waited all that day but he never called. I tried to get through to his hotel the next day and the next, but it was useless. When I finally got through on Thursday night somebody answered by yelling “Wei?” two or three times into the phone and then hanging up as soon as I asked to speak to Professor Sleeper.
“Friday morning I went down to our embassy to see if they could help me. They weren’t very cooperative. I got the feeling I was being given a polite runaround by most of them. One man, the Public Affairs Officer, said he would look into it and get back to me as soon as possible. I heard nothing until this morning – my God, it’s been a week since Ted called! – and then this man said that as far as he could find out it looked as if Ted had been detained by the authorities in Urumqi. When I asked what for, he said he didn’t know –- but I think he did. He was just too evasive. I said I wanted to fly to Urumqi at once. He told me that would not be possible, that I should wait here at the Youyi while he tried to find out exactly what was going on. He said he’d call me here as soon as he knew where Ted was and what had happened.
“I don’t know what to do. Ted’s been all over this country while we’ve been here – he’s never had any problem before. I just wish I could get to see him. Oh damn, I just wish I could stop crying so much!”
Talya leaned across and held her and we all tried to minimize the seriousness of the situation, talking calmly about the usual screw-ups in the vast Chinese bureaucracy and the stories we’d heard about the time it usually takes to untangle the Oriental knot, but what she had said made me tense and uneasy and as soon as I could conveniently do so I left the others to deal with Carol and called the embassy from the phone in the main building. I let it ring eight or nine times before I remembered that it was Saturday and the place officially would be closed. I tried Boaz’s private number and when he answered I told him I wanted to come down to talk to him; he sounded upset himself but he said he would meet me by the lake in the Purple Bamboo Park in an hour.
I had been watching the newly blooming shrubs by my bench and the ripples on the surface of the water for fifteen minutes when he finally appeared.
“Sorry I’m late. Some business to take care of that couldn’t wait.”
“What happened to Ted Sleeper?”
A momentary look of surprise tinged with mild irritation and then the hooded look of the senior civil servant returned.
“How well did you – correction, do you – know him?”
“Not very well. Talya and I have gone out to dinner with them a few times. We see them around the compound quite often. He and I run together once in a while. I do know that he’s a first-rate historian who’s got a wife who’s currently in pretty bad shape and that he knows all about doing favors for people when his research takes him to various parts of the world.”
“That’s knowing quite a bit.” He waited, looking from me to the lake and then back to me again, and when he’d made his decision he continued in a voice that now hinted at resignation rather than crisp efficiency.
“Sleeper has put us in an awkward position. He’s been caught with some printed information in his possession that the Chinese consider important to their national security. He insists that it is nothing more than research data that he was freely given by one of the senior cadres in one of Urumqi’s largest industrial brigades, but the official denies agreeing to help Sleeper in any way with the research for his book. The material is very sensitive – not the kind the Chinese would voluntarily share with a Western scholar, even one as well thought of around here as Sleeper. No, I think we’ll be lucky to get him out of the country at all. Some of the old Maoists are pushing for a long prison sentence; it’s a good opportunity for them to discredit Deng’s policy of encouraging Western scholars and businessmen to come to China and see for themselves what advances the country has made since Mao died.”
“Was Ted doing you people a favor in Urumqi?”
He just looked out at the lake, not even responding by giving me a noncommittal stare.
“Aren’t you going to do anything to help him? Even if he wasn’t working for you this time, don’t you owe him something? Are you just going to let him rot in some goddam prison?”
Boaz looked right at me, his face expressionless, and he spoke softly and without any apparent emotion.
“When I go back to the embassy I’m going to call his wife and tell her that her husband has been falsely accused of spying and that the American government is aware of the absurdity of the charge and is doing everything in its power to affect his release from the officials in Urumqi who are detaining him. I will also be flying out there on tomorrow’s flight, along with the embassy’s chief political officer and the DCM, and we will have an unofficial meeting with the responsible Chinese. Sleeper is a well-known scholar and he has some very important friends who may intercede on his behalf. With luck, he may simply be deported – but whatever happens, I’m sure he knew the risks. Most of us do.”
I watched him walk away, my impotence and frustration leaving a sour taste in the back of my throat, and I wondered how lucky Ted would feel if he were prohibited from ever setting foot in China again.
Either the Chinese wanted to avoid antagonizing the Reagan administration while the U.S. policy on Taiwan was still in so much flux or else Lynn Boa
z and his colleagues were very persuasive because the whole affair was kept very quiet. Nothing about it ever appeared in the Chinese press – controversial issues rarely did – and the foreign press corps found that no travel permits for the Urumqi area were being issued for the next few weeks. The foreign residents of the Youyi, however, talked of little else when we met in the dining halls; rumors were legion, of course, but most people accepted the one that said that an American professor had been taken into custody by the Chinese because he’d been too aggressive in searching for the material for his latest book and that he was in the process of being deported as persona non grata. Ten days after I’d met Boaz in the park Carol and her son flew to Shanghai where they met Ted and the three of them were put on a Pan Am flight back to California. They hadn’t let Ted come back to Peking and so Carol had asked Talya and me to help her with the packing. Four days after she had left I received a postcard that had been mailed from Tokyo, the only stopover on Pan Am’s new China-U.S. route. It was a glossy picture of Mt. Fuji and the message side had no date and no return address and only a single scrawled sentence and two initials: Guess this is what happens when you ride on the back of the tiger. T. S.
The Shadow Knows Page 21