Ha Jin - A Map of Betrayal - A Novel

“They ordered you to keep me in the dark?”

“Yes, my friend.”

In shock, Gary realized he might have to live in the United States for a long time. In spite of his bitterness, all he could do was to ask his handler to take care of his wife and children back home. Bingwen promised, “Rest assured, their well-being is guaranteed, in the hands of our country.” He picked up a succulent shrimp ball with his red chopsticks, dipped it into the satay sauce, and put it in his mouth.

When Juli was back in Guangzhou, she sent me her brother Benning’s email address and two photos, which, though somewhat blurry, showed he had a rectangular face and curly hair like my father’s. I wrote him, saying I was his aunt and would like to meet him if he lived nearby or came my way, but I got no reply. He used a Hotmail account, so it was impossible for me to surmise where he might be, in China or abroad. His sister sent him messages as well, and she did not receive a response either.

Then Juli mentioned that she was going to perform in a concert. It would be her debut, her “first big event,” which I felt I ought to attend since her parents wouldn’t be there. I decided to fly down to Guangzhou to spend a day or two with her, and also to see her sing. I had a friend from Wisconsin, Stacy Gilmour, who was teaching international finance at a business school in that city and said she would be happy to put me up in the two-bedroom apartment she had to herself on campus. I flew south on the third weekend of May.

I’d been to Guangzhou two decades before to do archival work for my book on the Opium War, and now the city was much brighter and brisker in spite of auto exhaust and the floating smog clouds. To my amazement, there were a lot of Africans living here, many with businesses in the area called Chocolate Town; they were involved in importing and exporting, mainly buying Chinese products and selling them in Africa and the Middle East. I guessed they must like the semitropical climate, which was too sultry for me. It wasn’t summer yet, but the downtown at noon was already sweltering like a busy kitchen. Juli was ecstatic to see me and introduced me to her boyfriend, Wuping, a tall man whose shoulder-length mane and disheveled appearance brought to mind the French philosopher Descartes, although the fellow wasn’t interested in philosophy. He managed the troupe whose band had taken Juli on. Like her, he was a northerner, from Jilin province, and his family had moved here many years before. He looked much older than my niece, perhaps on the verge of middle age. He drove a black minivan, the type nicknamed “bread box,” but his resembled a coffin on wheels.

After dinner with the two of them at a Vietnamese restaurant, where we had vermicelli noodles and seafood sautéed with napa cabbage and cayenne peppers, I spent some time with Juli alone, seated outside a bar on the Pearl River. A yacht with a boat-length TV screen attached to its side chugged back and forth in the shadowy water, displaying a series of commercials, while to our right, about two hundred feet away, a crowd of middle-aged women and men were clapping their hands and singing a Mongolian song: “In the blue sky float white clouds / Below the clouds horses are galloping …” A distant drumroll went on throbbing spasmodically as if a show was under way. Behind us a high-rise residential building loomed, silhouetted against the starry sky and leaking columns of lights through the undersize windows. The air smelled of overripe banana and was vibrating with a faint din like firecrackers exploding far away. Over iced tea Juli and I talked about inflation and boyfriends. I confessed that I had dated a dozen or so men in my life and married twice, but only two of them still meant something to me, Henry excluded.

“How about your ex-husband?” Juli asked me.

“Carlos is one of the two. He’s a good man, but we didn’t get along.” I stopped there, reluctant to talk more about him.

Juli said she’d been called “nympho filly” in high school, though in reality she had dated only one boy in her teens. “Or one and a half actually,” she said. “My second boyfriend dumped me as soon as he left for college. We’d been friends for less than a semester, and I didn’t do anything with him, so he shouldn’t count.”

I asked her how serious she was about Wuping. “I love him,” she told me.

“Does he love you back?”

“I think so.”

“What is it that makes him so attractive?”

“I feel happy and confident around him. I like mature men who have lived a bit.”

“How old is he?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“My, don’t you think he might be too old for you? Twelve years is a big age difference.”

“That’s not a problem. The problem is he’s still married and has a nine-year-old son.”

“Well, does he plan to get a divorce?”

“He’s been separated from his wife, and they’ll reach a settlement soon.”

“What does that mean?”

“He’s going to file for divorce.”

I started having a sinking feeling. “Juli, in this situation, try to use your head, not your heart. You’re not a teenage girl anymore. Don’t let love eat you up.”

“You mean I shouldn’t be too serious about Wuping?”

“I’m afraid he might be taking advantage of you.”

“You’re so prehistoric, Aunt Lilian. The fact is, you could say I’ve been using him — he can help me advance my career. He’s well connected in show business here. On top of that, we love each other.”

“Are you sure he loves you enough to leave his wife and son?”

“Not a hundred percent yet, but it doesn’t matter. Truth to tell, whenever he spends time with me, I feel he’s doing me a favor. So long as he allows me to hang around, that will be okay with me. As a matter of fact, he says I’ve been sucking him dry, but he won’t mind. That’s the price for love he’s willing to pay.”

Basically she was telling me she was content to be a “little third,” a term referring to a young woman who specializes in seducing married men and wrecking families. There are additional monikers for such a woman, like “fox spirit,” “evil flower,” “professional mistress.” Juli admitted that she had joined the online club called Little Thirds, whose theme song proclaims that their mission is to take men away from dull, obtuse wives. One of their slogans is “If you can’t take care of your husbands, let us help.” They’d just held their first conference on March 3, a covert event in Shanghai attended by scores of “little thirds” from all over the country. Some of the twenty- and thirty-somethings were quite brazen. One young woman posted five of her photos online and even boasted that her beauty had “startled the Party,” as if she’d swept numerous high-ranking officials off their feet. Her pictures showed nothing out of the ordinary.

Juli was a good woman, I was sure, but she could have found a better man than Wuping, who I felt was too smooth. I always believe that if you love and marry someone, that person will become a kind of investment, because together you two will build your home, your family, and if you are lucky, your wealth. But the Chinese dating scene is quite unusual. Most girls won’t consider any young man without his own housing. In a city like Beijing or Guangzhou, an eight-hundred-square-foot apartment costs over three hundred thousand dollars, but the wages of a regular worker or clerk are around six hundred dollars a month. How on earth can a young man come to own any decent housing by working an ordinary job? So a lot of men are kept out of the dating scene. To make matters worse, most well-off older men are interested only in twenty-somethings, and as a result, many professionally accomplished women have been excluded from the dating arena as well. There are pretty, well-educated, financially secure thirty-somethings galore, but they won’t date younger, poor men. These young males, disenfranchised and sexually frustrated, can be a major source of social unrest.