A Map of Betrayal (9 page)

By early April I still hadn’t heard from Yufeng, and I grew more anxious. I talked with Henry about it. He suggested going to the northeast personally to find out what had happened to her, so I began making plans. I moved my seminar from the next Thursday afternoon to Tuesday evening (pizzas provided) so that I could have six days for the trip.

On April 7 I quietly set out. It would have been faster and easier if I’d flown, but I’d have had to present my passport to purchase plane tickets, and then the police might keep an eye on me and throw up obstacles. So I decided to take the train. At the station, to my surprise, I was asked to show my ID too. This was something new. I had traveled on trains in China before, on my own, and never needed to produce my papers for the tickets. With no way out, I handed my U.S. passport to the woman clerk behind the window, saying I was going to Heilongjiang to see my aunt. To my relief, she didn’t ask any questions and just gave me the tickets and the change, perhaps because there was a snaking line of people behind me. Plus, I spoke Mandarin well enough that she might have taken me to be an overseas Chinese, belonging to a different category of foreigners, who travel frequently in China to see families, relatives, and friends.

The trip was long, more than twenty hours, including the layovers in Harbin and Jiamusi. I didn’t go deep into the two cities
while waiting for the next trains but merely strolled around a little to stretch my legs. Both places still had traces of the Soviet Union’s urban layout—massive buildings, broad boulevards, and vast squares. In the food stores I saw bread the size of a basin, bulky meat loaves, stout sausages. There were also a number of Russians on the streets, probably tourists and businesspeople.

The train rides had been humdrum but not tiring, thanks to my sleeping berth. I’d brought along a pocket
New China Dictionary
, which I enjoyed reading to brush up and learn some characters. The final leg of the trip was different, though. From Jiamusi I took a local train to Fushan County, and for two hours I sat among Chinese passengers, some of whom looked like peasants. Opposite me were a couple in their late forties, the man with a bald patch on the crown of his head and the wife with ruddy cheeks. Next to me a young woman sat with a toddler on her lap. She was obviously an urbanite, with a pallid face. After a male conductor had poured boiled water from a large galvanized kettle for the passengers who held out their mugs, I looked out the window, gazing at the shifting landscape, which reminded me of the midwestern American countryside. In a vast field two tractors were pulling harrows to pulverize the soil to prepare it for sowing, tossing up dust like teams of back-kicking horses. In another field a seeder was rolling. Beyond the machines, wildfires were sending up swaths of smoke. All the while I’d been holding my tongue to avoid revealing my accent, but now, unable to keep silent any longer, I asked the couple opposite me, “What are those fires for?”

“They’re probably clearing land for farming,” the man said. “They also burn the weeds to fertilize the soil.”

“What are they sowing? I mean those seeders.”

“Corn and wheat.”

“Soybeans too,” added his wife.

“Where are you from?” asked the young mother, my seatmate.

“Beijing,” I said.

“You don’t sound like a Han.”

“I’m half Uigur” came my stock answer. “But I live and work in the capital.”

Uigurs, a minority people in western China, are light-skinned and nicknamed the Whites of Asia. The passengers all bought my answer, and we began chitchatting. Soon the young woman next to me dozed off with her arm around her boy, who seemed in the deepest of sleeps. The man opposite me said that he and his wife had just gone to Nanjing to visit their son, who was a truck driver in an artillery regiment. The young man might get promoted to officer. If not, he should be able to make a decent living as a cabbie or trucker after being demobilized. I remembered that it used to be a sort of privilege to join the army and wondered if it was still so. The man said that military service was popular, but not everyone could afford it.

“What do you mean by ‘afford it’?” I asked in wonder.

“You have to pay,” his wife pitched in.

“Pay whom?”

“The recruiters,” the man said.

“How much did you pay for your son?” I was all the more amazed.

“Well, eight thousand yuan, the standard fee.”

That was about twelve hundred dollars, a hefty sum to a common Chinese family. His wife added again, “If you have a girl who wants to join up, that’ll cost you ten thousand.”

I said, “I guess military service might be the only profession where girls are more expensive than boys.”

That made both of them laugh. I wondered what would happen if a war broke out. Perhaps many soldiers would pay their superiors to get discharged or to avoid being sent into battle. The Chinese are a pragmatic people, most of them not interested in politics or principles. For them, survival has to take priority. The common people’s main concerns can be summed up in four words: food, clothing, shelter, and transportation. Nowadays they also talked a lot about health care and children’s education.

The station of Fushan was a new yellow building topped with a clock tower, which read 2:50. The platform was paved with concrete slabs and swarmed with people, many of whom were there seeing off family members or friends. The toddler whose mother had shared my seat refused to get off the train and burst out crying. He wanted to keep on riding. That got the grown-ups laughing and his mother embarrassed. Her eyes widened in panic as she said to no one in particular, “Forgive us. This is his first train ride.”

Outside the station stretched a line of taxis, and young women were holding signs that displayed hotel prices and amenities, all including free cable TV. I got into a cab and told the driver, “Take me to a guesthouse in town.”

“A cheap one?” He started the ignition and pulled away.

“No, a good quiet place.”

We were going north. Along the roadsides the young trees, birches and aspens and acacias, were sprouting leaves like tiny scissor blades and spearheads, all their trunks lime-painted from the roots up to four feet to protect them from insects. The town felt empty, with only a handful of pedestrians in sight. This was the first time I’d seen a town in China that looked as if there’d been more houses than people. It brought to mind a small U.S. midwestern town on a quiet day, though Fushan was a county seat. I asked the cabdriver why so few people were around. He said there’d just been a peasant uprising, which was suppressed by a contingent of riot police sent down from Harbin, so most country folks weren’t coming to town for the time being. Even the marketplace had been closed, and had just opened up again the day before.

“What for?” I asked the cabbie. “I mean the uprising.”

“Some officials in the county administration leased thousands of acres of land to local peasants and pocketed the money. But the land is public property and belongs to the state. This outraged the country folks. They sent delegates to the provincial capital and then
to Beijing to lodge their grievances, but they got manhandled in both places. All the officials turned a deaf ear, so the villagers came back and started a demonstration. The local police tried to break up the crowd but got roughed up by the demonstrators. Then the whole thing grew into a huge uprising, roads blocked and trains stopped, and more than a thousand cops were rushed down from Harbin.”

“Did anyone get killed?”

“No, but hundreds were injured. Some cars and tractors were smashed and burned. The cops fired lots of tear gas and rubber bullets.”

“No pepper spray?”

“What’s that?”

“Some police in foreign countries would spray peppered water on demonstrators. It can be effective for breaking up small crowds.” I moved my hand left and right to show how to apply an aerosol can. He saw my demonstration in the rearview mirror, wagging a toothpick between his lips.

“More like a toy, isn’t it? Tell you what, the country folks eat hot peppers every day and wouldn’t give a shit about something like that.”

I chuckled. Actually, my question about pepper spray wasn’t frivolous—I wanted to see how sophisticated the Chinese police had become in crowd control. The government was unlikely to send out the standing army to quell uprisings again, having learned from the fiasco of Tiananmen Square. That was why in recent years they’d been building a huge police force (2.5 million in total) and spent more on “internal security” than on the military. I often wonder, without that astronomical budget, how much China could do for its people, for the children in the countryside who are underfed and deprived of decent schooling.

We stopped at a two-story inn called Home for Everyone. I handed the cabbie a fifty-yuan bill for a thirty-five-yuan ride and
let him keep the change. A fortyish woman at the check-in counter gave me a multibed room, just for myself, as it was a slow time of year. I went upstairs, unpacked, took a quick shower, and lay down on a bed that smelled of tobacco. Though exhausted, I was in a good frame of mind because the woman downstairs hadn’t asked for my ID and I might be able to stay here peacefully. I had not expected the trip to go so smoothly.

In the evening I went out for dinner at a nearby eatery, a cubbyhole that had only three tiny tables below a cyst of a low-watt bulb, but it offered spicy noodles and succulent steamed buns stuffed with pork and cabbage. I wished I could eat noodles like a full-blooded Chinese, heartily slurping the broth and sucking in the wheat ribbons noisily and then, halfway through, holding the big blue-rimmed bowl to my sweaty face to bolt down the remainder. But whenever I ate noodles, people could tell I was a foreigner who used chopsticks clumsily and was afraid of lifting the bowl to my mouth. So I bought two small buns and a bowl of soup instead. The old man at the counter pointed his stubby red finger at me and said good-naturedly, “Just two buns? You eat like a kitten.” Behind him a stack of huge bamboo steamers was swathed in a cloud of vapor. He must have taken me for a Chinese woman fastidious about food, so I said, “Thanks,” then carried my purchase to a table and sat down to eat.

In China I liked being viewed as Chinese, though in the States I always insist I am American. For me, similarity is essential—I want to be treated equally. In elementary school I had once come to blows with a girl who called me “mongrel” instead of “bitch.” I looked up the word in a dictionary to see if it was related to “Mongol.” It wasn’t. I also examined a photo of my family and could see that I had my father’s nose and mouth, but I had white skin. Strangers tended to regard me as a brunette. Clearly it was my last name that singled me out. Yet intuitively I had always known I was different. Later my father would urge me to date only Chinese boys, saying they were more reliable than white or black boys. That
sounded anachronistic to me. I was so annoyed by his harping that once I retorted, “Why don’t you find me a suitable Chinese boy? I don’t want a nerd, though.” I said that thinking of Francie Wong, the only Chinese boy in my prep school. After my father died, I often wondered what he would have thought of my first husband, who was Hispanic. Carlos was quite nerdy, even bespectacled, but he had his charm and, as an insurance broker, maintained a large clientele.

Back at the inn, I ran into its owner, a roly-poly man with a doughy face and a thatch of bushy hair, and I asked him how to get to Gutai Village, where Yufeng was supposed to live. He said it was far away, more than ten miles, and I should take the bus. But I wanted to go alone in a car so I could have a flexible schedule the following day. The man helped me book a taxi, for which I put down a one-hundred-yuan deposit.

I ARRIVED IN GUTAI
around midmorning the next day. The trip was easy but turned out to be futile. The village chief told me that Yufeng had died a few years ago, and that the rest of her family was living in the county seat, running a seamstress shop. Her body had been cremated and the ashes were in her daughter Manrong’s charge, so Yufeng had left nothing in the village. “Damn,” I said to myself. “I hope this won’t be a wild-goose chase.” Without further delay I headed back to Fushan Town.

In the afternoon I went out in search of my half sister. The village chief had told me, “Just ask about Seamstress Shang, everybody knows where her shop is.” I was glad she and I still shared the same family name. My mother used to tease me, not without malice, saying, “You’re probably the last Shang on earth.” True, even in China, Shang, meaning “esteem,” is an uncommon name, but in a nation of 1.3 billion people, there must be many thousands of Shangs. The seamstress shop was easy to find indeed. It was on a cobbled street in the commercial section downtown, the part
closed to automobiles. After passing the few vendors selling produce and poultry along the sidewalk, I entered the shop.

“Can I help you?” a resonant voice asked from a corner. Following it emerged a sixtyish woman in a green turtleneck sweater.

At the sight of her I felt my heart lurching. She was the spitting image of my father, although a female version and four or five inches shorter, with the same elongated eyes, wide nose, full forehead, and roundish cheekbones. She was a bit plump but glowing with health.

“Are you Manrong Shang?” I asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“Your father’s name is Weimin Shang.”

“Who are you?” She stared at me in amazement.

“I’m Lilian Shang, his daughter too. Can we speak inside?”

She called over a younger woman, obviously her daughter, and told her to mind the front counter. Then Manrong led me into the back room. After we sat down at a table strewn with scraps of cloth, stubs of French chalk, and a measuring tape, she kept looking at me as if she hadn’t yet recovered from the astonishment. I took a small album out of my purse and handed it to her, saying, “Here are some photos of our father.”

“I never met him,” she said. “All I know about him is that he gathered lots of important intelligence for our country but couldn’t come back to join us. He died in the line of duty. That’s what the Internet says.” She couldn’t access uncensored Google or she’d have known that our father’s life had ended wretchedly. As she was thumbing through the album, her eyebrows now joined and now fluttered. Then her thick lips stirred, a smile emerging on her face. She said, “This is him. We have a photo of him as a young man.”