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A Map of Betrayal: A Novel (Vintage International), by Ha Jin
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A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
From the award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash: a riveting tale of espionage and conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two countries—China and the United States—and two families.
When Lilian Shang, born and raised in America, discovers her father’s diary after the death of her parents, she is shocked by the secrets it contains. She knew that her father, Gary, convicted decades ago of being a mole in the CIA, was the most important Chinese spy ever caught. But his diary, an astonishing chronicle of his journey as a Communist intelligence agent, reveals the pain and longing that his double life entailed—and point to a hidden second family that he’d left behind in China. As Lilian follows her father’s trail back into the Chinese provinces, she begins to grasp the extent of his dilemma: he is a man torn between loyalty to his motherland and the love he came to feel for his adopted country. She sees how his sense of duty distorted his life, and as she starts to understand that Gary too had been betrayed, Lilian finds that it is up to her to prevent his tragedy from endangering yet another generation of Shangs.
A stunning portrait of a multinational family and an unflinching inquiry into the meaning of citizenship, patriotism, and home, A Map of Betrayal is a spy novel that only Ha Jin could write.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #257138 in eBooks
- Published on: 2014-11-04
- Released on: 2014-11-04
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“Powerful. . . . A heartbreaking portrait of a spy torn between two countries.” —The Christian Science Monitor
“A startling thriller. . . . A moving family saga. . . . A subtle page-turner. . . . Expertly chronicles the fraught relationship between the U.S. and modern China with plainspoken clarity.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Deftly explores the parallels between an immigrant’s experience and an informant’s—the ambivalence, the delusion, the sense of warring loyalties.” —The New Yorker
“Ha Jin’s writing has a serene simplicity. . . . It is comforting as a reader to be in the hands of such a masterful storyteller.” —The Seattle Times
“A poignant novel that portrays the emotional drama of an immigrant torn apart by conflicting loyalties and ‘bone-deep loneliness’. . . . [Gary] may be a traitor and a superspy, but his tragedy is relatable. . . . It should strike many close to home.” —Los Angeles Times
“Ha Jin has captured the painful, often humdrum essence of the hidden agent. . . . We see America through the eyes of a Chinese émigré, torn between an old loyalty and growing affection for the adopted land he is betraying.” —The New York Times Book Review
“One of the great triumphs of A Map of Betrayal is how it uncovers and underscores the similarities between the domestic and the political, the family and the larger culture. . . . Lilian strives not to judge but to understand. She searches for a capacious, forgiving, and subtle interpretation of a struggling soul.” —The Boston Globe
“With one foot in China and the other in the United States, Ha Jin is the quintessential Chinese-American writer. . . . In his absorbing new book, A Map of Betrayal, the author offers his most searing portrait yet of divided loyalties.” —Chicago Tribune
“The book stands out for the way it straddles a number of worlds—China and the U.S., family life and adultery—and in Shang's case, the torturous inner life of a man torn between loyalty to two nations.” —NPR
“Beneath the quiet poetry of Ha Jin’s sentences is a searing novelistic ambition.” —The Millions
“Beautifully written. . . . Brilliant fiction, a story of shifting personal loyalties across broad swaths of territory, that can only be done by one with a deep knowledge of two cultures: in [Jin’s] case, China and America.” —Buffalo News
“A quietly humane, painstakingly detailed portrait of an idealistic man who tries to set himself morally apart. Ever present in this dense, compelling tale are provocative questions about the nature of patriotism: When do you betray your country? When does your country betray you?” —Shelf Awareness
“Gripping. . . . Poignant. . . . A haunting tale of two families and two countries that are linked together by the life of a single spy. . . . The novel closes with a delicate, ironic twist that one associates with the best of Jin’s fiction.” —BookPage
“A chillingly matter-of-fact tale of espionage and treachery. . . . Ha Jin offers startlingly redefining views of the strategic evolution of U.S.-Chinese relations. . . . A sharply ironic, stealthily devastating tale of the tragic cost of ‘blind’ patriotism, told by a master of clarifying fiction, uniting the personal and the geopolitical.” —Booklist (starred)
About the Author
Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of six previous novels, four story collections, three volumes of poetry, and a book of essays. He has received the National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. In 2014 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ha Jin lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The spring semester started on February 15 at Beijing Teachers College. In my American history class, a survey course for undergrads, six or seven students were from Hong Kong and Taiwan. They didn’t stand out among their peers except that they spoke English better, not because they were smarter or better at memorizing the vocabulary and expressions but because they’d begun to learn the language in their childhood. Twenty years ago it had been unimaginable that such students would go to college in China. I gave lectures in a large room with sloped seating, and the class was always well attended. I noticed that many students were taking the course mainly to learn English, since they planned to go abroad for professional school or graduate work. One girl, an anthropology major, told me that her parents would pay for her tuition and living expenses if she was admitted by a decent graduate program in the States. I asked what her parents meant by a “decent” program, and she said, “At least a state’s flagship university, like Rutgers or UMass-Amherst. Any of the UC schools would be great too.” I was impressed by her parents’ savvy about American universities.
Many Chinese had quite a bit of cash now, in part because they spent mainly on food and didn’t pay property taxes. Of course, if you stepped off campus, you would encounter all kinds of people who struggled to scrape together a living. Not far from the school’s main entrance there was a job agency beside a billboard that advertised shampoo. Under the gargantuan ad, which displayed a charming female face smiling over a bottle spouting pink bubbles, migrant workers, young men and women who had just arrived from the countryside, would gather in the mornings, waiting to be picked up as day laborers or temporary hands who made five or six dollars a day. Some of them smoked and wisecracked, and some stared at the ground. If you went to the train or bus stations, you’d find people lolling around, and some of them were homeless.
I was also teaching a graduate seminar and met a group of fourteen students once a week for three hours. We discussed issues in Asian American history and culture. I’d taught both courses numerous times and could do them without much preparation, so I had a lot of time for my personal project of reconstructing my father’s story. These days Beijing’s atmosphere was tense because the government was nervous about the popular democratic movements in the Mideast and Africa. But on campus people could talk freely in private. I told a few colleagues about the impasse in my personal investigation. One of them was in the Philosophy Department, Professor Peng, an older man I had known for many years; he said I shouldn’t give up the hope of locating Bingwen Chu. Professor Peng believed we could track Chu down if he was still alive. Chu used to work in the Ministry of National Security, which must have a file on him. Given his age, he must have retired long ago, so there should be no rule forbidding him to meet with me. Professor Peng said that a former student of his was working in that ministry and might be able to help me. He called the young man, a junior official, and told me to go see him.
I went to the headquarters of the Ministry of National Security, which was a brownish seven-story building encircled by a high black steel fence. The sentry at the front gate phoned my contact inside, and the young official strolled out to meet me. He had a soft-skinned face and an urbane demeanor. I told him I was looking for an uncle of mine, which was true in a sense since Bingwen Chu had been my father’s longtime friend of some kind. I showed him Chu’s snapshot, which I had Xeroxed from The Chinese Spook. A photo was necessary because I was clueless about his real name. The young official was delighted to know I was teaching at his alma mater for the second time and to hear me speak decent Mandarin, a language I had never stopped learning since I was a child, so he was more than willing to help. He jotted down the information on Bingwen Chu and promised to get someone to look through the archives. He’d give me a ring if they found anything about the man.
He called at the end of February to tell me that Chu was living in a suburb of Beijing, in a residential compound for retired cadres. I phoned Chu that very evening, saying I was Gary Shang’s daughter from the United States and would love to see him. After a long pause, Chu said in a voice that suggested a clear head, “All right, I have plenty of time nowadays. Come any day you want to.”
We settled on the following Wednesday afternoon, since I’d teach only in the morning that day. Before visiting him, I reviewed some questions essential for reconstructing my father’s story. I took a taxi to Chu’s place, intimidated by the packed buses and subway. Two decades ago, when I was in my early thirties and teaching in Beijing, I’d ridden a bike or taken public transportation whenever I went out, but it was hard for me to do the same now, because the buses and trains were far too crowded and because I was no longer young.
Bingwen Chu was a small withered man with a bush of white hair and a face scattered with liver spots, but his eyes were still bright and alert. Given his age, eighty-seven, he was in good shape. He appeared at ease and glad to see me.
We were seated in his living room, its walls decorated with framed certificates of merit, all bearing the scarlet chop marks of the offices that had issued the commendations. After his youngest daughter, a forty-something, had served dragon well tea, he said to her, “Can you excuse Lilian and me for a moment?”
The stocky woman nodded and left without a word. Although he addressed me by my first name and I called him Uncle Bingwen, I felt a palpable barrier between us. He’d been my father’s sole handler for three decades, but not an unfailing friend. I reminded myself to be composed and that I was here mainly to ask him some questions. Chu allowed me to take notes but not to record our conversation. That was fine with me.
“Sure,” he said, “Gary and I were comrades-in-arms, also buddies. I was his recommender when he was inducted into the Party.”
“When was that?” I asked.
“The summer of . . . nineteen fifty-two—no, fifty-three. He was voted in unanimously.”
“Uncle Bingwen, in your opinion, was my dad a good Communist, a sincere believer?”
“Well, it’s hard to say. But I know this: he loved China and did a great service to our country.”
“So he was a patriot?”
“Beyond any doubt.”
“Did it ever occur to you that he might have loved the United States as well?”
“Yes. We read about that . . . in some newspaper articles on his trial. I could sympathize with him. No fish can remain . . . unaffected by the water it swims in. In a way, we have all been shaped . . . by forces bigger than ourselves.”
“That’s true. How often did you meet him?”
“On average, we met every two years. But sometimes we lost touch . . . due to China’s political chaos. Sometimes we met once a year.”
“Did he ever come back to China on the sly?”
“No, never. Our higher-ups wouldn’t let him . . . for fear of blowing his identity. Gary was always eager to return for a visit. He often said he was lonely and homesick. The people in the intelligence service all know . . . what those feelings are like. For his suffering, bravery, and fortitude, Gary had our utmost respect.”
“Then why didn’t China make any effort to rescue him when he was incarcerated in the States?”
“He was a special agent—the type we call ‘nails.’ ”
“Can you elaborate?”
Chu lifted his teacup and took a swallow, his mouth sunken. He seemed to have only a few teeth left. He said, “A nail must remain in its position . . . and rot with the wood it’s stuck in, so a spy of the nail type is more or less a goner. Gary must’ve known that. There was no help for it; it’s in the nature of our profession.”
I felt he was hedging by categorizing my father’s situation. Perhaps he couldn’t go into detail about his case, which involved some thorny issues, such as the diplomatic relationship between the two countries and Gary’s future usefulness or uselessness to China. I veered the conversation a bit, asking, “To the Chinese government, how big an agent was my dad?”
“Gary was in a class all his own, our highest-ranking spy.”
That was a shock. “But—he was a general merely on paper, wasn’t he?”
“Not at all. The intelligence he sent back . . . helped China make right decisions that were vital to our national security. Some of the information from Gary . . . went to Chairman Mao directly.”
“So for that he earned his due?”
“Yes. His rank was higher than mine, although he had started later and lower than me.” Chu paused as if to gather his strength. He resumed, “In intelligence circles, very few can reach the rank of general . . . purely by their abilities and contributions. Gary was an exception. He got promoted to general, well deserved. I couldn’t catch up with him.”
“You didn’t become a general?”
“I’d been a colonel . . . for more than twenty years before I retired. I thought they might give me the big promotion, but they did not, because I didn’t have enough pull and resources.”
“What do you mean by ‘resources’?”
“Basically money and wealth. You had to bribe the people in key positions. At any rate, Gary was different from the rest of us . . . and earned his promotions, granted directly from the top. To tell the truth, in the seventies, my colleagues would pronounce his name with reverence.”
“You mean they regarded him as a hero?”
“Also a legend.”
Again my father’s gaunt face appeared in my mind’s eye, but I suppressed it. I looked through my list of questions and asked again, “Uncle Bingwen, did you ever meet my father’s first wife, Yufeng Liu?”
His face fell as if I had hit a wrong note. He said, “I met her once, in nineteen sixty . . . when I went down to the countryside to attend . . . your grandfather’s funeral. We used to mail her money every month, but later we lost contact. She left their village in the early sixties. I have no idea where she is now . . . or if she’s still alive.”
“You have no information on her at all?”
“I have something.” He stood and went over to a bookcase. He pulled open a drawer, took out a spiral notebook, and tore off a page. “Here’s her old address in the countryside. Like I said, she relocated, so we stopped sending her Gary’s salary.”
I folded the paper and put it into my inner jacket pocket. “Why wouldn’t she let you know her new address so that she could get paid?” I asked.
“Money became worthless during the three famine years. I guess that could be a reason. Or maybe she got married again . . . and wouldn’t want to be tied to your dad legally anymore.”
We went on to talk about my father’s personal relationship with his handler. Chu insisted that the two of them had been bound together “like a pair of grasshoppers on one string.” It was Gary’s role as a top agent in the enemy’s heart, the CIA, that helped Chu, Gary’s sole handler, survive the political shifts and consolidate his position in intelligence circles in Beijing. For that he was still grateful to my father. In his view Gary was undoubtedly a hero, whose deeds all the Chinese should remember.
Chu seemed to be carried away by his remembrances, growing warmer and chattier as he went on. Evidently he had few opportunities to speak his mind like this. While I was wondering if it was time to take my leave, he said, “Do you know . . . you have some half siblings?”
“My father mentioned them in his diary. But he spent only a few weeks with Yufeng before he left home. Are you sure they’re his children?”
Chu chuckled. “Absolutely. Yufeng gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, in the fall of 1949. I told your father about them. The two kids really took after him.”
His words, though casually said, struck me, and my cheeks heated up. I had known about my half siblings but questioned their paternity. Something like a wash of shame crept over me as I realized I had unconsciously attempted to distance my half siblings from our father ever since I came to know of their existence. Before saying good-bye, I held Chu’s blotchy hand with both of mine and thanked him for speaking to me.
Now I was more determined than ever to find my father’s first family.
Most helpful customer reviews
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
A Map of Betrayal
By Brendan Moody
Like Nanjing Requiem, Ha Jin's previous novel, A Map of Betrayal is informed by a deep interest in historical events. And like Nanjing Requiem, it works more as a fictional framework through which to view that history than as a novel in its own right. The narrative shifts between a third-person-omniscient description of Gary Shang, a Chinese spy working in the U.S. government during the mid-to-late twentieth century (and obviously based on Larry Wu-Tai Chin), and a first-person account by Gary's daughter Lilian of her experiences in the early twenty-first century with the descendants of her father's other family in China. The third-person material works far better, in part because Gary, torn between two families and two nations, always isolated, is the novel's only interesting character in dramatic terms, and in part because Jin's prose is much more suited to that point-of-view. Lilian's first-person voice is bland and occasionally stilted, like reading an actual memoir by someone with no flair for language, but that same tone creates an effectively subtle sense of tragedy in the Gary chapters. Both sections, however, are weakened by flat, functional dialogue that all too often sounds like it came out of a comic book or one of those awkward skits in workplace instructional videos.
The failings of the dialogue point to a deeper weakness in A Map of Betrayal-- serious lack of subtlety. It's always obvious what Jin wants us to think about his characters, their conflicts, and the institutions for which they work. Near the end of the novel Lilian and another character have a conversation that might as well be titled: "This is How to Interpret Gary Shang." But he at least is a character worth interpreting: all the rest are thinly drawn, devices by which the author can make various points about China, the United States, and their shared history. Details that might flesh them out are too half-heartedly introduced to be convincing, and are hopelessly outnumbered by ill-integrated expository asides. These asides are interesting on their own terms: the history here will be new to many readers who know American twentieth-century foreign policy only in terms of the US vs. the USSR, and the insights into contemporary China are equally welcome. The Gary chapters by themselves might make for a worthwhile short novel, but the episodic, unfocused, more obviously didactic Lilian chapters drag down the whole, emphasizing Jin's weaknesses as a writer and obscuring his strengths. And yet I can appreciate the overall shape and vision of the novel even though the execution doesn't live up to the intention. A Map of Betrayal ends up being one of those unsatisfying novels that is, for the right audience, nonetheless worth reading.
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Wanting It Both Ways
By Jill I. Shtulman
About a third of the way through A Map of Betrayal, Ha Jin writes this about graduate students: “They mistook verbosity for eloquence and ambiguity for beauty, worshipping the evasive and fuzzy while looking down on lucidity and straightforwardness.”
Indeed, Ha Jin himself believes in lucidity and straightforwardness – arguably, to a fault. His latest book chronicles the story of post-war Chinese translator Gary Shang, reportedly based on the real-world Chinese spy, Larry Chin.
Gary Shang straddles two worlds. A loyal Chinese Communist, he is reasonably content in a newly-arranged marriage and in the presumably temporary position he has working for the Americans. When the Americans leave, they ask Gary to go with them – a boon for Gary’s Communist handlers. Gradually, he settles into a double life, married to the narrator (Lilian’s) Irish-American mother, and torn between his love for the country he lives in versus the country he left…and still loves.
It’s all fascinating stuff, but I couldn’t help but feel as if Ha Jin was torn between presenting his readers with a history lecture or focusing on the fictional world he creates. There are many insights into the 1950s and 1960s mileau (including John Foster Dulles’ desire to use a nuke on Red China). And there are many passages like this one on Vietnam: “Some Chinese army hospitals south of Kunming City has been treating wounded Vietcong soldiers. It looked like China was becoming the rear base of North Vienam. If the Chinese continued backing up the Vietcong on such a scale, there’d be no way the Americans could win the war.”
So I come back to my first paragraph: can straightforwardness embrace eloquence and ambiguity? It can, but not always here. In the end, I learned a lot but wasn’t quite able to immerse myself in a fictional world. Like Gary Shang, Ha Jin seemed to want it both ways.
17 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Country or Family? And Which One?
By Grandma
Gary Shang's name wasn't really Gary. That was a name he adopted when he went to work for the Americans in Shanghai, leaving his new Chinese bride behind, as the struggle for domination over China came to a head between the Chinese Nationalists and Mao Zehdong's Communists. Over the years he kept his job, following the Americans first to Taiwan and then to America.
In America he worked for decades as a translator for the CIA. He married an American girl, had a daughter, Lillian, and became a citizen. He also had a Chinese mistress that his American wife bitterly resented. He never went back to China, though he made a trip now and again to British-ruled Hong Kong. And he never said a word about the bride that he had married, left behind in China and never saw again. It took thirty years for the American government to realize that they had a mole in their midst. Gary Shang committed suicide in prison.
Despite Lillian's repeated promise to her mother than she would never contact her father's mistress, she found her in Montreal after her mother died. Her father's diaries were waiting for her . . .
Grandma's $0.02 - Ha Jin's A Map of Betrayal: A Novel is beautifully written, readily bringing both China and Gary Shang to life. Easy to read, I raced through this in a single sitting. Highly enjoyable.
Recommended
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