“I’m pleased to hear that,” I said. “I’m proud of you, Juli. What’s a good life? A combination of vocation and avocation — to make work and fun one thing. That’s from Robert Frost.”
“Who’s he?”
“An American poet.”
“That’s cool — the way he put it.”
“It’s wisdom, simple and clear.”
“Thanks, Aunt Lilian. This is the first time somebody has said such heartening words to me about my wild life. I’ve never dared to tell my parents about this; they might send someone to bring back their bad daughter on the loose.”
We both laughed. We also talked about her twin brother, Benning, whose exact whereabouts Juli didn’t know. She was sure he’d been working for the government, often in other countries. That was all she knew. Sometimes Benning seemed quite aloof and secretive. Juli told me that he was the scholar of the family, the only one who’d gone to college. He also spoke English well; he had learned it as a foreign-language major. The more she talked about him, the more mystified I became by this nephew of mine, who seemed like a phantom my mind couldn’t grasp. I asked if Juli had a photo of him. She had some but not with her.
“Benning used to be a wild thing,” she said. “In high school he was obsessed with automobiles, but he was underage and couldn’t get a driver’s license. Whenever possible, he’d sneak into a car or tractor, monkeying with the gearshift and the dials on the dashboard. One evening our granduncle, my grandma’s brother, gave a dinner party at his home. We all went. When most of the men had gotten drunk, Benning slipped out and stole a truck that belonged to one of the guests. He drove it away, but the minute he got out of the village he lost control and ran into a pond used for soaking hemp. Lucky for him, the water wasn’t deep and he could get out of the flooded cab. My parents spent five hundred yuan repairing the truck.”
“I’d love to meet him,” I said. “He’s the only nephew I have.”
“I’ll send you his email address.”
“Please do. Do you have a scanner?”
“I have one.”
“Email me some of his photos.”
“Sure I will.”
Juli asked me what my father had been like. It struck me that part of her purpose in visiting me might have been to find out something about her granddad. I would not reveal his true profession; for the time being I was reluctant to introduce him to his granddaughter as a top Chinese spy. Instead, I told Juli that my father had missed her grandmother Yufeng all the time (which might have been partly true). I added that he’d been a loving father to me but a feckless husband to my mother, that he had lived a displaced life because of the separation from his original family, and that he’d also made many sacrifices for China and should be regarded as a hero by the Chinese.
I didn’t share my thoughts and questions about my father with Juli, though my mind had been full of them lately. In the center of his plight may have resided this fact: mentally, he couldn’t settle down anywhere. It was true that in his later years he began to like America and grow attached to my mother, but he could not imagine spending the rest of his life with Nellie. His heart was always elsewhere. Wherever he went, he’d feel out of place, like a stranded traveler.
1958
Gary and Nellie didn’t have many friends, but that didn’t bother them, since they preferred a quiet life. They were no longer in close touch with her parents, who had come to see their granddaughter the previous winter but stayed only three days, having to head back for the endless work on their vegetable farm. Since the birth of Lilian, Gary and Nellie seldom went out together, because they were reluctant to hire a babysitter. Once a man who had dated Nellie many years before phoned and chitchatted with her for more than an hour. Gary blew up and exchanged angry words with his wife. He threatened to move out if she kept answering that man’s calls. She caved and told her ex-boyfriend to leave her alone. She knew that her husband’s threat was not idle. Sometimes when Gary worked late into the night, he’d sleep in his little cage of a study, on a futon that he had insisted on buying over her objection. She was alarmed, afraid he might have lost interest in her, revolted by the ten pounds she had gained after giving birth. (In reality she was still trim with long limbs and a twenty-eight-inch waistline. She took great pride in her figure, and it would easily outshine her daughter’s in the future.) Nellie noticed that Gary was sometimes absentminded, seated at his desk doing nothing. That made her wonder why he looked so sad.
Indeed, his mind was elsewhere, shadowed by the memories of his other wife. One of those moments he always remembered was an evening soon after their wedding. Yufeng was sitting cross-legged on the warm brick bed, needle in hand and thimble on finger, mending a tear in his quilted overcoat. She was wearing a green tunic printed with tiny jasmine blossoms, which set off her smooth face, calm and shiny with concentration. He was lying with his head in her lap and observing her raptly, though she kept urging him, “Close your eyes and take a nap.” The light thrown by an oil lamp was soft but sputtered from time to time, and the bridal chamber was so peaceful that he felt he’d love to repose like this for the rest of his life. If he died then and there, he’d be happy. This tranquil image of Yufeng plying her needle would rise in his mind every now and then, haunting him and misting his eyes. If only he could rest his head in her lap again.
He felt she must still love him, but in a perverse way of thinking, he hoped she had betrayed him by finding another man. That would have made her life easier and assuaged some of his guilt, though it might cause her to lose his salary. It was too cruel to let her wait for his unforeseeable return. She’d be better off if she stopped being his wife. On the other hand, without her in the household no one was there to take care of his elderly parents. Like him, Yufeng was misused relentlessly. Someday he’d have to find a way of making it up to her, if he could.
Yet his thoughts about Yufeng did not totally incapacitate him in his current marriage. He was fond of Nellie, and once a week they still had sex, even with abandon. He would kiss her on the mouth and nibble her earlobes, and when inside her, he would move slowly and gently, feeling her blood pulsating in his loins, so that they both could reach climax. He’d do anything to make her come and loved to see her ecstatic face clench as if she were in pain. Much as he enjoyed her body, sometimes he preferred to sleep alone, giving the excuse that he had to work late into the night and was reluctant to disturb her. In a sense that was true, but he also meant to keep a clear head for his day job and secret mission.
In DC’s intelligence community Gary had gradually acquired a reputation as the best translator of Chinese. He was nicknamed the Linguist. His good name was partly thanks to his friendship with George Thomas, who was in charge of Chinese affairs in the CIA’s East Asia Division and often assigned Gary projects. To further his own career, Thomas had resumed his work toward a PhD in Chinese literature at Georgetown, writing a dissertation on the Tang poet Du Mu, whose lyrical poems he loved so much that he could quote some exquisite lines off the top of his head, especially those about mist-swathed Nanjing, the capital of many dynasties. Besides the primary texts, Thomas needed to read some secondary sources written in classical Chinese, but his grasp of the language wasn’t up to the task, so he asked Gary to translate some key passages of the conventional poetry diaries, which had been left by many major poets and had over the centuries become an essential part of Chinese poetry criticism. This was easy for Gary. He checked out a thick anthology of the diaries from the Library of Congress, a place he loved and visited at least once a month. Thomas wanted to pay him out of his own pocket for the translation, two dollars an hour, but Gary adamantly refused to take money from him. He did the work out of gratitude, and also to deepen their friendship now that Thomas was a senior officer in the heart of the U.S. intelligence business.