Jack and I talked a little while longer before he left. I mentioned how much I had been encountering Kwang. Jack didn’t seem too interested or concerned. He just asked if I liked him. The question struck me as strange, but he spoke in a tone that said it would be natural if I did. I told him as far as I could tell. He brought up nothing else specific. In the sudden quiet I showed him the electronic way I sent in the reports. How we printed them out. He nodded. He clapped my shoulder with fondness and lightly boxed my ear. Perhaps if I had grown up with a father like him I would be a more physical person today. I would have made my answer with a nudge. The smallest pitch of my weight. I would have assured him as I truly wanted, made the necessary offering.
But I did not. I celebrate every order of silence borne of the tongue and the heart and the mind. I am a linguist of the field. You, too, may know the troubling, expert power. It finds hard expression in the faces of those who would love you most. Look there now. All you see will someday fade away. To what chill of you remains.
I steadily entrenched myself in the routines of Kwang’s office. When I wasn’t out working with Janice, I was the willing guy Friday. I let the staffers know through painstaking displays of competence and efficiency that I was serious about the work however menial and clerical, and that I was ready to do what anyone of authority required. I was just the person they were looking for. I answered phones and made plasticene overheads and picked up dry cleaning and kids from day care. I had to show the staff that I possessed native intelligence but not so great a one or of a certain kind that it impeded my sense of duty.
This is never easy; you must be at once convincing and unremarkable. It takes long training and practice, an understanding of one’s self-control and self-proportion: you must know your effective size in a given situation, the tenor at which you might best speak. Hoagland would talk for hours on the subject. He bemoaned the fact that Americans generally made the worst spies. Mostly he meant whites. Even with methodical training they were inclined to run off at the mouth, make unnecessary displays of themselves, unconsciously slip in the tiniest flourish that could scare off a nervous contact. An off-color anecdote, a laugh in the wrong place. They felt this subcutaneous aching to let everyone know they were a spook, they couldn’t help it, it was like some charge or vanity of the culture, a la James Bond and Maxwell Smart.
“If I were running a big house like the CIA,” Hoagland said to me once, “I’d breed agents by raising white kids in your standard Asian household. Discipline farms.”
His Boys from Bushido.
I told him go ahead. Incubate. See what he got. He’d have platoons of guys like Pete Ichibata deployed about the globe, each too brilliant for his own good, whose primary modes were sorrow and parody. Then, too, regret. Pete makes a good spook but a good spook has no brothers, no sisters, no father or mother. He’s intentionally lost that huge baggage, those encumbering remnants of blood and flesh, and because of this he carries no memory of a house, no memory of a land, he seems to have emerged from nowhere. He’s brought himself forth, self-cesarean. If I see him at all it is the picture of him silently whittling down fruit-wood dowels into the most refined sets of chopsticks, the used-up squares of finishing sandpaper petaling about his desk amid the other detritus of peanut shells and wood shavings and peels of tangerine, the skins of everything he touches compulsively mined, strip-searched.
His friendly advice on how to handle Luzan was that I actively seek out his weaknesses, expose and use them to take him apart, limb from limb, cell by cell. Pete was a kind of anti-therapist, a professional who steadily ruined you session by session. He was a one-man crisis of faith. He was skilled enough in our work that he didn’t simply listen, watch, wait; he poked and denuded and uncovered secrets while still remaining unextraordinary to the subject, making the subjects dismantle themselves through his care and guidance without their ever realizing it.
As part of my initial training I watched him work a Chinese graduate student at Columbia. The student was starting a doctorate in electrical engineering. He also organized rallies against the hard-liners in Beijing in the flag plaza of the UN.
Pete and I were supposedly working with a Japanese daily, the something something Shimbun, Pete the reporter and me in tow taking pictures. Wen Zhou, our subject, his face fleshy like a boy’s, sat quietly for us in his tiny, orderly studio apartment in Morningside Heights. As my rented Nikkormat clicked and whirred, Pete plied him with the expected questions but then in a filial tone smattered with perfect Mandarin asked after his family and his studies and the long way he must feel from home. Pete then smoked a cigarette with him. I kept working the shutter, getting angles we didn’t need, even though I’d long run out of film. The two of them joked about American girls. Pete tried to get me involved but I just grunted when he asked what I thought. Wen shyly said he didn’t know any well but wouldn’t mind meeting one. A date would be fun. He confessed to a fancy for those with reddish hair. Pete laughed and told him he knew a few and they ought to go drinking together and have a fun time, and then he asked Wen if he wasn’t concerned for the safety of his loved ones back in China, with his face and name in the news. Wen said no one immediate, they were all living in Kowloon now, or some other place, but that yes there was one person, a young woman he’d befriended at the national university, a bright and ambitious girl from the southern provinces. He said he had stopped writing to her, so she wouldn’t have any trouble.
Pete kept on him, talking so gently and sweetly that he seemed all the more furious in his discipline, and I thought he had to be murdering himself inside to hold the line like that. We had been there nearly an hour. In the second hour Wen broke. He opened like the great gates of the Forbidden City. Pete led us inside the walls. We got whole scrolls of names, people both here and in China, and even names of contributors (all of them minor, not even the stuff of trivia) who helped the students by paying for flyers and banners and the renting of meeting halls.
I was enjoying myself. I was thrilled with what we were doing, as with a discovery, like finding a new place you like, or a good book. I felt explicitly that secret living I’d known throughout my life, but now for the first time it took the form of a bizarre sanction being with Pete and even Wen. We laughed heartily together. We three thieves American. Wen was soon talking without prompts from Pete about his giant China, about the provinces, and poverty, the backwardness of people and leaders. It was both stony and nostalgic, the whole messy text of his homesickness. He liked New York City. The only other place he had been was West Lafayette, Indiana, doing a term of research at Purdue. “I guess I am a Boilermaker.”
He spoke the sweetest, halting English. Caesurae abounding. He kept saying, “America and Japan strong, but China is the future place.” He retrieved an album from below his sofa bed and showed us pictures of a collective farm where his father grew up, a full page of his grandmother, a shrunken woman with three teeth and skin the color of chestnuts, his mother and father and sister in the middle of Hong Kong harbor on a tour junk, overdressed, looking sea-green. And I thought I heard Pete say to him, “And you’ll be back someday.”
But then Wen said the name of the girl he loved. I knew immediately that she was doomed. I don’t remember her name, maybe I forgot it instantly when he volunteered the thing. Rather what I recall exactly was Pete’s face, which I caught reconfiguring, lamping up with the day’s first piece of truly useful information. There was a joy there, if oblique, left-handed, and Wen probably thought here was a man with whom he could share a longing. I noticed earlier that Pete hadn’t asked after her when Wen first brought her up. Of course he wasn’t missing anything. Not a step. It’s the simplest finesse, Dennis Hoagland lesson number one, and only effective with virginals like Wen, who would never imagine anything beyond a simple polarity to the world. Positive and negative. You couldn’t fault him, for why would an immense China ever need a third party to reach a person like him, the tiniest of the tiny, so easily forgotten, whom no one ever listened to anyway?